Personal

I’ve just got off the phone from my daily call with my "accountability partner", Diane Corriette who runs the site Inspirational Guidance.

(An "accountability partner" is someone who you go through 5 questions with each day.  The questions are designed to keep you focussed and on track with your daily tasks, and so also your long term goals.)

The call is supposed to last 7 minutes to go through our questions and answers with 3½ minutes each.  But it usually runs over because we chat.

One of the questions is (paraphrased) "what are you going to do today to further your goals?". Diane’s reply was "to clear up my space".

Because we’d both been on a teleseminar call last night about MySpace, it seemed a pretty topical thing to do.  So I then spoke about MySpace for about 15-30 seconds, which is quite a long time in a telephone conversation.

And then Diane said, "no I meant my space here is a bit of a mess, I need to tidy up…"

Anyway, I’m still chuckling about it, but it just goes to show how a conversation can go completely down the wrong route without a bit of clarification.  I wonder if any wars have started because of a simple misunderstanding?

It also shows how you can jump to a conclusion (well I can anyway), when you don’t have all of the facts.

The other night it RAINED.  I don’t mean water the garden so everything is fresh in the morning kind of rain, I mean torrential downpour, flash flooding, the garden is now a swamp kind of rain.

The roof on my office which is attached to the side of the house needs replacing, and has done for a while.  While it will hold off most of the elements, the kind of rain we had the other night severely tested it.

Can you guess what’s coming?

Well…

We have a couple of leaks.  One we already knew about and so we’ve temporarily dealt with it by using some plastic sheeting.  The other we thought we’d fixed for good.

But no.

The rain was so rainy, it leaked in again through the same spot.  Here’s the funny thing.  I didn’t know about it until this morning when I reached for a marker pen that’s in one of those little multi-pen-tidier-thingummies.

It came out wet.

Somehow, the rain had dripped in just enough to almost fill one of the pen holder bays without splashing a drop anywhere else on my desk.

The diameter of the pen holder bay is an inch across and if I’d put it there deliberately to catch the water, then of course it wouldn’t and my desk would have been soaked.

I’ve been lucky this time (if you believe in that kind of thing), but it’s just one more thing I have to deal with at some point in the not too distant future…