Always Prepared

I am an in advance preparer. I don’t like to leave things until the last minute. I fear if I do wait something else will come up and I will be left unprepared. I hate to be unprepared. I like to think of what could go wrong and plan what I will do if it does. When I was in my late twenties I had to train myself to not worry about what might go wrong by considering what the chances are that said thing will go wrong. The chances were usually low, but just in case, I was prepared.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a doomsday preparer. If something catastrophic is going to happen then I am perfectly fine with not surviving along with all the people I love. The worst case scenario for me is being the only one who survives. Who would I play Mah Jongg with once there are no people or electricity.

What I am not a fan of is other people not preparing and expecting me to save them when they have many last minute requests or needs. As the saying goes, your lack of planing does not constitute an emergency on my part.

Of course someone else’s poor planing can effect my plans so I am constantly on the lookout for that.

One of those scenarios is that someone allowed too many people to sign up for one of my classes by more than double. Now the crowd size is not an issue for me, but being able to make sure everyone in the class has a satisfactory experience is important to me. So with a months notice I painted these 6×9 inch Mah Jongg tile cards. I plan on using them in class to illustrate hands in a big enough format that people far from me can see.

I would have liked to have three months to paint these, but I didn’t have that much time. So any day I was home, which was only 7 in the month, I would sit at my game table and paint the cards. Thankfully I finished painting on Sunday. This left me enough time on Monday to sew a little bag to carry the cards in. I am not about to let anything happen to these after all the hours it took to paint them.

Now I am envisioning all the ways I can use them in future classes and am very excited about having them. The emergency that was created by one person, might end up being a way I can improve my teaching for all. Now I have to purchase a portable system to display the cards so I will be prepared to teach anywhere, at any time, under any circumstance, except maybe not in the rain outdoors. That would involve the need for an portable tent big enough for a whole class and I am willing to give up on being that prepared.