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About halfway through this very difficult Thursday, I was ready to give up. Nothing was going right, and I can’t even tell you how many times the Boss phoned to tell me I was doing something wrong. That makes a guy feel good, you know? Especially after I told him to leave me alone so I could finish the quarterly taxes and get ready for the audit. That’s the time I really need some guidance about how to do my job better.
He even acknowledged that the things that were wrong weren’t my fault. I was getting bad information, and we all know what becomes of garbage in. (Hint: garbage out.) It was my fault for trusting the bad information I guess. I should have been reading people’s minds. That’s how I would have known that when they wrote “north” on their time cards, they really meant “south.” If I’d picked up on that subtlety, I wouldn’t have to go back and redo six weeks of cost reports, changing north to south.
Really, I was ready to cash out, take my losses and live in the branches of the old oak. What I really wanted to do was scream, but I wanted to do it without anyone hearing me so that I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone. Instead, I just had to scream silently.
Needless to say, I wasn’t up for being social tonight. I wasn’t even sure I could form complete sentences. But there are some situations where grammar takes a back seat. Dakota doesn’t have much use for sentence structure, so when he answered the door at Tammy and David’s tonight and said “hi,” my troubles began to melt. Kind of like lemon drops.
As bad as my day was, Tammy had a worse one. She took herself to the doctor and immediately had to turn around and take Aiden. (Hideous diaper rash, the poor baby.) She had so little time in between that I was on alert to pick Dakota up from school, although in the end she managed. She always seems to manage, somehow.
So she invited me over for salmon tonight, except that they forgot to take it out of the freezer so she picked up steaks instead. Only when David went to fire up the grill, it was out of propane. He had a backup plan, the old-fashioned barbecue. He filled it with charcoal and then couldn’t get his lighter to work. By the time he did, it had already been decided that we (that is, he and Aiden) would pick up spaghetti from Mary’s Pizza Shack. I could have been disappointed, but Mary’s has great spaghetti, and I wasn’t really there for the food anyway.
It’s been a while since I’ve been there for dinner, and I’d forgotten how chaotic things can be, with four (oops, still only three) kids and a big, tail-whapping dog. I suppose if you live in the middle of all that commotion every day, you might not appreciate it as much as I do. Little boys, in case you don’t know, have a hard time moving from place to place without running. Often they have a hard time communicating without shouting. Sometimes they need a time out; sometimes the adults need one.
But they’re good kids, all three of them. Aiden doesn’t drink face first out of the dog’s water dish because he’s bad; he does it because that’s the way Titus showed him how. D.J. doesn’t talk nonstop for any other reason than that he has so much to say it’s hard to get it all in before bedtime. And the only reason Dakota throws rocks is... Well, I don’t really know. He just likes to throw rocks, I guess.
Anyway, it was fun. Probably more fun for me than for Tammy and David, but I’m not even sure of that. I think they secretly like all that excitement. If they didn’t, why would they be having another one? | 
