I think I’ve been struggling with the schedule changes of the past year. Rising at six to get the youngest on the bus was already a struggle, particularly since I was always still up to provide supper for my wife whenever she got home, which was seldom before one and often meant serving food closer to three; now the six o’clock alarm has been pushed back to five, as the houseguest son of the absented houseguest becomes my responsibility, and his bus is most of an hour earlier. Thus I am not only not good at mornings, I’m starting to lose afternoons.

I say that I take Saturday off; that’s not quite an accurate statement. I have church on Saturday mornings (Seventh Day Baptist, thank you), but I’m usually late, and later when I’m more tired. I made it in ample time to hear an excellent sermon this weekend, but it was a drag-yourself-out-of-bed effort to get there. Thus Sunday morning is the only day on which I am usually able to sleep in, and today I did so well into the afternoon. I then had disruptions dropped into my lap, and only now am preparing supper as the calendar is preparing to change. I’ve much to do, and do not relish being up late doing it. In my favor, though, there are no school buses in the morning.

I’m not going to complain about not accomplishing anything during my time off; it is, after all, time off. I stumbled upon the DVD copy of Sliding Doors, which has been missing since New Year’s Eve, but could not have been where I found it. I did a bit of Romans editing while waiting for a son who was browsing video games at Walmart, looking for a way to spend his money. I made a recording of one of the Collision songs, because I wanted one of the drummers to hear it, and because I think Brittany will have a better shot at learning the very difficult contrapuntal vocal instrumental duet if she has a good recording of it. I’m not saying this is a good recording, but it is at least an accurate rendering of what I expect of the song.

So I did a bit more than nothing, and I’m making a push at getting through the rest of today’s work tonight.

–M. J. Young

Today was marked by a trip to court for another member of the household; since we’re still working with the rental, I had to drive. The truck turns out to be bad news–not the starter, the flywheel, which means several hundred dollars to pull the transmission to get to it. Ah, well–we agreed that we need the truck, if only to get trash to the dump.

It also means that the trip to Ubercon has been seriously jeopardized; we have three cars any one of which might or might not be done by Thursday, and we must have two on the road to make it work. Odds are slim.

Sitting in court gave me time to do a fair amount of editing on the Romans notes. I confess, however, that my mind was a bit frazzled, and I did not feel that I was giving it the attention required. Here’s hoping I haven’t missed some glaring problems in my failure to grasp what I was reading.

After that, I still had to get my mother-in-law to the store; my wife wanted to go along, but that meant we had to take our youngest son, so that we could feed him. That became more complicated, and it was after eleven thirty that we managed to get home. Mercifully I had been able to get the e-mail done in the cracks before and after court, so I’m drawing near the end of the night. Unfortunately, I’m not really getting things ready for the convention, and I’m running out of time.

On another note, I stumbled upon a DVD of Sliding Doors for ten bucks, and since that’s a movie about which I get a fair amount of mail (my Temporal Anomalies fans keep telling me that I need to see it even though it is not a time travel film), I decided to add it to my growing stack of films. I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to watch it, but at least I’ve got it.

–M. J. Young