Being empty nesters, Sarah and I have fallen into a very comfortable dinner routine. We catch up at our kitchen island as she puts the final touches on our meal. Then we load up our trays and head to our family room couch. Unless it's my turn to cook. The tray part's the same, but it's preceded by a phone call and quick trip for a large Gino's Special pizza! Hey, nobody's complaining.
Tonight was obviously Sarah's night - homemade butternut squash quiche, salad and vegetable barley soup. Yum! But this time, she did something unusual. After we settled in, she handed me Sriracha hot sauce in a plastic squeeze bottle - the kind with a little screw tip you twist open to squeeze it out. (A bit odd. She's never done this before. So now, in retrospect, I'm assuming it was for the benefit of this blog post.) I grab the Sriracha, give it a shake, set it down, pick up the remote, tee up "Limitless" episode 7, grab the Sriracha again, turn it over, cover my quiche with hot sauce, and we're off. An hour later we're cleaning up.
While I am no iron chef, I am awesome at cleaning up, including our trays. They're usually pretty clean, but not this time. Mine looked like a Sriracha bomb went off on it. Drops of the orange sauce were everywhere! Now I'm not a dainty eater, but I'm no slob either, so I'm scratching my head trying to recall if I wrestled with my quiche. Nope. Just the normal fork to mouth, fork to mouth, over and over again.
About an hour later, I'm back in the family room when something catches my eye. There, on the arm of the tan leather couch, is an orange spot the size of a dime. And then another, and another, all in a line running back to the coffee table where my tray was earlier. Wow! It was a Sriracha bomb! How'd I miss that?!
That's a lot of preamble to a point, but now I can rewind to the moment Sarah first handed me that bottle and I shook it before grabbing the remote. What I haven't shared yet was my inner voice while I was shaking the bottle with my focus on teeing up our show from On Demand. I was saying to myself, "I wonder if the screw cap is closed on the Sriracha bottle? That could make a mess if I shook it up open!" Duh.
The good news is, my intuition was fired up and right on. It was talking, I was hearing, and it was relevant. The bad news is, I wasn't listening. It tried to get my attention, but I wasn't having it. Nope. I was too distracted to heed its warning. This time. So I cleaned up my mess, wrote this post, and vowed to be more vigilant. I'm doing better now. I hope you are as well. If not, at least remember to close the top before shaking up that Sriracha bottle. A small win, for sure, but a win nonetheless.
Post-it Note
I authored this post on Saturday, November 7, 2015. I am connecting the dots here so you can trace them to the February 21, 2016 "Listen to Your Heart" post where, unlike on this night, I did listen to and act on my intuition. It's also clear now why I wrote this and why I waited to post it. Undeniably perfect timing. I have promised myself I'll remember this the next time I grow impatient for a result.