My day has been chewed up into little bits, but otherwise I would say it was profitable.

It started this morning, really; I was not entirely awake when I was trying to get the boy to school, and although he rose at a decent time he had trouble finding decent clothes, and so missed the bus. That means I have to put on clothes (saying that I get dressed is overstating it–usually I pull pants and a shirt over the sweatsuit I wear as pajamas) and drive him to school. It also means that I don’t get back to bed so quickly as otherwise, as I have to remove those clothes and unwind a bit from having pulled myself into full wakefulness.

I suspect it was for this reason that I was late rising for the workday. I started getting organized, making coffee, starting the computer, and I remembered that Baxter was going to get back to me about rehearsal. Since I hadn’t heard from him and did not see him on the caller ID, I called him. He said that he was not well, but that he had talked to Brittany; he had earlier told me that Brittany, apparently a manager of her college girls basketball team (an injury sidelined her this year), had a game bumped to an early slot; I’d said that we couldn’t practice so early as one, but I could practice at two or later in the evening, and he was to get back to me on it. Brittany, he said, would be at my place around seven thirty or eight to rehearse, but he was not feeling well and had to be at work at ten, so he wouldn’t make it.

Somehow in the midst of this I started poking at the temporal anomalies page for Primer. I had put it on again last night–it’s become my cure for insomnia, perhaps. I had continued thinking about it, and went back to write quite a bit more on the subject. I also decided in the middle of this that the site probably needs a glossary page, somewhere where all the terms and abbreviations I use can be explained for reference, rather than assuming that anyone would read the entire site in the order it was written (an order I’m not certain even I can identify at this point), so I started on that.

This was interrupted; Baxter called back to say that having missed rehearsal last week he really wanted to get some time in this week, and had less than two hours immediately. It was by this time after three, but I hopped in the truck and brought him back. That was a good session, in which he got a handle on some difficult parts before I ran him back home before six.

My wife had asked me to pick up a couple things and drop them off to her at work–not things needed urgently, but things needed today–so I made that part of the same trip. I had a couple of things I wanted to get anyway, so I tossed that into the same errand. It did not go entirely smoothly, as the store where I expected to get everything did not have one important item she needed and wanted too much for an item I needed, so I went to a second store also. I got everything else there, but also encountered a retired pastor and his wife who are dear to me, and although I see them almost every weekend it was too good seeing them in the store to pass up chatting for what I hope was not more than ten minutes or so. However it was, it was after seven by the time I was making my delivery, and around seven thirty by the time I got home.

This of course meant that Brittany would be arriving at any moment. I had already instructed that people should eat the leftovers, and some had done so, and I was in the middle of writing an e-mail to a temporal anomalies contributer concerning the composition of the glossary, so I tried to finish up as much as I could of that, but still left things open as my vocalist arrived. I spent most of the next two hours working with her (Adam played with both rehearsal sessions), introducing her to some of the toughest vocal parts she’ll have to sing; she did impressively well with them, and I’m looking forward to a hopefully combined rehearsal next week, although one can never tell how holiday weeks will go.

All this means I’ve not eaten (apart from the end of a bag of white cheddar Cheetos and a couple pieces of chocolate), didn’t get to my morning study in Corinthians until after ten at night, and am pushing to get through the standard Thursday fare as midnight approaches. I’ve also got to schedule a few major trips to bring people here over the next few days, but I don’t have all the schedule information, so I’m not sure how that’s going to fit.

I’d better get to work.

–M. J. Young