Rocky Road

Flikr: Erik Forsberg

I’m sorry it’s been a while since I’ve shared anything here.  It has been busy, but I’ve also lacked inspiration.  Oh well, here I am now!
 
I thought I’d share about my morning.  It’s the first Saturday of the month, so we had our women’s gathering.  I was prepared to show a beautiful YouTube video about St. Junipero to the group, using a laptop. 
 
This morning, I got up early to get to chapel for personal prayer and set up for Mass, as well as take care of what I needed to before heading over to the local church for our event.  After this, I brought the items I needed back to the convent, where I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out how I could best place them in my bike basket and on the handle basket to ensure optimal balance and safety on my 10 block trek. 
 
It took some readjusting, even after I had “hit the road,” but I made it to Church without incident.  I had arrived plenty early to set up everything for our gathering in plenty of time to get upstairs for Mass. 
 
I parked and locked my bike, and headed inside.  After finding an outlet and plugging in the computer, I turned it on.  A black screen with white typeface informed me that it was “unable to find operating system.”  These are not words that a computer-reliant presenter wants to read!  Despite multiple attempts, including first briefly removing the battery, the same fateful message met me when I tried turning on the machine again. 
 
Giving up on the futile effort, I decided that I’d better walk home and get a phone instead; I still had time to make it back for Mass–if I walked really fast…I didn’t want to monkey with the bike lock at this point.  It was 6:53 a.m., and 7:15 Mass was coming right up! 
 
I must admit I was a bit frazzled on the walk, but I did my best to prayerfully calm my nerves. 
 
I did make it back in time for Mass, with a few minutes to spare.  I had left the laptop plugged in while I was gone (about 20 minutes) so I gave it one more quick try in case it had built up enough charge to work.  No such luck!
 
After Mass, I went downstairs and we had a nice, if small, gathering.  We listened to the video on the phone, with its volume turned up all the way.
 
Afterword, I headed back out to my bike for the trek home, happy that I now had less items to carry (as a basket I had been carrying had been disposed of). 
 
I unlocked the bike and started on my way, but something wasn’t right.  I stopped, and discovered that my back tire was FLAT. 
 
I walked the bike back to the convent garage, where I parked it before heading back to work.
 
I don’t know if I had ridden over something, unknowingly, or if the weight of the computer and supplies was too much for the tire. 
 
Whatever the case, it was kind of a rocky road this morning! 

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