Rhino Ramblings

My plan was to write this blog about the play Rhinoceros.  But as is wont to happen, detours occurred throughout the week.  And so, like a threatened rhino, I will charge blindly (rhinos have poor eyesight) ahead and talk a bit about detours. For me this past week the biggest detour was a rescheduling of my pin removal wrist surgery from the end of April to this past Tuesday (4 weeks early).  Happy to be one step closer to recovery (Doctor says 12 weeks for that to happen) but was not prepared for the falling behind that resulted (with the end result being this late night blog).  I hit the more normal detour yesterday as I drove up to my granddaughter’s (Quinn) 4^th birthday party and, of course Route 95 had multiple crashes which had me multiply selecting detour routes.  Got there, and she had a great gymnastics party.  The wonderful rain last night left me with an even higher grass height, so I detoured into left-handedness and managed to mow with only my left hand.  Work always presents detours as new issues, challenges, staff changes along with successes, growth and staff reshaping providing plenty of detours in plans.  In fact, while detours inevitably change time tables and can add unknowns and unexpected stresses, I have often found detours to provide opportunities and explorations.  When driving long distances, I prefer to detour off the main highway.  Stories abound with my most favorite being a trip to Florida with my kids who I think were teenagers or in college at the time (I will never write a true memoir-I can never remember the details).  On the way back, we took a backroad detour that included a stop at the Okefenokee Swamp.  But my main goal was to find a good milk shake (ice cream and milk shakes being the treats I can never pass up).  As we were driving on a two lane highway (?) in Georgia, we entered a city (nope); town (nope); collection of trailers and some houses (yeap).  Out of the corner of my eye I notice the front window of the largest house in this collection with the words “Milk Shakes”.  I turn around, go into the driveway and enter the restaurant/corner store/house. Right inside the door is a counter with a 10 to12 year old girl greeting us.  Just past the counter are shelves of mostly grocery type products (cereal, etc); to the left is a living room with grandma and grandpa in their easy chairs watching TV.  We order our shakes and grandpa goes back into the kitchen to make them.  I tipped the girl and from her reaction I am pretty sure that was a first for her.  I don’t know if taste-wise they were the absolute best milk shakes ever; but experience-wise, they outshone all others (there are some close seconds which also resulted from detours-future blog opportunities abound).  So my advice is to take the detours you are able to in life.  Enjoy the scenery and the literal and figurative milk shakes.  You’ll eventually get back on the ever-present (for east-coasters) Route 95 with the traffic, boring landscape and eventually man-made detours.