Last weekend my step daughter celebrated her 16th birthday. Unfortunately for me and my beloved, brilliant, gorgeous, amazing wife, last weekend was a dad weekend so we didn’t get to celebrate it with her.
This weekend is a mom weekend so we have declared today 16th Birthday Day (celebrated). My beloved Jennifer has booked a couple of adventures for the day but we don’t know what they are. Surprises abound!
I can’t wait!
I was running around like a nut today, all kinds of busy, getting stuff done, meeting deadlines. My mind was wandering and I really wasn’t paying attention, but when the thought, “it’s been a long day” popped into my head I had to stop and assess the situation.
I looked at my watch. 5:50am. I had literally only been awake for 50 minutes and I was already thinking that it’s been a long day.
That is a bad sign, right? I am in serious trouble today, for sure.
At least it’s the last day before a long weekend, and the kids are at our house for the whole thing.
Bright side, babie. Bright side!
We had to do some grade A schedule juggling last night.
My step daughter was on a school trip to Europe. Yesterday she woke up in Barcelona. She was booked on a flight to Lisbon, and then another flight to Boston. The Barcelona plane had mechanical problems and was delayed for a long time. Long enough for them to miss the connection in Lisbon. Now what?
The tour company and the airline did some major league scrambling just trying to get the 33 students and all of the chaperones back into the USA. They ended up getting onto a flight to JFK in New York. From there they took a bus up to Logan airport in Boston. Instead of picking her up at her high school at 4:00pm or so, we ended up needing to pick her up at 1:20am in Boston. That would be rough enough on us old people, but when you add in the other thing…
My step son has a school trip of his own. He’s staying in the country, but has to take a long bus ride. The plan was to get him to his school for check in at 5:00am. So if we pick up the world traveler at 1:20 and get home at 2:00, we’d have to get up at 4:00 to get ready to drop the other world traveler off at 5:00. Oh, and then we had to go to work. Yeah.
My beloved wife took care of the Boston side of thing and I took care of the check in side of things. With the stress of the whole day and the fluidity of the situation, neither of us got much sleep. I have no idea how much I got. Three hours? Maybe? certainly not four. The downside of yesterday is that I am possibly more tired than I’ve ever been. I’m mentally useless today. The upside is that step child #1 is home safe and sound, and step child #2 is off on a really cool adventure.
Fair trade.
We are a touch less than a year and a half on from my step son’s type one diabetes diagnosis. That was the scariest thing I’ve ever been a part of. Since then he’s had frequent check ups and his handling of his blood sugar has been closely monitored. A few weeks ago his doctors saw something that deserved a closer look, and today he went in for a couple of procedures.
He was nervous about the IV, but he wasn’t nervous about being put under, or about the procedures themselves. My wife and I were nervous enough about those for all of us. The staff treated him well. They explained everything they did at every step of the process, and worked very hard to make sure the IV process went as smoothly and painlessly as possible.
In the end, everything went by the book. We have to wait a couple of days for the results, but the doctor who handled everything said it all looked good to him. My step son is incredibly brave and unbelievably tough. The universe keeps dealing him a weak hand and he keeps rolling with it and turning the lemons into lemonade. I’m very proud of him, as always. Good job, bro.
I told myself that I was going to keep this new account clean. I was going to start from scratch and forget about past stuff. Then I was poking around the settings page and saw that they had a function for importing Medium blogs. I didn’t know that WordPress could do that. So I popped over to Medium and found the export function and then popped back to WordPress and imported it. So much for a clean start. If I was going to do that, then I had to pull in the last WordPress account too, and that account includes all of the Blogger posts and a bunch of Myspace posts too. It took a while, and a lot of it is littered with broken image links (thanks a ton, Posterous) but it’s all here. Again, so much for a clean start.
So it’s St Patrick’s Day. Are you having a Happy St Patrick’s Day? My go to line is always that I don’t have to wear green because my red hair is proof enough of my Irishness. Har har har very funny. I don’t drink, so I don’t really celebrate outside of eating some boiled dinner. Corned Beef and Cabbage, hold the cabbage please. Today though, I did something fitting. Netflix released the new Marvel series, Iron Fist. The traffic was light enough that I got into work over an hour early, so I watched the first episode on my iPhone while sitting in the car. The jury is still out on the show. I don’t really like marshal arts stories. This feels like that kind of thing after one hour. The interesting thing though was when I went looking for podcasts that cover the show and found one that seems to cover all of the Defenders series. They published an episode today that discussed the first episode of Iron Fist. That was exactly what I wanted for my evening commute. The cool thing? It was three Irish guys. They wished us all a happy St Patrick’s Day.
My wife and my step daughter are going to the movies tomorrow. My step son and I are on our own for the afternoon. We have to come up with something interesting to do. I have no ideas at this point. I’d be up for an Avengers movie fest, but we should do something that doesn’t involve melting our brains in front of the tube. I’ll let you know what we come up with.
