Where does the time go

So Friday got away from me, obviously, as it often does when I front-load my work week with hours and give myself the opportunity to bail out of the office sooner than later on Friday afternoon, which is exactly what happened last week. This cut down on time that might have been otherwise spent blogging, but on the plus side did afford me the chance to go and get a much-needed haircut before picking up the little guy from daycare. (Who, upon being picked up, allowed himself to be loaded into his carseat and driven all the way home before asking me, as we pulled into the garage, “Daddy you get a haircut?” At which point I was fairly impressed by his perspicuity. When I agreed that I had gotten haircut, the little guy nodded and touched his own locks and said “Me too!” At which point I was highly amused by his whimsical approach to defining his own reality, but I no longer had any idea if he had actually noticed my own ‘do was an inch shorter or if the whole thing was just one extra-large coincidence.)

The rest of the weekend went by in a blur as well, because we made a daytrip to my wife’s hometown for the wedding of a family friend on Saturday, all in all a successful occasion even though we risked the grave peril of powering the little guy through the whole afternoon without a nap, since the wedding was at 1 p.m. As it turned out he was happy as the proverbial slop-supplied pig, specifically if said slop were composed mostly of fruit and cheese hors d’oeuvres and well-frosted wedding cake. Whereas on Sunday we were forced to reckon with a little guy who was decidedly under the weather, first unable to keep any breakfast down but non-feverish, then later successfully managing juice and saltines but also spiking a mild fever, though all in all the signs of him improving over time were part of mounting evidence that it was a 24 hour bug and he did essentially sleep through the night last night. When I tell it like this it makes it seem like one day we deprived our child of sleep and also pacified him with sugar and thus reaped the whirlwind the following day, but it could just as easily have been a slow-incubating bug that the little guy picked up at school last week, or something even more random, none of which necessarily rules out the crazy rule-breaking of Saturday as a contributory factor, either. Parenthood truly is a voyage navigated by tiny landmarks amidst a vast sea of who-the-hell-knows.

But we made it to the dawning of another day, a day which now finds us well and truly on the cusp of autumn, which I know for a fact because this morning when I let the dogs out back and watched them from the deck, coffee in hand, I could see nothing but black sky and constellations overhead. When 6 a.m. looks like 2 a.m., summer is over.


The fall has its compensations, of course, like a break from the torturous heat we endured this year, and the arrival of football and baseball playoffs, and of course the new tv season. I can wax philosophical for pages and pages (and have been known to do so) about why it’s so hard to be the people we aspire to be and how I can easily name a couple dozen things that would probably make me a better person and the world a better place than tuning in regularly to network and cable broadcasts, but … I loves me some tv, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been looking forward to the new tv season since the last one ended. Especially now that our summer vacation at the beach has come and gone, which means I need something new and close-at-hand that’s clearly demarcated on the calendar to look forward to.

In fact, inspired by the programming scheduling which is fairly top-of-mind this week, I’m thinking of instituting a similar approach to the old blog here. Honestly I’ve been thinking of doing something like this for a while, so now seems as good a time as any to see if I can actually pull it off. I’ve already been more than forthcoming about my own tendency to associate various concepts both big and small with days of the week, so it may very well have been inevitable that I would just allow my daily postings to fall into that kind of pattern. So here is my preliminary plan:

Mondays – work stuff, which should be pretty self-explanatory
Tuesdays – anything goes, which I know sounds like a cop out of an especially egregious kind because, come on, I couldn’t string together two thematic ideas in a row? I guess I’ll just have to say “Trust me” on this one.
Wednesdays – geek stuff, since this is my weekly gaming night and also the day new comics come out (not that I’ve picked up any of those in a while)
Thursdays – stuff about the little guy
Fridays – random anecdotes, which I know I KNOW sounds like Tuesday Part Two but I mean random anecdotes from the distant past which may or may not have any bearing on anything other than popping into my head, as they do. Outside of that, this blog is mostly about what’s going on with me now, and Tuesday will be a freeform riff on that, as opposed to stuff that happened to me in seventh grade which I feel like excavating for entertainment purposes.
Saturday – grab bag stuff, so no real change from now, including the fact that it probably won’t happen every single Saturday
Sunday – scanned-in special content, because, hey, did I ever mention that I finally broke down and got a scanner? Totally did! Several weeks ago in fact! But I still have yet to fuse its awesome powers with those of the blog. This fall, I plan to remedy that.

So on the one hand this may come across as supremely self-indulgent (but really, as far as that goes, thy name is “blog” and everything else is a bit redundant) but I actually do hope that this is a little bit helpful for some people who visit here semi-regularly. If you really want to know how life in the contracting trenches is going, Monday will be the best time to find out, whereas if my dissection of the inane minutiae of government office life is not your thing, then feel free to skip the first day of each week. I know some of you think the pop culture ruminations are all well and good but the little guy is really the star of the blog; I know others of you think my kid is cute and all but really get stoked for yet another examination of the modern myth-building in the genre ghettos, and so, now you may tune in according to your tastes. Mostly. I, of course, reserve the right to juggle everything around if the little guy blows my mind on a Tuesday night and thus commands a Wednesday post. Or maybe this whole experiment will go down the drain after three weeks. You never know.

Of course it probably seems like I’m off to a bad start because I haven’t blogged about work at all today, but today’s not over yet! More to come!