Hundreds of Ways to Get Through the Day
The most powerful weapon against your daily battles is finding the courage to be grateful anyway. -Unknown
A girl like me has never owned much to brag about if your scale involves money and expensive things. Money runs in the opposite direction from me for some reason, it always has. Since the day I was born.
I’ve become good at being poor.
I’ve always had a knack for fixing things, solving problems, often non-conventionally. An outside the box thinker.
Because I’ve been in a lot of situations where I had to be.
I’ll joke with Serge sometimes after I impress him with a skill he didn’t know I had, which if I’m honest, I probably didn’t know I had either in the moment and I will shrug and say, “I’m just good at being poor”.
And I am.
As an example, just recently, a homemade stylus for Blake when they were quite agitated to have lost the tip they had been using and then also couldn’t locate the extra tips that Serge had bought for them for just such an occasion.
It was a Saturday night, food was cooking. Pizza and wings for the kids, stir fry for me and Serge as I watched the whole thing unfold. The upset tone Blake had, the solution Serge wished he had for them. I slipped away quietly after a few minutes, pretty sure I was about to save the day, but saying nothing in case I couldn’t pull through with the Frankenstein tech pen.
On my way out I stealth swiped a regular pen out of the drawer, a little hunk of foil and waltzed out of the kitchen unnoticed. I grabbed a q-tip from the bathroom drawer before landing in my bedroom. I threw it all down on the blanket and plopped down with my phone. I had done this before. Years ago, before kids. But my memory is rusty, so I wanted to just do a quick internet refresher. I had all the things I needed. I disassembled the pen, threw its guts to the side. It bled more ink than I was expecting, staining the very tips of my fingers black and gray and ruining my pretty, freshly painted green nails. I cut the q-tip in half and shoved it up, cotton side down, into the hollow body where the ink tube and tip had just been. Then, I carefully tore the foil into a smaller, more manageable piece and began to wrap it meticulously around the tip, being sure that the foil was making solid contact with the cotton tip but not covering it. I then used the rest of the foil and a piece of tape to secure it all in place.
Now the moment of truth, my heart was beating hard! I pick up my phone and try to navigate it with the new stylus but… NOTHING. I try some more but nothing was happening. What did I do wrong? What am I missing? I revisit the instructions online which, admittedly, I did only skim through, and I see what I missed. I forgot the cotton tip needed to be just slightly damp for the whole thing to come alive. I lick it because I’m too impatient to get up and walk to the bathroom sink. I lick the tip and again, go after my phone with it…