Week 3 of the less stress project: It's a metaphor.

This week was like any other, really- running from school to work to activities, fitting in the rest as well as possible.  Some things in my control, others not so much.

One big (and unfortunately continuous stress) in our lives is renovations.  We have had a bunch of work done on our home, unfortunately some of it hasn't turned out too well, so we are often chasing down contractors, waiting for trades, and bleeding out cash to fix things we have already paid to fix.  It can be really frustrating, and is one of those things that falls into the "out of our control" column, which further adds to that frustration.

This past week, we enjoyed a restful rainy day at our new cottage, only to discover a major roof leak from a deck to a sunroom below.  Now, if you have been around awhile you know that we have this ongoing issue with water- our original cottage was destroyed in a flood, our current home has ongoing roof leaking issues (even though we "fix" it every year!), our basement has flooded, and so on.  Perhaps the result of an Aquarius marrying a Pisces?  Regardless, a big PITA.  So we were NOT excited to find this new issue at our place of relaxation. We went about having a quote to fix it and were stunned by the $16.5K price tag.  Seriously?!?!  

So this brings me to the title of this post- it's a metaphor.  Have you read "The Fault in our Stars" by John Green?  The movie is actually coming out this week as well.  It is about a teenage girl,  Hazel, diagnosed with terminal cancer, who meets Augustus, an osteosarcoma survivor with an amputated leg, at a Teen Cancer Support Group.  On their first encounter, she is kind of enamoured with him- until he pops a cigarette in his mouth.  "Are you SERIOUS?!?" Hazel asks, and proceeds to tell him that he just ruined everything and how ridiculous it was for a cancer survivor to be a smoker.  Augustus explains that the cigarette is a metaphor- he puts the killing thing between his lips, but doesn't light it, thereby taking away its ability to do the killing.

This passage reminded me somewhat of my Less Stress Project.  Stress will always be around, like cancer, and ready to do its damage.  It is up to me to take away its power over me.

So the leaky roof is an annoyance,  for sure, but need not be a STRESS.  It's a first world problem- poor me and my drippy second home.  No one is dying or bleeding here.  We will deal with it.  We will get another quote.  It was probably doing this before we bought it and so it is not an emergency.  I will use my energy in a positive way to work towards a solution to this problem, rather than lamenting it.

Small battles won this week on the stress front.  

Now if I could only figure out how to stop my kids from pushing my buttons.....they drove me freaking mental this week : /