Yesterday got buried in errands, and I never completed my day’s work.  It was near three in the morning when I posted to the Corinthians list, and I at that time still cherished hopes of making it to church this morning.

For what it’s worth, I did not; I did not awaken until too late, and even then I was not terribly functional, and went back to sleep for a few more hours.

I did drop a copy of Faith and Gaming into the church library last night after Bible Study, which was eagerly snatched by one of the two teen boys who had expressed interest in it at the coffeehouse concert two weeks back.  He promised to pass it to the other after perusing it.

All this means that here it is Saturday afternoon and I’m breaking my rule about not working on Saturday in order to finish what I failed to complete on Friday.  However, it’s going to be rather slow going–I still have errands on my plate which cannot be pushed into tomorrow, so I’d better see to them, too.

–M. J. Young

I suppose it was a sort of accomplishment.

I finished my scheduled Monday work last night, signing out from posting to the Corinthians list just as my wife finished hers and arrived home.  We were both dealing with those last-thing-before-bed things when the phone rang, and our son wanted to come home from his work address.  Normally my wife would go, as she enjoys late night drives; or else, if she was not feeling well, I would go.  However, she decided we would both go.  That, though, meant that our departure was delayed a bit longer, and we stayed a bit longer at the other end than we otherwise might have done.  I got home in time to shut off the five o’clock alarm and give the first boy his medicine as he prepared for school.

We had a bit of a scare, because his bus was late.  I do not recall it ever having been late, and thus our fear was that it had come early and he had missed it.  This would have meant an extra forty minutes or more of driving for me, to deliver him to the school.  However, it arrived, and he caught it.  I, then, proceeded to prod the other boy, the one who has to catch the next bus but who lately has been freed from riding buses because his girlfriend drives and has her own car.  He is not an easy starter, but I managed to get him to acknowledge verbally that it was six thirty-one.

I’m afraid that the next thing I remember was said girlfriend standing over him telling him that he had to hurry, because she had misplaced her car keys and her father was driving them.  He flew out of the house remarkably quickly as I apologized for failing to roust him quicker, and I finally had the opportunity to get ready for bed.

All of which means that I am finally hitting the ground for today’s work.  I have managed in the midst of everything else to arrange for our mechanic to take a look at the car one of my sons is hoping will be available for him to take to school soon.  I’ve unblocked it in the drive, but one of our houseguests has apparently decided it is a good place to store stuff, so I’m going to have to get him to clean it out later before it vanishes.  However, there is much still to do, so I’d better get to the doing.

–M. J. Young

Some are no doubt wondering what became of me on Friday.  On Thursday evening I was asked whether I might pick up the girlfriend of a certain son Friday night, and although I recognized that this would mean at least five to six hours on the road, I also recognized that there is value in making the lives of my sons a bit brighter.  Then late Thursday night I mentioned this to my wife, his mother, by way of discussing vehicle arrangements–and she cut the discussion short by saying no, I was not to make the trip.  Her reasons are not relevant here, really; I passed them to the boy the next afternoon when I saw him, and he did what he ought to have done initially, which was discuss it with her.

The joke of it, really, is that they came to an agreement that I would pick her up, but neither of them mentioned it to me until late in the afternoon when mother called home and was surprised that I answered the phone.  I would have been there anyway, since pickup was not to be until between eleven and twelve, after the girl got home from work but before her parents would be disturbed by people arriving (even people who sit at the curb and never see them); I left shortly after church.

Along the way, I got a call from the other son who often calls upon us for transportation.  It seems he was chatting with his brother’s girlfriend, and she discovered that he had a stretch of days off from work (which he had created so that he could weekend with some friends), and insisted that he call us and arrange for us to grab him on the way home.  It’s not far out of the way, although what with getting off the highway and stopping and all it probably adds half an hour to the trip.  His plan was to change his transportation arrangements such that the person taking him to the weekend gathering Saturday would pick him up at home instead of at his work address.  So that was added.

Returning home around two, I knew that I could not address the work awaiting, so I did the posting to the Corinthians list and went to bed, so as to get at least a few hours of sleep before church in the morning.

