Week 8: What skills have *you* forgotten during these times?
Dear readers,
Yesterday was an exciting day: I nearly drove a rental car into a wall. I can see some of you going "What?! Are you OK?!" - don't worry, the only thing that got damaged was my ego.
It's important to have something or someone to blame when bad things happen so like most things these days, I blame Corona. Yes. Because of Corona, I had only driven once in three months. And because of Corona, Tom and I got so excited yesterday at the prospect of driving around town to run errands, that we decided to rent a station wagon so that we could go and buy some garden furniture and a tree for the balcony in our new apartment (which we're moving to in 2 weeks).
I don't normally drive station wagons (nor do I do drive much under normal circumstances) so the station wagon + the parking lot of the garden centre sadly proved too much for my rusty driving skills. Whilst trying to straighten out the car, I hit the gas a bit too hard and drove the car over the concrete curb into the patch of gravel separating a warehouse from the parking lot.
As I sat there stressed out, a small part of me was relieved I didn't run into the wall. The main part of me however was thinking "How the f*ck am I going to get us out of here!?". At that point, the driver of the car parked to our right came over to my window. He and Tom then proceeded to coach me as I got the car back over the curb without scratching the car on our left. πͺ
Even though Tom and I probably (?!) would have succeeded without outside help, having a stranger step in and give directions in that moment helped me get out of my head and focus on the task at hand. So, thank you stranger and thank you Tom for sitting with me through that stressful situation. π·
After that, I'm pleased to say that we got on with our day but we didn't buy the tree. I'm not really sure how we were expecting to put said tree in the back of the car (sideways I guess?!), but after the near accident, my levels of confidence and ambition went from sky high to knee high. Anyway, that's what online shopping is there for, right?
A few other things that have happened since the last newsletter:
I finally submitted my Udacity project (yay!) and it got accepted despite there still being a couple issues with it (huh?!). Once I finally finish the course, I'm going to write a long post about the pros and cons of online courses because I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of feedback.
I wrote a short blog post on saying no to things at work. It's so short, it probably would have made more sense as a Twitter thread - something to experiment with next time perhaps?
Tom and I tested out some paint samples on the wall of our new bedroom. I know my favourite βΊοΈ
Today is also Mother's Day in most places except the UK so Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers reading this!
Until next week,
Alicia