Passover was good.
My sister and brother-in-law took care of all the setting up in my niece's apartment. I scheduled my cooking duties so that my mom and I would not have to share the kitchen at the same time (which would have made things difficult in my tiny space). Everybody got along.
And then, yesterday morning, I woke up with one of those sinus-y, congested-y fever-y things I'd managed to avoid all winter.
I felt like crap yesterday and it's worse today.
So I'm probably in the perfect mood for tackling the meme Katja tagged me with last week:
LIFE GAVE ME SOME LEMONS
- IT'S OK, I MADE DELICIOUS LEMONADE - MEME
Rules:
* Copy and paste these rules to your blog post.
* Link back to person who tagged you.
* Write about an incident in your life you first thought was really bad, but ended up being a blessing.
* Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
* Let each person you tagged know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
(* And if you want some extra good karma - link back to this original Lemonade Meme post too.)
So here goes:
The summer before I graduated college (with a major in Radio-Television-Film), I was accepted for an internship in the research department at KHJ-TV (the same channel 9 station that now goes by the call letters KCAL). I was trained to work with the Nielsen and Arbitron overnight ratings.
In those pre-personal computer, pre-Internet days, I was tasked with showing up at the station at 7:00 a.m. and grabbing the raw numbers as they spewed off a teletype machine, and then extrapolating them into a form that could be used for selling advertising.
Up till then, I'd been putting myself through school by working a late-night shift at our local newspaper. It was nothing exciting - I was the person who ran the printing plates from the composing room in Van Nuys to the printing plant about two miles away... but it was a really cushy job for a student, because it involved hours of just sitting around between plate runs; time I put to good use by studying. (I kept patting myself on the back for finding a job where I could study while I was on the clock!)
But there was NO WAY I could keep that job (which ended each night around 2:00 in the morning) AND be in Hollywood by 7:00 a.m. for my internship. I had to give it up.
My new boss at the TV station felt bad that I'd had to quit to work for him for nothing, so he arranged another part-time job at KHJ's sister radio station.
And here's the part that turns a lemon into lemonade, because my new boss in radio was a recent college grad, a woman my age, who soon became one of my closest friends. About a month later, another new hire came on board and the three of us bonded very closely...
...so closely that 29 years later, we are still friends.
Our lives have diverged in countless ways. We've been through marriages and divorces (well, both of them) and children and job changes. We don't see each other as often as we used to, but when we manage to coordinate our schedules and get together, it's as if it was only yesterday.
These women are a source of strength and inspiration to me, and I love them as sisters.
And if that's not lemonade, I don't know what is.
(OK. I'm crawling back into bed now, so I'm not going to bother tagging anyone. If you read this and want to participate, leave me a comment and your link -- THANK YOU!)
For Local Blog
