Holy Crap Sunday: A Recap

So Sunday was... fraught. (Interesting word, fraught. It's derived from "freight". Something that's fraught is carrying a lot of freight, usually -- the way we use it now -- in the form of emotional baggage.)

It stopped raining shortly after I got out of bed (a solid seven hours of sleep that I could easily have doubled except that my life hasn't worked that way in decades), so in keeping with our current policy I pried the boys away from their video games and took the whole family on a walk around the block. Well, the whole family except for the cat; kitty don't go on walks. Kitty's a hardcore napper. But I digress.

As soon as we got back from the walk, we all piled into my car and I took us to the donut shop, because boys who have been on walks are eager for donuts.

That left me enough time to scramble some brunch: hamburger, bacon, Colby-Jack cheese, garlic salt, and eggs. Sort of like an omelette, except it was more of a splat -- but again, I digress.

I finished eating, and we emptied out the back of the van and ran off to purchase a new treadmill. It turned out to be a bit larger (and nicer) than we expected, but the van has a lot of storage, and we managed to make it work.

(There's a story there. A while back, we changed Secondborn's room into an exercise room. He'd been doing most of his sleeping on the lower bunk in his brother's room, and we needed a way for the boys to exercise inside the house. So, the exercise room acquired a treadmill, a television, a small trampoline, and Firstborn's laptop, which was plugged into the television. The rule was that you could only watch YouTube videos on weeknights if you were active on the treadmill. Unfortunately, on weekends Firstborn liked to play games on his laptop, and he got in the habit of sitting on the front of the treadmill while he was doing so. The eventual result of this was that the front pinched the track while the treadmill was trying to run, and when it couldn't turn it burned out the motor. Around this same time, Secondborn started complaining about not having a room of his own, and asking us to put a bed back in there. So... the arrangement didn't last, but when it was working it worked brilliantly. Anyway, the dead treadmill left, Secondborn got his room back complete with a new bed, and this treadmill represents the second iteration of this cunning plan.)

So: we bought a new treadmill and brought it back to the house. It turned out to be nicer, newer, and bigger than the last one. It also turned out to be bigger than our front door. Or any other doors, for that matter. (Beautiful Wife: "I have made a terrible, terrible mistake.") So I spent the next half an hour disconnecting the very-prominent control panel section so that we could lean it against the tread and maneuver (read: manhandle) the whole thing through the door. In the process we discovered that our Very Elderly Cat had pooped just inside the back door; fortunately, the boys were helping us out and Secondborn cleaned that one up. And then I spent the half-hour after that figuring out how to get the control panel slotted back into place. And immediately after that, I discovered that Very Elderly Cat had also thrown up in our bedroom.

::sigh::

By now it's after 1:00, and I still have some errands I need to do. The first is to check on a maintenance job I left running on a SQL server at work. I started it right before I left work on Friday.

It's still running.

This is, for a variety of reasons, not optimal. Not only is that a long time for a job to run, but it means that two other jobs have kicked off, run simultaneously with this one, and finished -- one on Saturday night, one early Sunday morning. Also, this process locks various tables while it works on them, so while it doesn't take the whole system offline it can cause some really ugly delays. If our departmental politics were less fraught than they are right now, I'd say that this was all part of the troubleshooting process. As it is, well... I'd really hoped to have all this cleaned up by now. And now I have to remote in and check on the benighted thing every so often so I can see when it finishes.

After that, well: groceries. Because people (and cats) still need to eat. Once I had everything I needed, I headed back to the house and put it all away.

And then, finally, I got to take a hot bath and read for a while.

Gentle readers, it was amazing.

There are still things that need to be done. Beautiful Wife is off to a girl's night out, so I'll be the one putting the boys down. That's not as big a deal as it might be, because that's usually my job anyway. I need to get more lines in on the Beauty and the Beast/Heroes Are Assholes story, but it might be better to sleep first and get up extra early to work on that. And there's always more reading lined up and waiting for me. But I think I might actually have adulted my way through this long damned day.