I don’t like Christmas. Well, that’s not entirely true. I love Christmas. I just hate all the crap that leads up to it. My step son asked me why I get so stressed out around Christmas time. I told him because, for adults, Christmas is just the most stressful time of the year. It’s just the way it is. I usually try putting off the prep work for as long as possible. This year my family was okay with that to a small degree. The house remained Christmas free until December 10th. The season, however, is now officially in full swing.
There is a tree in the living room. It’s not decorated yet, but it will be today. Probably by lunch time.
Trips to the mall have been made. Mostly to help the kids get the various gifts for the various people they need to buy gifts for. Thus far we’ve been pretty unsuccessful, but amazon.com should fix things for everyone.
Speaking of which, amazon.com has been accessed and put to good use. It’s not over yet though, far from it.
We still need to finish the shopping and decorating. Then there is wrapping and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. Then there is cooking and cleaning and probably more decorating. Then Christmas eve we have my wife’s family over to do gifts with them. Then Christmas day itself comes and all of the stressing out and preparations are over and we can just enjoy the holiday.
Then we have to clean up. Yikes!
HoHoHo!
Well hello there. Welcome to the annual The Day Before Thanksgiving is the Longest Work Day of the Year post! I’m glad you could make it.
Have you ever noticed that? The four day weekend (for many of us) is looming. It’s Wednesday. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. The clock seems to be moving slower and slower as the day wears on. I’ve been at work for about 12 hours now and somehow it’s only 10:45. I don’t get it. The antici-
-pation is unbearable.
So tomorrow is Thanksgiving again. It’s pretty much my favorite holiday. That probably explains why the whole household gets seriously sick on this day each year. My wife is at home suffering from a major cold. I am at work and I can feel that same cold bug starting to take over. I’ve a little sore throat and a little stuffy nose. By the time we’re ready to eat the turkey tomorrow I’ll be 75% dead and without the strength to lift a fork full of bird to my mouth.
Assuming my beloved and I are healthy enough to join in the holiday festivities tomorrow (that’s a big “if” at this point), we will be celebrating with my side of the family at my brother’s house. My step kids will be with their father and that royally sucks, but it’s part of the deal. I don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do about it. My niece and three nephews should be there, although the annual sickness is tearing through my siblings’ houses as well as mine so who knows.
I have decided to create a list of topics that should be off limits for Thanksgiving Day discussions. These have not been agreed to by the rest of the family, but I am throwing them out there in the hopes that we can end all arguments before they begin. The list is:
I think we might want to add politics to the list as well.
So I’ve spent six hours writing this post and it’s still only 10:53. The clock has only moved eight minutes. This is crazy. Clearly the day before Thanksgiving is The Longest Work Day of the Year.
HoHoHo and all that crap.
It’s Friday morning, just after six am. Everyone’s favorite work day. The weekend is almost here, and it’s going to be a busy one.
Kids stuff tomorrow. Karate, band, some other stuff. Errands like food shopping and unclogging a drain in the bathroom. It’s time to start raking leaves, but I think I can delay that a week. I need to buy clothes, my last good work shirt lost a fight with some spilled buffalo sauce the other day, and I need a haircut. Sunday means my band practice, the last before our next gig. There will be more errands, and I want us to be able to eat dinner together before I leave for practice.
It looks like a very busy weekend for me, but it’s the good kind of busy. It’s busy doing things with my family, mostly. That’s the kind of busy I can get behind.
My step son signed up for a Magic the Gathering tournament tonight. We haven’t a clue how long it will last so I am outside in the parking lot waiting.
So far I’ve watched some Supergirl on my iPad (it’s okay, but not even close to as good as The Flash), and taken a few camera phone snaps of the sky.
Wanna see?
That’s the standard iPhone 6 Plus camera, touched up with Photoshop Express. The next one is the recent pinhole lens for Hipstamatic.
Cool, huh?
My step son is so passionate about playing Magic. He talks about it all the time. I haven’t a clue what anything he says means, but I can sit there and listen to it all day long. The kid is a force of nature.
How about one more pic for luck?
Nice. Okay then, back to Supergirl I go. If I get through the few episodes I downloaded onto my iPad I’ll switch to Stranger Things on Netflix on my phone.
Last weekend was a four day weekend for me and my beautiful bride. This weekend, as in right this very minute, is another long weekend. This time we will have the kids, and it’s probably going to be a stay-cation kinda thing and that is perfect.
The kids are on a trip with their father and step mother right now but we will pick them up tomorrow. We haven’t seen them for a full week. That sucks. I’m so looking forward to tomorrow.
Long weekend #2: bring it on!
Inside the Red Head's Head 