I was fairly tired by late afternoon Saturday, but someone offered to make supper so that I could finish the unfinished Friday work, and my wife asked if I would make a quick run to Wal-mart with her to see whether they accepted a certain insurance coverage for eye exams and glasses.  They did not, but as long as we were there she thought it would be good to spend a lot of money on some things she felt we needed (in fairness, perhaps five to ten percent of the expenditures were for car care products I thought we needed–motor oil and brake fluid).  Between three and four hours later we returned home to discover that dinner had not been made, and it was too late for me to undertake making it, so I spent the next hour or so obtaining and serving Kentucky Fried Chicken (a task extended by the fact that they neglected to include two of the items in the bag, so I had to drive back for these).

At the end of that time, I was entirely exhausted.  I went to my bed, put on that movie I promised to watch, The Last Mimzy, and after getting a very vague feel for what was happening at the beginning, fell completely asleep.

I’m up now.  I can’t really catch up on what I missed–there were too many “extra” things I should have done.  However, I will do today’s work and see where it gets me.  Already the week ahead is looking overbooked, but we’ll manage.  I’ve got to be in North Jersey again on Tuesday, to return said girlfriend and to visit my parents, who have something for me and something for my son, and for whom I also have something.  That’s going to be difficult, because we have a shortage of help on Tuesday, but we’ll manage.

I did get a bit done on a read-through edit of the new Game Ideas Unlimited book; I’ve also been pressuring a few people for feedback on the cover, but without result.

That reminds me:  I was supposed to post on Friday to call your attention to the second article in the archived series, Game Ideas Unlimited:  An Amusing Dungeon.  It describes the juxtapostion of two unrelated ideas into a fascinating adventure.  As always, comments in the forum are invited.

–M. J. Young

I am still recovering from Easter; I am not certain when I actually got to bed last night, but I did not budge until the afternoon alarm, which awakens those on the three to eleven shift.  From there, I stumbled around a bit, trying to find my voice (I am battling an upper respiratory infection, and with the aid of the marvelous tropical fruit flavored Cold-Eze™ zinc and C drops I seem to be winning, but please don’t ask me to sing tonight).  Before I’d really figured out what I was doing, I was informed that I had to take a truckload of empty boxes to a frequently helpful friend half an hour away who is moving.

Thus it was after seven before I was actually on the road to take my mother-in-law shopping and deliver my son to his brother’s house for work tomorrow.  It seems both of them need me again tomorrow–she because she has run out of checks and did not realize it today until it was too late to get to the bank, he because he is working tomorrow morning and then off again for several days.  I’ll lose a few hours to that, but it will be good to have him home.

Home is where I finally found myself at one in the morning.  I immediately did the last thing I do each night, posting to the Corinthians list, so that I would not have to do it when I finished whatever I managed to do.  I then came here.  I have not yet done the e-mail, and possibly I won’t; given my condition, I might not finish the forum–but I have already opened it, so I will at least start it.  We’ll see how far the second wind in my sails carries me.

I did a bit of editing on the Faith and Gaming book.  I had expected merely to read a few of the articles while getting dressed and eating lunch, but in reading I found places where I needed to add footnotes, delete extra line breaks, and make a minor correction or two.  So today is not completely without progress.

–M. J. Young

…Not necessarily in that order.

As I mentioned on Sunday, yesterday’s plan involved driving north so that a son could spend his girlfriend’s birthday with her. This also would give me opportunity to visit my sick father, who although home from the hospital seems to have lost his voice (vocal chords not responding for some reason), and to connect with our drummer to give lend him the electronic drum gadget he’s been eager to use. It has also meant that the Monday workload got pushed into today atop the Tuesday workload, which is a lot of work.

The plan did not go entirely smoothly. I believe I got almost three hours of sleep by five in the morning, when the first to need to catch a bus was looking for his morning medicine, and then in somewhat disrupted and disjointed fashion pieced together my morning study and was on the road around quarter after seven. We grabbed breakfast at the gas station (which is not as bad as it sounds, since although Wawa has recently established a strong place in the retail gasoline market they are traditionally a deliconvenience store) and so reached the northern destination very shortly after ten.

Having fought for consciousness over the last leg of that journey, I locked the car and slept, fitfully with the CD player running, for about two hours. I then was unable to reach the drummer, who I think had not anticipated his wife and her Irish family monopolizing his time on St. Patrick’s Day–but my mother called, wondering why I was not already there, so I went there, ate lunch, and by around two was reading clippings cut for me.

Then, perhaps near three, I fell asleep again, and slept until my cell phone awoke me, my wife calling to see what arrangements I had made for several things she had expected me to address. Since it was by then almost six, my mother turned her attention to feeding me dinner and packing my car full of groceries. I still could not raise my drummer on the phone, I settled in to wait for someone to call.

