When all else fails-game day!

So yesterday (Sunday) was a bit odd, and I thought I’d talk about it.

I woke up before 6:00 to find a horrible electrical smell filling the whole house, and even after my whole family looked around the house, we couldn’t find a cause… so we tripped the breakers for the house to prevent a fire. 

We called not one, not two, but three whole electricians, one of whom suggested we just turn the power back to the house in one big flip, (HUGE fire hazard.) And one of whom suggested we just live without any electricity for the next week. None of them were free any time this week, let alone the same day. 

We had a friend suggest trouble-shooting by flipping a new breaker every two hours, to see if we could figure out where the issue was. This worked fine, but we still didn’t have power in the house for much of the day, nor did we have any internet, so we couldn’t “attend” digital church, nor a lot of other things that we would have typically done on a lazy Sunday.

Now, you may think that we decided to sit down and sulk after this series of events… but you’d be wrong. Instead, we decided to use the lack of electronics as an excuse for a good long game day.

As you can see we chose Monopoly; and by the time we finished, I think we had played for about 6 ½ hours!

After 2-3 hours it felt as though my victory was assured;

My hand,

My brother's hand,

My mom's hand.

A little while after this photo was taken, my mom dropped out, and then there were two;

House rule- when you drop out, you get to chose what happens to your hand, you can put everything back, or stack it in the middle, and whoever gets to free parking first, gets it all.

With a stack like that whoever got to free parking first was assured a win… right? Especially considering that I landed on it, with the hand you can see above more or less intact.

But then, disaster! My brother decided to develop everything in sight, slowly bleeding me dry, and somehow managing to almost perfectly avoid all my properties!

I fought back, placing six houses, and hoping that the property development card would take him out… he drew and paid it; twice.

I knew that I had lost, but I wasn’t going to give up either. So we played it out to the bitter end. My brother managing the most spectacular Monopoly feat I’ve ever seen in my life; gaining all the 500 bills by the time I finally lost.

Now, don’t get me wrong the game was fun; but I think there may be a small lesson in here somewhere… or maybe it’s just been too long since I’ve been able to teach, and I’m pulling lessons out of nowhere. 

Considering everything that went wrong yesterday morning, no one on earth would have begrudged us a cranky day, but instead, we decided to do something fun together, without the internet as an interruption. Sometimes life sucks, everyone knows that, but sometimes… just sometimes, you can choose to try and have a good day; even on a bad day.

I wish I could say that I was great at this, but I’m not, I have bad days just like everyone else, sometimes even more than everyone else; but yesterday, in spite of everything, was a good day.

Thanks for reading!