What A Week

And I don't mean that in a good way.

It has been a devil of a week.

And the sad thing is - it's not quite over.

Come tomorrow at about 2 pm, I will be home and will be a very relieved individual.


Safe Kids Day is tomorrow. It's a fundraising day for Safe Kids Worldwide, and we are participating (though not so much in a fundraising type of way). For this day, Safe Kids Utah partnered with Rocky Mountain Chevy Dealers. We were originally planning on having some kind of event at all of the 12 dealerships. Long story short, we'll be at 9 of the 12. As of the end of last week - when we thought we had it all ironed out - we were going to be at 7 or the 12. Two days ago I found out that a couple of dealers were really upset that nothing was going on at their dealership. The one that makes me the most infuriated is one that emailed back my coordinator and said no, they didn't want to do an event. This was a month ago. Two days ago, we're hearing that they are extremely upset that nothing is happening there. Thankfully we have an email trail showing that they said no, but somehow it's still completely our fault that nothing is going on there.

I don't know if any of that makes sense, but I don't want to go into tons of detail. Suffice it to say, I'm pretty ticked off at the dealership and the hissy fit that they're throwing - while blaming us for the problem and taking no responsibility of their own.

We found out what was going on while we were in Fillmore doing a health fair. From then on, the week has been insane. We drove back (we, in this case, is Janet - my Safe Kids co-director who works at Primary Children's) from Fillmore, got to my house, came inside and we pulled out our laptops and cell phones to work on damage control.

After an hour or so of that, Janet went home. I continued to draft a long email to those in charge (and blaming us) explaining what had been going on. I included the emails that the coordinator had sent and the response she had gotten back. I listed out what another coordinator had done in another county, and I explained that while we could have done things better, we did try, and in no way was this mess completely our fault. We were getting very little response or help from our contact with RMCD, and it resulted in the present mess.

I worded things much more diplomatically than that, but I was clear that this was not all our fault. As irate as I was feeling, I did manage to keep the email fairly toned down. I kept remembering what I've heard my mom say for years - it never helps to make an enemy or burn a bridge. And while I'm really not wanting to ever work with these people again, I can't say for sure that we won't and I didn't want to make it impossible for us to do so.

Thursday was another devil of a day with more damage control and then a long car seat checkpoint in Riverton.

Today was supposed to be a shorter day but became an almost full-length day. It started off with a visit to the Fox13 News studio at 7 am. I was behind the camera observing this time - thankfully. I had just a little time back at the office before I had to leave for a high school in Magna for a ceremonial signing of some suicide prevention bills and the bill stating that teens 18 and under can't talk on a cell phone while driving.

After that I went straight down to Provo to drop off helmets for tomorrow. When that was done, I was officially done with work. I swung by campus to visit with a friend I haven't seen for a long while and then stopped by my old office to visit a former co-worker there. Those were fun and relaxing, and I'm really glad I did that. I ended up staying too long, so then it became a rush to get home, run inside and grab my temple clothes, and then head off for my temple shift. By this time, my head was pounding. I wanted so badly to not go into the temple today, but at the same time I really wanted to go because it's been about two months since I've been able to be there. So I went.

And my head pounded and throbbed every time I moved. Thankfully, we weren't very busy at all, so I didn't have to move very much. But getting ready to come home set my headache off again.

By the time I got home, I had been gone for 14 hours - not including that 2 minute sprint through the house grabbing what I needed for the temple. It's been waaaay too long a day to end a waaaay too long a week - that's not even over yet!

If you're in Salt Lake Valley and you see fireworks going off around 1:30... it's probably me. (: