It's been a helluva week

This week has been a rough one. I'm no longer feeling exhausted, but we'll see how the weekend fares with 3 swimmeet sessions.

On Monday, I had a training event that I needed to attend at the local office, an infrequent occurance for a remote worker. As I left the meeting, I saw there were 8 missed calls on my phone. Something was up. It turns out that my daughter broke her arm on the playground at school. My wife had scheduled last minute doctor's appointments for her and was quickly directed to the Emergency Room at Seattle Children's Hospital. I was in Kent, she was on her way to Seattle and our oldest was at swim practice on Mercer Island. I waited for swim practice to end and rounded up our oldest and met Heather in the ER.

Chase's elbow (well, the upper arm right at the elbow) was broken and she was going to need surgery and some hardware to hold it all together. There were more pressing (emergent, in medical-ese) surgery cases, so they put her in a splint, scheduled an appointment for Tuesday afternoon and sent us home for the night.

We left the hospital late and once we got home and Chase mostly comfortable in bed, I worked late into the night to catch up from being out of the office all afternoon.

I was too tired to go to the gym Tuesday morning, so I didn't. I spent the morning re-arranging my day, moving my afternoon appointments to Wednesday. Tuesday was one of those days that I had planned to spend most of on the phone making follow up calls. Heather was at a PTA luncheon and the hospital called to see if we could come in a few hours early. We jumped at that opportunity, with the hopes that we would get her surgery done earlier. We arranged for a friend to take our youngest and pick up our oldest after school and we were off to the hospital.

We were admitted and promptly taken back to a waiting area. And we waited. There was no cell phone coverage either. Finally at about 4:30 pm (pretty much our original schedule), Chase went under the knife. Her procedure only lasted an hour, during which Heather and I ate at the hospital cafeteria. We were paged to come back to the waiting area and we did and waited. Evidently, Chase was sleeping off her anesthesia and after a few hours, they took her to her recovery room, where she and Heather would stay overnight.

I ended up leaving the hospital at about 8:45pm to go take our kids off our friend's hands. Once I got the boys in bed, I worked late into the night to try to keep my head above water at work.

Chase had asked me to come back to the hospital in the morning, so I had it all planned out. I would go drop our youngest at pre-school and then go to the hospital, stay for a few hours until I had to leave to pick up at pre-school. Seconds before I was going to shut off my computer and start executing that plan, Heather IM's me and says that they will be leaving soon.

Chase and Heather returned home and we quickly turned around to go to literacy day, so she could show off a book she had made in class and a neat PowerPoint presentation about the desert.

As I was returning from the pre-school pickup, my MINI lurched and had a loss of power. The check engine light came on and we limped home. I was able to schedule an appointment, unfortunately for next Tuesday. What was truly problematic was that I had a 6 am flight Thursday morning to go to Oakland. I arranged for a shuttle to take me to the airport and was set for the next day.

My shuttle arrived promptly at 2:50am Thursday morning. It was really quite early and we made 5 other stops on the way to the airport. I got to the airport on time, in fact early, but I was already exhausted and this didn't help any. Usually, when I travel, I stop at Starbucks (the first one on the B concourse) and buy coffee and a scone. I got there before they opened. So, I took a nap and waited for them to open.

I had a full day in Oakland and got a lot accomplished. I didn't get too much email, so on Friday there wasn't much catching up that I had to do either.

My shuttle back home only had me, so it was much faster and I only got home a few minutes later than had I been driving.

Friday I was still too beat to go to the gym. Even though it was only two days ago, I can't remember what I did. There was a swim meet and I do remember that there were lots of calls to our consultants that resulted in, "Can I call you about this on Saturday."

Saturday was another early morning, because we had a swim meet. I only got two loads of laundry done, some work and some reading. I think the best part of the afternoon was giving Heather a nice full body massage. She thought I had been practicing!

So, here I am on a Sunday, again at a swim meet (yep, 3rd time in a weekend). I've been catching up on blogs (pre-writing a few and staging them as drafts, so they are ready to publish during the week). I am about half way through Freakonomics and looking forward to dinner with one of my college room mates who is in town for a conference.

I'm definitely not caught up on rest, but I'm getting there.