The son called first–not the son for whose call I was waiting, but the son who hoped I would pick him up from his brother and bring him home for a few days. That was agreed, although the timeline was still uncertain. Then the anticipated son called, but to tell me that he was going to have dinner nearby before he was ready to go home. Then the drummer called, and the end of the stay up there was a somewhat awkward juggling of conflicting connections–but we made it.

The return trip put us in the driveway around two in the morning, if memory serves, and then there were some things that could not stay in the car overnight which had to be unpacked. My online work was limited to posting to the Corinthians list, and then I got to bed about an hour before I would be getting up again–but at least this time I correctly anticipated being able to return to bed after people were rousted and driven from the house. I think I’m reasonably rested at this point, but do not know whether I will be caught up by the end of the night or not.

To add to the confusion, my mother-in-law called. We just solved her banking problem so she can pay her bills, but now she has no stamps. Thus I have promised to bring her some tomorrow. Here’s hoping that’s not too disruptive.

–M. J. Young

I was wrapping up last night, with only the Corinthians list still to do, when I was asked whether I would be willing to go for a short ride. The short ride wound up about an hour each direction, and the quick run inside also hit about an hour, so by the time I got home and finished that last bit of work it was about fifteen minutes before time to roust the boys.

This would not have been so bad, but that our oven died over the weekend, and a call to the gas company appliance service promised a technician this morning, so I had to stay up in case he showed early. He did not show that early, and did not stay long before pronouncing: the oven is dead. I thus lost part of my afternoon to finding a replacement, but other than that we drove quite a distance hunting for the used appliance shop only to realize when we got there that we’d been there before some years back (to get a part for a dryer) it went quite well, and tomorrow afternoon someone will be removing our worn device and replacing it with a rather nicely refurbished one. We did have to stop to pick up a few things that will make dinner possible, but by TV Guide standards it is not yet evening as I start my work.

This, too, would not be so bad, but that last week I committed to driving two people to the north country tonight. They must be there; I must drive them. I might get some driving help, but my new stand-in driver has been deathly ill the past couple days and I’m almost surprised that he is coming with me, but that it is his girlfriend who is going home, and another son going to work for the week.

All of this means there is little hope that I might complete my Tuesday workload. I’ll be pleased if I manage to get through today’s Gaming Outpost threads and am still able to post to the Corinthians list. We need to get on the road early this evening, and that does not give me much time.

–M. J. Young

Yesterday was one of those days when I just could not get started. I thought about staying up after I got a boy on a bus, and I thought about getting up more than once after that, but even after I got to my room I found myself dabbing at this and playing with that, just not turning my attention to anything that really mattered.

Part of it was that I knew I had overbooked the day–in addition to taking my mother-in-law grocery shopping, I was planning to do some grocery shopping myself (she shops at a relatively expensive store, I at a surprisingly cheap one), and stop at the bank, and stop at another store to look for a specialty lightbulb, on top of doing the work here. Yet I was not turning my attention to any of these tasks.

Finally I left, later than I’d intended, to deal with my mother-in-law’s shopping trip. It was already nearly evening, and I had already left instructions for supper and then delayed my departure yet again. However, I went there and did that, and returned home.

It was by this point ten thirty at night, and now that I was moving I was wondering how I was going to finish what I had not yet started. I was stopped at a traffic light perhaps two miles from home, listening to the local radio station whose transmitter I had just passed, trying to sort the work in my mind.

Quite abruptly, the traffic light and the radio station both shut down–along with every light within view but for those connected to vehicles.

By the time I called the electric company, they knew that all of several towns were blacked out, and were predicting half past midnight as the restoration time. Several of our emergency lights were missing, but we have blackouts frequently enough that several were still available, and there was enough light for our purposes. I realized I was not going to be able to do much even if the estimate was accurate. I pulled out the Romans editing and worked at that by electric lantern light, then got dressed for bed.

The lights were restored mere minutes before one in the morning; I took the opportunity to send my daily post to the Corinthians list, and went to bed.

This morning I got my laundry going that absolutely had to be done last night, so I’m a step behind even now. Also, while I was getting students started for school, I finished the last of the Collision repertoire recordings. At that point I figured I might as well just stay up and see what I could accomplish, which has not been as much as I might have liked, but I’ve finished the e-mail (including a letter from someone asking my input on General Relativity, which is not really my area). I still have to do that grocery shopping trip, and stop at the bank, and there’s another appointment this evening, but at least I’m moving.

