Wintry mix-ups

In an arguably more-ideal world, I would have been at work yesterday and not at work today, as yesterday would have been a Thursday of business-as-usual and today would have been a day on which an afternoon meeting between me and my wife and the little guy's teacher would have justified me burning a personal day. Then, however, came the snow late Wednesday night, which necessitated widespread closures across the area on Thursday. So yesterday my entire family was at home, and there were some late morning exertions in shoveling about a foot of snow off our driveway and walks, but mostly it was pretty mellow.

Today school was cancelled yet again, and our meeting with the teacher along with it. The back-up plan was for us to simply show up at our regular scheduled parent-teacher conference time, which is set for Monday afternoon. Unfortunately I can't make it then, because Monday is a federal holiday and I volunteered to work as part of the small force of contractors guaranteeing that there's minimal coverage in place while all the civilian government employees are out of the office. Of course I had stepped up to this task in light of the fact that I was going to be out on Friday anyway and wanted to balance things out. But now here I am at the Big gray today, and I'll be here on Monday as well.

But on the other hand, the federal government offices opened with a two-hour delay today, so I got to sleep in and only clock six hours at my desk. Although now, I suppose, I'm really only going to be clocking five, since the boss-several-rungs-up-the-ladder just announced that, because it's the beginning of a three-day federal holiday weekend, we could all knock off the customary 59 minutes early.

So yeah, I'm not altogether sure why my snow avatar up above is so miffed. I got a freebie day off yesterday and had fun hanging out with my wife and my kids, and I'm basically getting a free half-day today. And Monday will be a bit of a joke (by which I mean it will be even easier to slack off than usual, and I trust I've made my case often enough over the years that it's pretty dang easy to slack off around here). I'm bummed about missing the parent-teacher meeting, since I do genuinely care about what's going on with the little guy as he continues to try to get the hang of school, with ups and downs and all. But, on balance, things could be much worse.