Old Fashioned Stress Relief

Today was one of those Dog Days of Summer where nothing was going to go right. Working in the area of Parks & Recreation, one would think my job would not be that stressful, but given that its summer time and we have a community pool with a swim team and swim lessons, in-house recreation baseball and parks to mow and maintain, life at the park district can definitely be eventful. With the impending storms, we decided to close the pool early and prevent the staff from having to come back up to the pool, close and go home and then return when the storms cleared – like we did yesterday. Two times.

So, ME, the budget minded manager, decided to close the pool for the day. Radar looked patchy at best and thunderstorms were called for the entire afternoon.

About 1 p.m. the sun broke through the clouds. Crap!

I got a text from Sunshine stating my two other daughters were fighting AGAIN. My oldest sent me a text asking me to come home because no one was listening to her. I came home to have my oldest break into tears as she tried to explain her frustrations from the day and her two unruly sisters.

At this point, I talked to my hubby  and between my own frustrations at work and issues at home, I was ready to call it all quits and become a SAHM again. Just how can it be worth it to have unsupervised children at home, fighting, sitting in front of their computers or TV screens and me at work not enjoying my job? How much money can that be worth?

Today there wasn't enough money in the world to make it worth it. I hated my job. I hated my lack of control in my home. I hated feeling so frustrated.

Normally, my joke would be that I needed a glass of wine to win(e)d, but not today. I knew wine would not do the trick.

1)      It would not solve my problems.

2)      It wasn’t worth the calories or potential liver damage.

Instead I decided to go straight for the hard stuff…..

A WORKOUT

That’s the only thing that was going to relieve my stress. And I loved it.

9 p.m. a nice 5k run through my quiet little town as I contemplated the trials and tribulations of my day, what went wrong and how to fix it. My run was refreshing, inspiring. Damn! It felt good.  P90X Kenpo this morning and an easy 5k run this evening. Capped off a rotten day, but I am thankful God has blessed me with the ability to relieve that stress.