Photo of the Day January 11th

Today started out so well - I read a bit of my book over coffee and cereal, spent the rest of morning getting caught up on emails that I had pushed to the back burner while working (and working, and working, and working) on school-related stuff this weekend, and then took Sophie to Goodlife after I picked her up from school. When I was done working out (including 30 minutes on the elliptical - the longest I've been able to hold out yet!) I surprised Sophie by taking her swimming, which made her day. She loves swimming, and was practically glowing with excitement when I told her we were getting our bathing suits on and hitting the water. After a nice swim we headed for home so I could get dinner started before a busy evening of taking Chris to work, Sophie to my friend Julie's house for a play-date with her daughter Kenzie, and myself to a meeting I was running at the school. Busy, but under control... as long as nothing went wrong that is. But while I was cooking dinner I heard a giant crash/splash sound from Sophie's room, and when I bolted in there I found exactly what I've been fearing for weeks - George the cat had pushed Sophie's fish tank off her dresser and broken it. There was water and gravel from the now-empty tank everywhere, and her fish "Red" was nowhere to be found. I panicked... I knew George hadn't had time to eat the fish between when I heard the crash and raced into the room, so it had to be somewhere in there. I flipped the now-soaked covers on her bed, moved one of her dressers and her desk and looked in the (also wet) laundry basket, but that fish was nowhere to be found. By this point I was in tears, because I was picturing not only Sophie's reaction to the death of her fish (which had been a Christmas present from Courtney) but what on earth was going to happen if I couldn't find its body... I won't bother outlining my thoughts on that. Thank God for Chris, who responded to my panicked calls and crawled around in the fish tank water on the floor until he found Red on the floor underneath one of the other dressers in Sophie's room - the little guy had really flown. We tossed him into some water quickly and I was flabbergasted when he started to swim around... it took him a while to stop releasing air bubbles and for all of his fins to start moving again, but I think he'll actually survive. I was tense and upset so I spent the next half an hour trying to get myself calmer and in a "run a meeting" state of mind while I sopped up all the fish tank water from around Sophie's room and threw away a couple of books that got soaked. The drama's done for now, and the rest of our well-planned evening went off without a hitch... but I'm keeping an eye on Red and shooting many dirty looks in George's direction.

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