–M. J. Young

It happens sometimes–something hits me early in the day that throws me off balance and derails everything I’m trying to do, so I can’t get started. It just happens that today was a rather bad day for it to happen. I had a half rehearsal for Collision this evening–Brittany can’t make it tomorrow, so rather than miss her rehearsing completely, I met with her tonight. However, I was so late finishing my morning study in Corinthans that I had to interrupt making supper and push that later to work with her, and then finish that after rehearsal (at least I had the sense to keep it shorter than the usual two hours-I have another rehearsal with Baxter and Adam tomorrow night). Then I had a flurry of MySpace friend requests because I happened to mention my MySpace account on a list as part of a question about something only loosely related–and you all know how much I hate the way MySpace sucks bandwidth and computer resources, and would rather avoid it because it takes forever to do so little as load a page. Plus the time travel e-mail is still running a bit heavy. Today someone wrote about Kate and Leopold, and said that they found the site because it was linked from something connected to Terminator 3 page of IMDB.

So I’m busy, and it’s late, and it’s my own fault, really, for allowing myself to be so completely derailed by something stupid.

No, I’m not going to go into more detail than that. Let me get to the forum.

–M. J. Young

I got kids on buses this morning, and although I forgot one thing I was supposed to remember (and sat on the sofa trying to think of what it was), the affected kid remembered it.

I’ve also got my ground beef mostly defrosted, I think, in preparation for making meat loaf, which I will do probably in about an hour. I am otherwise fairly free, although I was supposed to stop at the bank last night and forgot, so I might go out sometime tonight to do that. It’s my understanding that my commuting son is coming home, but it was unclear how he was doing so, so I might be going for a ride late tonight anyway, and once you’re going as far as that a few miles out of the way is not so big a deal.

Did remember to do the system maintenance before bed–but I almost forgot, and had to go back to do it. I’m always forgetting that stuff.

I also completed a milestone which makes me happy: in my morning study in First Corinthians I completed chapter 13, the famous love chapter which is so frequently taken out of context that a lot of people know portions of it by heart and have no idea what it really means. I’m finding that a lot of the assumptions people make about the meaning of the text are not supportable by the text itself, and seeing how it actually fits is enlightening. (Of course, if you’re interested in that in detail, you can sign up for the Chaplain’s Teaching List and get the daily installments.)

I hope to maintain the momentum, though, so I’m momenting out of here.

–M. J. Young

I will begin to apologize here; I will have more apologies to make on the forum. I had planned to take a son’s girlfriend home, and while that far from here visit an old friend to talk about Collision, music, and drummers, then return home to finish my work Friday night. Part of the derailment was due to the fact that wives always retain the prerogative to rewrite all plans to suit themselves; part of it was that it took longer to do some of the steps than anyone anticipated. Oh, and the part about making the wrong turn on Route 46 and going fifteen or twenty minutes in the wrong direction when we had been not more than a few blocks from our destination also helped. In any case, it was almost dawn by the time I got to bed, and I did not get my visit, although the girl was delivered to her abode sometime after one in the morning, and I do not wish even to consider how far after one that might have been.

I had intended then to go to church, take the trash to the dump, and do the grocery shopping, and including in the cracks the delivery and retrieval of our dialysis patient to the hospital. I did not make it to church, and each of those tasks ran either long or late, and there was a phone call interrupting the process at a point that did not need interrupting. By the time I sat down to do my Saturday morning study in Corinthians, I fell asleep in front of the computer; I gave up attempting even to make dinner, bought pizza, did some Romans editing while waiting, and attempted to get some sleep. Even this was derailed, as once I got to my bed I became absorbed in an episode of House I had never seen, followed by the Hitchhiker’s movie which despite being a disappointment to fans of the BBC miniseries was still worth watching, and then I was rousted a few times for various reasons ranging from being offered ice cream to needing to track down someone’s buzzing alarm clock.

There was a directors meeting today, so that again set me back; but business is part of the job, and it was a reasonably productive meeting.

Now I’ve got to go offer apologies to people on the forum, and try to finish my work at a decent hour. I’ve been warned that tomorrow is not going to run on schedule, so I’ll need to get some sleep tonight if I’m going to function through the day.

–M. J. Young