Published September 28, 2024 

Earlier this week I posted about my Monday errands, and I told you I’d have more to say. “How interesting can someone else’s errands be?” you no doubt asked.

Well, that’s a great question.

The answer is: not very. Someone else’s errands are not very interesting. But I still have more to say about that day.

If you read the blog post hyperlinked in the first paragraph, you might guess that running errands is sometimes daunting for me. There are several reasons. But I promised myself I’d knock as many of them out as I could Monday, starting with picking up a new vial of estradiol valerate at my clinic in Portland.

That transaction went fine. What else? I took stock of how I felt and decided I could do at least one more thing. Because my car’s registration was due to expire on the last day of this month, I decided to renew it in person rather than online. I set one of my GPS apps to direct me to a licensing office I hadn’t been to in a few years, and I wanted to see how it would route me.

Well, that was unexpected

I’m glad I did. Somehow I chose the wrong office, which I realized along the way. Oh well, let’s see how this goes. I’d been there before, but not in 10 years or so.

Not only was the drive fine, but I learned that there’s a drive-thru window there, which made the process even easier. I paid and was on my way.

Wait, aren’t I now close to a car wash? I can drive through that and have a clean plate to stick my sticker on. So I went there.

Wait, aren’t I now close to where I wanted to pick up late lunch? By now you know the answer: Yes. Yes, I was. So I went to the new Raising Cane’s, only the second one in the Pacific Northwest, and had Cane’s for only the fourth time in 14 years. Mmmmm.

Then I went home and put my new “tab” on my clean vehicle plate.

Oh, and one more thing

The errands went fine. More than fine. Like, it was almost too easy. I might be tempted to do it again. Getting out in the world, I mean.

I saw a speeding car and hoped the driver was being safe. You never know what emergency someone might be responding to, what deadline they’re trying to meet, who they’re rushing to, so I was trying to have empathy, trying not to judge.

And I realized that because it was my day off, the first of two in a row, I was in no rush, and I could afford to be unfazed by a speeding driver. The fact that the pieces of my errand day fell into place so neatly was no small part of that. It also occurred to me that all of that, and being in that mindset, was a luxury and a privilege owing to more things than I probably know to be grateful for.