The Meeting Before the Meeting

Thursday comes, my car is packed and I am a wreck. Thank God for completely consuming work.

The meeting is at 6 pm. I can't wait for it to be done, but I'll go and be dutiful. It is a program serving kids with special needs. I can relate.  Besides, it is a 6 pm meeting. I am sure they'll be serving sandwiches or finger food of some kind. That is incentive enough.

I get to the meeting and it is galling. The meeting organizer is anything but organized. In her passion for her job, she inadvertently makes some pretty insensitive remarks. She also has failed miserably in the food department. Boring cookies, mini danish, coffee and water. 

Umm, hello, this is not a breakfast meeting.

To make matters worse, the meeting of invited advisers was expanded to include a handful of parents whose children had gone "through the system" without much support or success and who could provide valuable input about what would have been helpful and meaningful.

But instead, each one of them, in turn, goes on an individual endless discourse about their heartbreaking experiences, and extreme frustration and offers absolutely nothing that amounts to a suggestion or solution.  The meeting disintegrates into a 3 hour grouse-fest.  When the agenda reaches the part where we are supposed to mingle and exchange business cards, I take a cheese danish and a coffee for the road and scram.

On the way, I call James again, my moist astute of cat friends. He asks if the new kitty is a boy or a girl. I tell him Scott thinks it may be a boy but isn't sure. And that I think that is funny.  My friend tells me that the parts are a little confusing and that a girl's "parts" will look like an upsidedown exclamation point.  Now I'm confused.

But one way or another, in about an hour I'd be meeting my new kitty. Hil and Pat have agreed that if it is a boy he'll be Ringo, and if she's a girl, she'll be Gidget.  I just have to figure out who exactly is coming home in the gender-neutral green kitten bed.