The Last Two Weeks

Sunday, 11/18/07:
5:00 - Wake up and get ready for church.
6:30 - Attend Bishopric Meeting.
8:00 - Attend Priesthood Executive Committee Meeting.
8:50 - Panic and drive home to pick up the kids for church since my wife went to choir practice at 8 since she's leading the choir.
8:56 - Arrive home to find the kids don't have shoes on and the babysitter playing a board game with them.
8:58 - Get in the van with two crying children and a babysitter that would rather be anyplace else.
9:04 - Arrive at church late, but still before the meeting actually starts; wrestle with children who are not happy for the next hour.
9:35 - Wife directs choir and it goes really badly; it is easily the worst performance in my wife's three and something years as ward choir director.
12:30 - Finally be done with church and go home ... for an hour.
1:50 - Return to church to help the Bishop as he interviews people.
3:00 - Finally go home for the last time, very early compared to most Sundays.
3:30 - Call my parents and spend an hour and ten minutes on the phone with my parents; wife gets grumpy.
5:30 - Pull together dinner with the wife for the kids.
6:30 - Wife eats two bites then leaves for yet another choir practice. It's bath night.
7:30 - Kids finally finish their baths/showers.
7:50 - Kids finally are in bed with the lights out.
8:00 - Cruise the net and wait for my wife to come home.
8:50 - Wife finally gets home, and we talk the balance of the night.

Monday, 11/19/07
5:20 - Alarm goes off and I'm too tired to get up. Figure I can work from home, turn the alarm off, and go back to sleep.
6:45 - Wife's alarm goes off and she gets up to take a shower.
7:05 - Wife wakes me up and the kids are really noisy. Get up and shower.
8:00 - Begin working from home.
9:00 - Dial in to a meeting at work. Spend the rest of the day mostly spinning my wheels.
11:30 - Take a half-hour lunch with my wife and youngest son.
4:20 - Stop working and start spending time with the kids.
5:30 - Have dinner with the family and do a Family Home Evening.
6:00 - Get a call from my home teaching companion - he's sick and can't come home teaching with me.
6:45 - Help my wife get the kids ready for bed after falsely remembering that my home teaching appointment was at 7.
7:45 - Leave to go to my home teaching appointment. Have a great discussion with a new couple and one of their sets of parents who are in town for Thanksgiving.
9:00 - Go home and spend time with my wife.

Tuesday, 11/20/07
5:10 - Actually get up to go to work. Sleepwalk through pre-work procedure.
6:10 - Begin drive to work.
7:00 - Arrive at work. Discover it's a ghost town due to the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Find out from manager he wants me to write a procedure for a training exercise coming up in two weeks. Spend the rest of the day writing said procedure (it goes badly).
3:00 - Go home a tad early -- it is a holiday after all!
4:00 - Arrive home and spend time with the wife and kids. Have dinner.
7:10 - Leave to go home teaching again, this time to pick up companion.
7:25 - Discover companion thought the appointment was at 8 and isn't home. Leave to go home teaching alone ... again ... without a lesson prepared.
7:30 - Have wonderful visit with a very kind sister.
8:10 - Leave to go pick up companion. He's finally home, but still somewhat sick.
8:30 - Arrive at second appointment for the evening, which goes very well, but companion spreads his germs everywhere.
9:30 - Take home teaching companion home, then go home and crash.

Wednesday, 11/21/07
6:30 - Awakened by the kids after sleeping in. Yes, 6:30 is sleeping in for me.
7:30 - Take the kids to school.
8:00 - Get home and prepare to go out with the wife.
11:00 - Go out with the wife, dropping youngest son off with a good and very pregnant friend, and go out to lunch after running some errands. Go to lunch at sandwich shop -- it's a decent meal, but overpriced, and we won't be going back.
1:45 - Go home to await arrival of daughter from school. Go pick up youngest son. Hang out at home (a favorite past-time of mine). Spend the balance of the evening doing laundry and wondering when my brother-in-law with his family will show up the next day.

