The front door has been sticking recently. We checked all the usual culprits like foreign bodies, sagging hinges and the like. The fit is so bad that we aren’t troubled by it swelling in winter. It may well swell but it never comes close to catching. Left on her own today (having taken time off to recuperate from dentistry, Julia identified the problem as a loose floor tile and corrected it. She was, I believe, much better than she had thought she was going to be, and had spent the day doing odd jobs and being active. Yesterday I was treating her like a rare flower, and today she is regrouting floor tiles.
Do you have grout in America? My WP spellchecker doesn’t like regrouting and is offering rerouting and regrouping as alternatives. Strangely, it doesn’t mind grout. Maybe you only grout once and it lasts forever. My Dad once stayed somewhere in America and his hosts told him they would take him to see the oldest house in town. It had been built in 1928, the year my dad was born. He was not keen having the label “Historic” attached to a house that was the same age he was.
I have been looking up a number of strategies for coping with conflict at work. One is to ignore it. Another is to talk about it. Neither has produced much of a result up to now. The best advice I could find, and there wasn’t much good advice online (I suspect the word “online” is a clue to the value of the advice you find there) was to ensure that I don’t get dragged down by it, and don’t let it get into my head. Strangely, this is advice I have given the kids in the past – seems like I knew the answer all along but just forgot it for the last two days.
(Lightly edited 4.11.22 as some of the phrasing implied criticism and though it’s how I feel, it’s maybe not how I should be writing about someone else when they don’t have a chance to reply.)