Tuesday Team Building.

Sometimes the best team building happens when the Boss We Love Dearly gets his ass out of the office for the day.

The remaining female staff gathered - one part-time admin, one marketing and so much more person, one Me, who is their de facto lawyer, HR department, community relations person, and WTF, I have no idea what's next, but am thinking I'm not getting paid enough for it - and compared notes on what we are working on.  We are scheduling our own meeting for the day after the official company meeting, to figure out what we have to do to get shit done.

I have an ally.  Not the person I'm replacing - not that she's NOT an ally, but she really wants to and deserves to retire, and she's truly trying, with a lot of conflicted feelings, to remove herself from the day to day BS.  It has been a couple of months, and I'm getting my feet under me and figuring out the challenges. 

So today was a lot of laughter and hair-pulling and mock-screaming, but also not nearly as tense and frustrating as my last job in corporate world.

And the house my daughter and son-in-law are renting from me is falling apart in bits and pieces lately.  An old towel rod broke free from the wall today.  Not a big deal, just a sign of the things that need addressing.  We laughed about it.

And that's the secret to it all - being able to laugh, shrug, and resolve to get to it soon.  I was raised on pressure by parents who were raised with major pressure of their own, and the combination was nearly deadly.  I am still, at going on 55, dealing with the pressure to make everything Perfect, for Everybody.  I am finally shrugging off my upbringing, and the Pressure to be the Perfect Daughter, their Only Precious Child, and OMG, someday I may find the time to write a book (if I win Lotto or marry money) about it.  One of the hardest learned lessons of the last decades was that sometimes a falling down towel bar is just an annoying thing, and not a sign of personal failure.  It'll get fixed.  It's not a big thing.

This is a big thing to someone who was raised by people who saw everything as a big thing, and then married a guy who saw it that way too.   They were wrong.  Sometimes, it's just a trip to the hardware store.