Thursday, 11/22/07 (Thanksgiving)
6:30 - Sleep in again, then spend the morning with the kids having breakfast.
8:45 - Go to play football, the annual Turkey Bowl, with my ward.
9:55 - Break finger, re-set it myself, and go home. It still moves and doesn't hurt much.
10:00 - Explain to wife what I did. Receive stern look. Wife runs to store to buy a splint.

11:00 - Brother-in-law shows up with his wife and four kids. Enjoy their company while finger stops flexing, starts swelling, and starts hurting a lot.
12:00 - Have sandwiches for lunch. Wife requires help of nephew to prepare turkey, a task I normally do.
1:00 - Family plays games and enjoys company. Finger continues to swell. Wife continues to prepare Thanksgiving meal without my help (sorry!).

4:00 - Turkey is done and brother-in-law (who is something like a decade older than me) carves turkey for the first time in his life since I can't (and he does badly). Dinner is enjoyed by all -- left-handedly for me.
5:15 - Dinner is done and I finally decide to go to Urgent Care.
5:30 - Arrive at Urgent Care and discover it, too, is a ghost town. Get X-rays and discover finger is broken. Leave Urgent Care in 20 minutes -- a world record.
6:15 - Drive home and get taunted by in-laws. Play more games and have a good time. Discover I greatly prefer the word "cripple" to "gimp."
8:00 - Struggle getting very excited children to go to sleep; having three boys in one room doesn't go well.

Friday, 11/23/07
7:00 - Sleep in a lot since kids are distracted by in-laws; it's fabulous.
7:15 - Shower and get ready for the day.
10:00 - Leave to go to Six Flags for the day. Use free tickets for brother-in-law and his oldest son who are both not so sure about the rides. Have a wonderful day and convince them they really like big rollercoasters. Broken finger doesn't limit my ability to enjoy the rides.
11:45 - Eat lunch and spend $11 for a cheap burger and fries at the park; drink is excluded from this price, so I drink water.
7:45 - Tired but exhausted, leave park and return home. Kids are getting ready for bed -- it goes slightly better.
8:15 - Spend the evening playing games.

Saturday, 11/24/07
6:30 - Sleep in.
10:30 - In-laws leave to return home. Their trip was short, but enjoyable. Spend the rest of the day relaxing, cleaning the house, and putting up Christmas decorations.


Sunday, 11/25/07
5:00 - Wake up and get ready for church.
6:30 - Attend Bishopric Meeting.
8:00 - Attend Priesthood Executive Committee Meeting.
9:00 - Family joins me for church.
12:00 - Go home for a quick bite to eat.
1:00 - Go back to church to attend Ward Council.
2:30 - Bishop begins interviews while I help organize who's there; wife has choir practice at the same time, so the kids are home with the same babysitter as the previous week.
4:00 - Finally go home.
7:00 - Wife goes to Christmas choir practice (where she is not the director) while I put the kids to bed.
7:30 - Kids are in bed. I have a peaceful evening.
9:00 - Wife finally comes home. The evening just got better, though she's feeling under the weather.

Monday, 11/26/07:
5:20 - Wake up and realize that my wife is sick enough that she needs me home. Spend the rest of the day taking the kids to school, being helpful, and trying not to work too much (and failing).
9:00 - Dial in to a meeting at work; spend what I can of the day working on a presentation for Wednesday and reviewing sequences of commands for my spacecraft. Take a half-hour lunch with my wife.
4:30 - Stop working, and spend time with the kids. Have dinner.
6:00 - Have a family home evening on being kind because the kids had been fighting a lot.
7:00 - Put them to bed; spend time with wife and watch old Stargate episode. Pack for business trip, to which I would leave the next day.

