Streak Ends

To my son Tommy,

After ninety-four days straight of posting to this blog, yesterday with the click of the second hand, the streak ended. I always thought it would be some type of natural disaster that ended the streak. I figured a blizzard would come and knock out the power and snow us in. Unfortunately I have no cataclysmic excuse for missing yesterday. It was a simple combination of a work filled frustrating day and a forgetful mind.

Yesterday started out in the morning as days usually do. Your mother had clinicals and was up early getting ready. Though I was half asleep, I remember chatting with her in the morning about you. Thursday and Friday I am responsible for getting you where you need to be, but your mother usually helps me out by setting out clothes for you and such. I think secretly she worries you will look like a harlequin if I were to dress you.

Anyways, after she left I tried to wake you around 6:30. I have resigned myself that we will rarely make morning mass when it is just you and I, but I still want to not feel rushed and get you ready as soon as possible. You on the other hand have adopted your mothers approach which is to suck every second of sleep from a morning. I got you out of bed totally asleep and brought you downstairs on the couch to try to gently persuade you to wake up. It wasn't till 7:10 or so that you finally obliged.

When you did finally wake up, it seemed everything was a fight. You didn't want to get dressed. You didn't want to go potty. You fought every spoonful of breakfast. You even fought getting in the truck to go to school. But we fought through it and I finally got you to school and headed off to work.

I should have known work would be one of those days from the commute. It seemed I got behind every person who was determined to save gas by going ten miles per hour under the speed limit. When I arrived, I arrived to one of those help desk type days, where people just refuse to think for themselves and need hand holding even for things they have routinely done every day for the past week, month, or year. To compliment this I found a major bug in one of my projects and had to make sure that was being worked on.  Throw in a couple meetings and a botched attempt to have Xerox repair a brand new printer that ate up two hours of my time installing the printer after the repairman said it was fixed and uninstalling and repacking the printer to send back as it must be a lemon, and work had the makings of major frustration.

I headed home from work somewheres about 6pm and from phone calls throughout the day I could tell your mother didn't have much better of a day than I did.  I was bringing home unfinished work and she had tons of schoolwork to do last night as well.  Your mother seemed to be the only student assigned extra work from her clinicals professor.  Your mother is not the type of person to keep her head down and fly under the radar.  Unfortunately that means she asks bunches of questions and in my opinion the professor had no idea of the right answers and instead of letting on to this fact, the professor just assigned finding out these answers to your mother in the guise of  "if you research it yourself you will learn it better".   Still somehow your mother found time to cook a fine dinner and invited your Pop-pop and your Aunt Na down.

You were asleep when I got home and after lending an ear to your mother's day, I started on setting up the tablets for the employees I had to get ready for the morning.  Pop-pop and Aunt Na had bad days as well and over dinner we all commiserated our poor day as if we were in a sadistic form of a one upmanship contest.  Except for a brief debate on politics (which is a nice topper for a day) I was constantly working on setting up these ipads for work.  Downloading and upgrading to ios6 which came out after these ipads were shipped takes some time.

So somewhere around 11:40 PM or so I could no longer keep my eyes open and neither could your mother.  Neither of us were complete in what we had to do, but the sandman didn't seem to care.  We both planned on waking up in the morning and finishing our unfinished projects.  It wasn't until I woke up this morning somewhere around 5 am that I realized I had forgot to write to you the day before.

So a streak ends, but that is okay.  When one streak ends another has the possibility of beginning again.  I offer the above story not to rationalize or excuse not blogging but simply as a recounting of the events of the day.  A new day and a new streak begins!

Sincerely with love from your dad,
Leo