Lately we have been crushed under a multitude of personal/family emergencies/problems . A young man in the family died, the wife had to be with his family a 100 miles away. My oldest daughter & I had to do home chores which mom took care of ( like home schooling the youngest, not-so-smart daughter) in addition to doing things like the laundry while having to prepare for he own exams, and while I travel every night the 100 miles to the other town where mom is to see the extended family and give mom what she needed ( a change of clothes ..etc. )

In these days, I noticed we didn't need much of the emergency kits or cool tools. What we needed was a lot of patience and endurance.

My oldest daughter did a marvellous job of homeschooling an ADHD girl with a memory span of milliseconds. I managed to keep my nerves under control while doing the chores and travelling the long distances to the family and wife, plus delivering every promised job to my boss, even when internet connections were terrible, and I didn't have enough sleeping time.

So, all in all.... Be patient and level headed in rough times
This is more important than all the cool gadgets we seem to stockpile in our GHBs.

This goes double for traveling across country by plane!

Hang in, Chisel.

This is The Perfect Time for Homemade....VODKA!:)

Patience? We need patience?

WE NEED PATIENCE????!!!!

Uh-oh!

Ah, RedFlare, do you sell... oh, never mind...

Sue

Inhale ... exhale. Inhale ... exhale.

Sometimes just breathing is enough.

When it makes sense to look around focus on baby steps. One small step at a time.

AA gets it right when they say you stay sober one day at a time. What gets lost is that sobriety, like any stressful situation, is handled one day/hour/minute at a time.

Years ago I read a book about an air force pilot who went down in a hurricane. He managed to get into his tiny one-man life raft. Then the wave knocked him out of it. Every time he got in the waves would knock him out.

The way he stayed sane and kept going was he would figure that if he dug deep he could take three more. After those three he would dig deep and handle three more. Instead of looking at as a storm with thousands of waves he took them on three at a time. He also stopped counting anything beyond three.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Handle it one small unit at a time. Then stack those small units into bigger units. In the end you have, on the outside, something less than 120 years. Anybody can handle one second. All you have to do is handle one second 3784320000 times.

Inhale ... exhale.

Out here, that's a sport called surfing, and people spend thousands on their "rafts", their wetsuits, and the parking required to get near the waves.

That would probably get a good laugh from the pilot. even at the time. And he would keep laughing until he got his paycheck and found out it was docked for the time he spent on his 'surfing vacation'.

Better that the military doesn't read about the concept. They may start deducting the time spent in 'sunny, exotic Afghanistan' from the their vacation time.

Ha ha. Right on, Bro.

Reminds me of Reagan calling ketchup a vegetable--literally correct but generally recognized as inappropriate.

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
- John Quincy Adams