I spent today in a meeting from 9am until 4pm, followed by an emergency meeting from 4pm-5pm that only came up at noon.
I am not cut out for long virtual meetings, I can’t focus on anything in a virtual environment for that long.
The hour long meeting was fine because it was a crisis management that focused on risk managing a situation and trying to problem solve some thing that can’t really be solved and will probably end up seeing some animals destroyed. But at least in that meeting I felt like I was contributing to something other than feeling like a repeated target of “We want to do X at Y….but …Paige!” because a number of individuals want to do something that is a terrible plan but my thoughts on it are inconvenient…which is how the longer meeting went. I think the topic and my name came up like five times and I definitely felt a bit ganged up on. <shrug, I’ve been fairly consistent in saying it’s a bad idea and explaining why>. On the flip side, I guess there is enough respect for health related considerations that others haven’t just ignored one or both of us and forged on ahead, so there is that.
As much as I hate running, going for a short run after that day was a good thing.
And at least today there was no bear.
Yesterday evening I went for a run and as I headed down a neighbourhood street and a car passed me. It stopped at the stop sign and someone was standing in the street and walked over to speak with them. A woman on a kick scooter passed me and joined the conversation. Someone else was leaning out a window. I just assumed it was a neighbourhood chat and continued to run towards the mini crowd.
I ran around the side of the car and headed over to the other side of the street to face the parked cars….and almost ran into the bear coming out of the driveway in front of me.
….and realized why everyone was stopped.
I just reeked right and to the other side of the street and kept going, it was a black bear, looking a bit agitated but moving slowly, a yearling, probably fairly fresh on its own this year.
Part of me thought “Why didn’t someone yell at me?”, but then realized they probably did and I didn’t hear because my earbuds were not set to transparent sound.
What does any of that have to do with the photo?
Absolutely nothing, it’s just a random photo of some paint brushes, because I am tired.
