Mood Enhancers

Have you ever had one of those days when everything goes wrong? When your supposedly helpful electronic devices all gang up on you at once?

You have an important early appointment with a big client an hour's drive away, but you forget your (indispensable) cell phone and only remember it when you are a third of the way there, so you have to backtrack. Then, you get back in the car only to have the GPS tell you that you missed the slender traffic-free window and now must slog all the way there, arriving even later.

That's the kind of morning My Beloved had this week, a perfect illustration of Murphy's First Law, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." To put it mildly, he was not in a good mood. He was halfway down the hill and on his way the second time when he simply stopped, took a deep breath and called the client to reschedule, deciding to have a home office day instead.

*Whew*

Instant calm. Immediate lessening of stress.

Then, being the thoughtful guy I'm nuts about, he turned his car toward our favorite neighborhood restaurant and bought two cups of coffee, one for me and one for him, and a pastry for each of us as well. To this little feast, I added some fresh strawberries and we sat down to decompress for a few minutes before he took the rest of his coffee downstairs to his home office.

When he's in the office, I can hear his phone calls, not enough to understand the words but his mood comes through. I can tell by the tone of his voice if he's teaching someone how to use the complicated software that accompanies the locks he sells for his biggest factory, pitching to a new customer, solving (another) problem for a customer, or chatting with an industry pal. His voice plays like background music to my day as I'm writing blog posts, catching up on email or cooking in the kitchen.

The coffee, the morning bun, the strawberries and his voice are all mood enhancers.