Lovely Other Catastrophes

P1010558
Originally uploaded by billyjoebob.

It's interesting, Brambling, just exactly what being an adult entails. It's interesting as you grow older and discover more and more often how difficult this job can be. I think that the thing that's most difficult, that's really struck me very hard over the last couple of days, has been that there's no let-up.

So when, as in the course of general human events, things go wrong, there's no opportunity to stop, there's no opportunity to take a breath, there's no opportunity to take stock of your strategy for dealing with it and more so, that there's never, ever, any chance to say no thanks, I'd rather not deal with that, it's outside the terms of the original agreement.

Having said all this, your party was fabulous.

Now, on with the woe is me.

It's hard to know where to start with this litany of disasterfication, but we'll try to find a point at which to jump off.

We need to preface this by saying that I'm waiting for someone to call me about something very important, but that he can't call me until someone calls him about it. So first of all the guy totally didn't call back about the thing yesterday, so I spoke to him at about 1130 and said 'i'm going into a meeting, i'll be out at two', and he was like yep ok no problem i'll call you as soon as there's news.

so i called him when i got out of the meeting at one, no answer.

two, no answer

three, no answer

four, no answer

fivethirty, i call him and say 'yeah, hi it's me, i've got a few questions for you can you give me a call, i'm pretty upset about the lack of feedback here'. no call. At around 1130am the next day I hear from him that he's had his phone on silent since midday the previous day, and so didn't realise that I'd called.

THEN

I got home and the dogs had managed to Rip Palings from the fence and get through to next door's back yard in the section that I didn't electrify because it was concreted so it didn't matter they couldn't tunnel through oh but instead they can physically pull down a hardwood fence and run into next door's yard and bark bark bark at the next door neighbour.

THEN

You were having some difficulties with the whole teething and having a cold thing, so you were working on one of those nights in which we get you home and you scream and scream and scream and scream and scream until we get you to bed but then you don't stay asleep for very long and so you wake up every couple of hours and scream some more.

ALSO

Your mum and I are both sick too, and so we're dealing with all this with horrid sore throats and snotty mcsnotterson

THEN

on my way into work yesterday morning I filled up the car with petrol except apparently they didn't feel the need to actually put petrol in the petrol tank and i got something like a 50/50 mix of weak white wine and red cordial that, needless to say, made the car run a bit funny and stall in the middle of peak hour traffic on Lygon street, so i had to limp the car home and then walk to the tramstop and catch the tram and sit next to a strange smelly woman who kept muttering under her breath.

hangon what else

oh yeah and evey put the washing machine on without remembering to take the plug out of the laundry sink and flooded the laundry.

Apart from that, though,

everything's fabulous. As I sit here to write this, it's with a feeling of extreme fatigue, sure, but it's also with a feeling of pride that your mother and I managed to meet all of these great challenges, none of them incredibly huge problems in and of themselves, but when lumped together it all felt very close to being too much to cope with. It was 24 hours, punkin, of the most stressed I'd been since you arrived. Even when you were in the hospicamackal and we were very worried about you, I didn't feel so overwhelmed, I didn't fear that I would be unable to continue. I didn't once think that I couldn't cope.

This time, I did, but I was able, mainly through knowing that your mum was there to stand beside me, to fix everything that needed to be fixed (although it was your mum that installed the extended electric fence yesterday All By Herself while I was at work).


Love you,