While I was out

As I mentioned in the last post, I missed some time at work. Also, I was not really in great shape for cooking, as even when I was not completely exhausted I felt like a cauldron of germs. This happened at an especially bad time of year, because it was during the toy drive.

Now, I posted about the toy drive last year. I posted in the summer, several months later, because that’s just kind of how things were going, but if anyone wants to catch up on it, you can do so at http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2011/07/toy-drive.html.

If I had won money, what I wanted to do was spend $500 on toys, with $100 each going to Small World Surprises and Piccolo Mondo, and maybe even spending some at Finnegans, so that local businesses were being supported. Since that didn’t happen, I had to adjust, but it worked out pretty well. I decided that each pay day I would check the ads, and spend $20-$30 on toys. That way, there was no big drain, but I would be able to accumulate a lot of toys.

I ended up getting pretty much all of them from either Walgreens or Fred Meyer, which are chains, but my sisters ended up getting a few from Small World Surprises, so there was local representation. This was doable, and also I hoped that having a long-term plan would help me from going crazy at the last minute, which I did a little last year. (That was fairly successful. There was one week when I intended to buy six toys and I bought ten or twelve, but otherwise I stayed on target.) Anyway, even without prize money, I could contribute a lot of toys. (I will go over actual numbers in a subsequent post.)

Now, on to the stuff I could not do. We intended to have fundraisers for the Panda again, and people floated different ideas around, but things weren’t actually getting planned, so finally I laid out a schedule of what we were going to do, covering about a three week period.

The first week was going to be the In the Gravy potluck. Let me explain. Once when I was planning the monthly happy hour, I wanted us to go to Fourth Down because I’d had totchos there, and they were really good. I found out that Fourth Down had closed, so we ended up at Cheerful Tortoise, but now I had totchos on the brain, as did some of my teammates. (Totchos are tater tots with nacho toppings. Mmmm!)

Anyway, we ended up making it a potluck to celebrate the end of one of our quarterly exercise challenges. As we were planning this, and talking about totchos, which is fun to say, frequently the Village People would come to mind singing “Totcho, totcho man. I’m going to be a totcho man.” It was catchy. Alison suggested that we do an “In the Gravy” potluck, because she wanted to make rutamousse, and you can put gravy on that. I had to hold her off, because other people had already expressed desire for a peanut butter sandwich bar, which of course we called P, B, and J (Y M C A). We had that in early September, for back to school, so finally it was her turn for In the Gravy, completing our trio of Village People inspired potlucks.

We’d had a bake sale last year, and we wanted to do that again, and also Teresa had mentioned a pajama party, where we would eat doughnuts and pie. That had to be scaled back to crazy slipper day, but nonetheless, we had a plan.

Okay, technically I made the plan, even though I was just organizing other people’s desires. However, as the main organizer, I was starting to feel a little dictatorial and bossy. In many ways it seemed to be encouraged, but I didn’t want to have to start coming into work in combat boots and fatigues, so to mitigate my role, I went and asked different people to organize each event. Alison was a natural for In the Gravy, and Teresa would have made sense for the Slipper Day, except that she had also made strong points that we needed to get customers from other floors for the bake sale, so they would subsidize our beating them in the toy drive, it was valid. I put her in charge of that, then had Mary take over slipper day.

My only motivation was to spread responsibility, and not turn into Castro, but it turned out to be really lucky, because then I was not in any shape to participate. I was not even there on the day of In the Gravy, so I have still never tasted rutabaga, in mousse form or otherwise. I was there on the day of the bake sale, but I did not bake anything. I did bring a purchased pie for Crazy Slipper day, and it turns out no one really cares about pie. So really, I was a very minor presence for all of this.

And you know what? It was fine. People ate. We raised money. It was fine.

Then, because we are getting some new neighbors, we were having a two-team potluck, and I was asked to organize that, which I did, and I couldn’t be there for that day either, because I had a dental appointment. I should have had it the previous week, but I rescheduled because I thought the uncontrollable coughing might be a problem. So I worked out the signups, and then delegated the setup for that day. Again, it was perfectly fine.

There are a lot of reasons that I overfunction. Some of it is probably avoiding my own issues, and some of it is trying to compensate for my shortcomings and be worthy, but also some of it is having a hard time trusting other people to come through. That’s the part I hate the most, because it feels like a superiority complex, like I am the only one who can do things, and I don’t want to think that, but then I am left having to trust again. I am getting better about that. Also, I’m on a really great team.