The symptoms of this round of teething are about what you’d expect: he drools like crazy; he sticks his fingers in his mouth a lot; he gets fussy sometimes; he rejects food even when we suspect he’s hungry. The worst symptom, though, is a tendency to wake up in the dead middle of the night shrieking in pain. Sometimes it’s just one quick, sharp cry, loud enough to wake his parents before whining and whimpering back to sleep on his own. And other times it’s the beginning of an extended jag of howling and sobbing while standing up in the crib that can only be countered with some Baby Tylenol and hugging and rocking. And yet other times it’s the extended jag version but only a matter of two or three hours since the last jag, and thus since the last dose of Tylenol, which means there’s nothing more to do except power through. And then sometimes the glider rocking chair breaks.
So this morning at about 4 a.m. I was fetching my toolbox from the garage up to Meemie’s room and wondering what exactly happened during the course of the move that caused all five screws holding the glider seat to the left leg to shear clean in half. Meemie, at that point, was twitching fitfully against his mother’s shoulder in our bed. I improvised a way to reattach the seat to the leg (by stealing screws from other attachment points) and by 4:30 or so Meemie and I were gliding together and he, at least, was sleeping a little more deeply. I laid him in his crib a little after 5 a.m. and then got in the shower to start my day, which I imagine will end with me passing out some time around 8:45 this evening. Honestly, the best silver lining I can come up with is that dragging my carcass out of bed when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. is usually agonizingly difficult, so when 5 rolls around and I've already been up for an hour, it's not as bad by comparison.
Anyway, I was out of the house an hour later. Commuting from the new house has been interesting and I have yet to make a final determination on what method I’m going to use long term. The first few days I tried the Virginia Rail Extension, which has a station (with free parking) down in the old town area very close to the house. The VRE train feels like a mode of transportation from an imaginary time, not so much anachronistic as retro sci-fi, the way that a visionary in 1921 might conjure up commuting in 1999. The cars are double-deckers, with paired seats on either side of the aisle on the lower level and single seats on either side on the upper level, and every seat has a fold-out latte-sized cup holder. The tickets are sold at automated touchscreen kiosks on the platform but the trains have multiple human conductors in uniforms with dark sweaters and sharp little hats. This all seemed really great when I took the train in on Tuesday morning a week ago, even though I had to plan my morning around the once-an-hour schedule of the train (usually they run every half hour, but Tuesday last there was still too much snow on the tracks for a full schedule, apparently). The VRE runs to Crystal City, which would be convenient when/if I go back to working out of that office, but for now means I need to transfer to the old Metro and ride a few stops up to Rosslyn. On the way home that Tuesday, however, the weather-truncated schedule meant about a million people tried to get on the already full train in Crystal City in the afternoon. I ended up standing in the vestibule between cars for the entire ride, which lasts about an hour. Nevertheless, I did the whole thing again the following day when the trains went back to their normal schedule, and I got a seat on the way home (although I had to share a pair bench on the lower level; the singletons in the upper level, which I prefer, were all taken).
Since Christmas Eve was again a truncated schedule day for the VRE, and I had no idea what time the office would be closing and sending me home, I drove out to the Vienna Metro station and took Metro all the way in. The parking there is not free, and getting there via 66 can be a challenge for any number of reasons, but it is the terminus of the Orange Line so getting a seat in the morning is (usually) not a problem and it goes straight to Rosslyn. I’ve been driving to Vienna this week, too, and so far it hasn’t been a big hassle and seems more flexible than the VRE option, if a little more expensive. I’ve run into a couple of slowdowns on 66, one heading east in the morning and one coming west in the evening, but both were due to disabled vehicles, not soul-crushing volumes of traffic. Of course, the cynic in me thinks there will probably be some idiot putting their disabled vehicle in my way as many times as not, not to mention that I really don’t have a true sense of the traffic volume yet because plenty of people are still on holiday vacation. I believe I mentioned earlier that the whole thing is still under review, since VRE and Metro have ups and downs and neither one seems like a hands-down winner yet.
Of course this could all be moot if I end up transferred to the Fairfax office in January as my boss keeps alluding to, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.
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