Death by Paper Cuts

These past... I don't even know, about two months maybe, but let's just stick with the last two weeks. I don't even know how to describe this, because none of it catastrophic -- it's just that there's so much of it that it kind of feels that way.

I'll start with the obvious: I just worked thirty-four hours of overtime this past weekend. That's "overtime", as in "it happened between two forty-hour work weeks". My wife, meanwhile, was out of town giving a paper at an academic conference, which should have been simple except that she discovered at the last minute that the person who was doing her scheduling hadn't booked a hotel room for her. So, you know, panic, chaos, and a certain amount of last-minute adjustment. Fortunately, the boys were able to stay with their grandparents over the weekend; unfortunately, the Beautiful Woman came back into town and retrieved them on Saturday evening, just in time for Firstborn to wake up on Sunday with a 104 degree fever. Pediatrician's diagnosis was "viral infection", but over the course of the week it morphed into a sore throat that turned out to be tonsillitis. Meanwhile, he came back home from school on Thursday morning (almost immediately after I dropped him off) with lice.

So I'm bald again, and we're disinfecting/running laundry/vacuuming all the things. Oh, and yesterday evening Secondborn reported that his tongue felt hairy; the last time we had that, it turned out to be Strep, so we're probably dealing with that again as well.

Plus, yesterday -- during work, mind you -- we bought a car. Or, mostly, my wife bought the car. I just had to test drive it, like it enough to want it, and sign some things. It's a Honda Accord Sport, and it's replacing my old Toyota Camry. This solved two problems: first, the insurance company had totaled out the Camry based on hail damage; also, one of the seat belts in the back seat of the Camry had stopped latching, which is ridiculously inconvenient if, say, you ever need to pick up two boys from elementary school. So I now have a much newer (2014), much nicer car with working seatbelts and a working CD player.

Somewhere in here, owing to that same hail storm, we're due to get the roof replaced on the house. And somewhere in here, I need to figure out how to replace the the little plastic skylights on the shed in the back yard -- they didn't survive the hailstorm either.

Oh, and my boss is out sick, so I'm trying to cover for him as well.

We're almost to the end of school, so we have various events to keep up with on that front, too. And there are probably some other things that I'm overlooking, since we've coped by mostly ignoring anything that isn't an immediate crisis. At this point, we're pretty much just waiting to see what comes at us next.