Tuesday, 11/27/07:
5:20 - Wake up and actually get up to go to work. Spend the day in meetings. Stay late and decide to go home before driving 1 1/2 hours to location of business trip.
6:30 - Arrive home and spend next two hours with the family. It's a welcome departure from the plan to go straight to the business trip.
7:00 - The kids are in bed, a miracle because they haven't gone to bed that early in years.
7:30 - Discover the oldest isn't really asleep and spend the next twenty minutes convincing him it really is bed time.
8:30 - Depart for business trip location.
10:00 - Arrive at hotel of business trip. Call wife to tell her to go to bed, fully knowing she won't actually go to sleep. Find out later that she stayed up 'til about 2 am. Discover that she was researching a holiday vacation next year to Hawaii. Still be a little grumpy that she didn't sleep, but temper it with the understanding that she didn't sleep because I wasn't there.

Wednesday, 11/28/07
6:50 - Sleep in after a fitful night.
7:20 - Go to breakfast. The hotel has a free breakfast, with a cook who will make a breakfast to order. I choose a ham, cheese, and spinach omelet -- it's light on the egg, but tastes magnificent.
8:00 - Have extra time, so go back to the hotel room and channel surf. End up watching ten minutes of Ice Age 2 (sad, but true -- I've never seen it before).
8:30 - Go to the business meeting and spend the whole day there. They had pastries for snacks in the morning and delightful cookies in the afternoon.
11:45 - Break for lunch and go to Panda Express. Get orange chicken -- it's very spicy.
1:45 - Present my portion of the meeting for 45 minutes -- it goes very, very well.
6:00 - The meeting finally adjourns and I go to Carl's Jr for dinner. Get a spicy salad. Realize too late that two spicy fast food dishes in one day doesn't sit too well. Drive home to see my family that night. Spend the night at home while work pays for the hotel that sits empty in my absence (but I left my luggage there!). Find out my wife intends to bring the kids the next night and skip school (something they have never done) on Friday so they can play at the hotel.

Thursday, 11/29/07
6:30 - Sleep in and then have breakfast with the kids.
8:00 - Drive to hand surgeon to have him examine my hand and the X-rays that were taken the week before. Discover that I don't need surgery and that my finger should be fine in a month (though it will be slightly crooked).
9:30 - Drive back to business meeting.
10:45 - Arrive at business meeting where it is in full swing.
11:30 - Discover my spacecraft went into safemode again due to a simple human mistake -- the second time in as many weeks. Upper management freaks out and we spend the day trying to explain that sometimes a mistake is just a mistake. They don't buy it and believe that "the process" is broken. Multitask during the meeting to try to recover from safemode as quickly as possible.
12:00 - Go to lunch at Jack-in-the-Box. Order a great burger, curly fries, and a mint chocolate chip shake which sits a lot better than the previous meals I'd had.
1:00 - Returned to business meeting where things are still chaotic.
5:00 - Family shows up at the hotel. I let them into the hotel room then head back to the meeting, which adjourns within minutes.
5:30 - Take family to dinner at Carl's Jr. Have a burger and not much else. Started really getting sick of fast food.
6:30 - Returned to the hotel and took the kids to the really big spa, even though it was really cold out. They had a great time and afterwards they crashed hard.
8:00 - Watched Survivor with the wife and had a very pleasant evening together with the kids passed out in the other room.

Friday, 11/30/07
6:45 - Slept in, even though my oldest woke the other kids up at 6:00. He spent the morning reading in the bathroom while we tried to get the other two kids to go back to sleep. We finally gave up and got up with them. I took a shower and went over to get another omelet (same kind, it was great!) while the rest of the family had cold cereal. It was raining and my daughter was so excited to have a covered patio off the room that she ate out there in the cold while it rained.

8:00 - Went to the meeting where things were really fascinating -- the scientists for my spacecraft were sharing some of the results of their recent activities. My family apparently went to the beach despite the cold and rain and enjoyed themselves there.


