Just say NO

Last week's Isthmus had an article on taking charge of your life or some such thing. I had to check out the link that tells you how to politely say No to new commitments. It made me laugh.

Every time that I think that I will say no or at least decrease my involvement in some organization or activity something happens to make that not work out. That probably explains a lot about Dave and I's life.

It also explains why we got a ticket for not clearing our sidewalks ($109, ouch!). It's not that we didn't clear our sidewalks at all. It's that we cleared them after most but not all of the snow fell on Sunday. Then last week got insanely busy between bike stuff until late on Monday, followed by ski race prep Monday night and then a full schedule of ski race stuff on Tuesday. We never found time to get out and finish clearing up the last bit of snow from Sunday's storm. Apparently the inspector came by on Wednesday and we were busted. In the future I guess we'll probably skip some other pressing obligation for high quality snow removal though since a subsequent ticket is something like $189.

The funny part is that we cleared our elderly neighbors sidewalk when we were out doing ours so that she wouldn't have to shovel so much snow. Of course, she had the good sense to go out and clear the remaining inch of snow from her sidewalk and thus avoided the high price of bad behavior. It's funny because I always though snow removal was one of the things we were much better at than many of our neighbors. I sure hope that the really bad offenders in our neighborhood got tickets.