Long week looming

One of the (many) things I allowed myself to be giddily optimistic about back in January when I was trying to set up a time to interview for a potential new job was the fact that if I got offered the position sometime in February and gave my notice such that I departed my current gig in March, I would have successfully snuck out before my yearly turn came up in the rotation to work the security detail for the office. But that rosy scenario failed to come together, and here I am on the first day of a five-day stint of staying later than usual to make sure things aren’t left in too compromised a state overnight.

It’s really not that bad of a deal, spreading the nightly security duties around to everyone in the agency; in fact given that we have 60-something employees my turn comes up a little less frequently than once a year - behold, the last time I was grousing about this was back at the beginning of February last year. Wow, just look how things have changed. Last go-round I was bemoaning the fact that I might miss the laughably-delayed season premiere of Community’s bizarro fourth season. Since then not only has Community not been cancelled, but it’s gotten Dan Harmon back and there’s been ho-hum discussion as season five now draws to a close that season six is, if not a sure thing, at least more likely than not. (And the episode I’m worried about missing this week if schedules go ka-blooey is not the season premiere but a late entry, albeit the animated GIJoe homage which is right in my wheelhouse.)

Also (and immeasurably more importantly, I hasten to add) last time I had security detail my wife was pregnant and we had two kids; now we have three, and my wife is working fewer days per week but longer hours per day, which means that on Wednesday and Thursday the sitter is going to have to stay later than usual waiting for me to get home an hour and a half after my usual arrival time, which will still have me beating my wife home, and at which point I will charge with no transitional downtime into getting the kids fed (unless the sitter volunteers for that overtime extra credit) and bathed and pajamaed and tucked in an all that. And that's not at all an attempt to discount the fact that on the other three nights of this week, my wife will be home alone with no backup during the dinner-prepping-and-serving part of the evening, which given our brood's temperaments (individually and collectively) can be among the most harrowing moments from start to finish of any given day.

So it’s going to be a bit of a week, and if the blog sporadically pops in and out of regular updating, now you know the reason why. (Mental exhaustion, probably. Murdered by my wife, less likely but non-zero possibility.)