12:00 - Meeting ends. Find out my wife checked out of the hotel and headed out to lunch. I follow her on the way home.
1:00 - Finally catch up with my wife at Jack-in-the-Box where we have the last burger of the week (*phew* my constitution couldn't take much more).
2:30 - Make it home and spend the next little while cleaning up.
4:30 - Go to dinner at a local pizza joint with my daughter's soccer team -- the last game was the next day and this was the final celebration. She received her first trophy ever and had a wonderful time with her friends. She lost $1 in a "claw" game she didn't know how to operate and was sad (it was a good lesson she learned) and my older son lost a quarter in a faulty toy machine, but he bugged the workers in the restaurant 'til they gave him a new quarter (it was also a good lesson he learned).

6:00 - Went home, put the kids to bed, read books on Hawaii, and watched more episodes of Stargate. It was a nice evening.

Saturday 12/1/07
6:45 - Woke my daughter up and got her ready for her soccer game.
7:30 - Left for soccer game. It was really cold outside.
8:00 - Refereed my daughter's last soccer game.

8:35 - My daughter scored the only goal for her team during the game, and the last for the season. She was very happy.

9:00 - Took the kids to Home Depot to do their monthly project. Hammered lots of nails in the project for all the kids as they made a "memory" tray -- basically a wooden tray they can put anything in.
10:00 - Went to a furniture store that is going out of business to look for a dining room table.
11:00 - Left furniture store having not found a table in our price range and went home. Spent the rest of the day doing laundry and making cookies for the ward Christmas party that night. My wife is quite sick and sore from our stay in the hotel caused a too-soft bed, residual illness from the week before, really cold weather, plus an overdose of fast food.
6:00 - Finally wrestle the kids into the van and head to the party.
6:10 - Return home to get something we forgot.
6:20 - Finally make it to the party to find it in full swing, which is remarkable, as Mormon standard time, the one time we count on it, wasn't in effect. Have a great dinner (tri-tip steak!) and a great time at the party. Join in an ad-hoc bell choir. Watch my older son and daughter play a shepherd and a sheep, respectively. Chase my youngest around. Watch my wife take center stage and help with other songs she didn't really know (and do great!). Watch some of my good friends who were at the manly football game where I broke my finger dance across the stage wearing pink tutus to the tune of "The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy". Tried to keep my kids from eating too many desserts.

8:30 - Go home and put the kids to bed. They crash. Watch another episode of Stargate (okay, we're addicted).

Sunday, 12/2/07
6:30 - Wake up and get ready for church.
7:30 - Arrive at church to make copies. Be there for an ad hoc Bishopric Meeting.
8:00 - Attend Priesthood Executive Committee Meeting.
9:00 - Family joins me for church. It's so cold outside and the building isn't properly heated. Most people stay huddled under blankets and my wife took my suit coat for the last hour.
12:00 - Stuck around after church to watch people be set apart for new callings at church.
1:00 - Went home.
2:00 - Got a call and realized I was supposed to be at yet another meeting at church. Went back to church in my jeans (I hate doing that!) with a bowl of leftover cookies from last night, which was super insensitive since it was fast Sunday and most people at the meeting hadn't broken their fast, yet (oops!).
3:00 - Made it home and spent a short time with my wife.
3:55 - Wife leaves for a Christmas choir practice.
3:57 - Start writing this blog entry.
4:30 - Start making dinner for the kids.
4:34 - Ran over to my neighbor to give him a soda and some medication since he couldn't get up by himself -- he just had a heart transplant (!) and came home two days ago.
4:40 - Re-started dinner - macaroni and cheese with canned corn on the side.
5:00 - The older kids got in the shower so they could play their Harry Potter computer game afterwards and before bedtime. They were motivated and finished quickly.
5:30 - Tossed my youngest in the tub. Received a call from my mother and spoke with her for about 45 minutes.
6:15 - Got off the phone with my mother and washed my youngest, who was a water-logged prune by that time. Got my finger brace wet.
6:30 - Got the kids to sit down with me and read a story to them about the Mormon Trail.
7:00 - Put the youngest to bed. My wife finally came home and we put the oldest kids to bed together.
8:00 - Amazing Race starts.
8:27 - I finish the first draft of this blog and save it for the evening. I intend to drink hot cocoa (had ice cream instead), cuddle with my wife (which I did), and watch more Stargate (which we did).