Ah, Monday....

I have finally, finally gotten enough sleep -- though I still need to work on regularizing my sleep schedule. So, naturally, we have other things we now need to take care of. Still, I can go into this morning with some confidence that I'm reasonably well-rested and firing on most (maybe even all) cylinders. We're still sorting some things out with Secondborn, who's already managed to get behind in her online school assignments -- though in her defense, she's taking both Geometry and Algebra 2, and she is trying. 

I have a bit of final editing-and-polishing to finish up this week, but I'm waiting until I've got all my brain cells in working order for that. Which, I mean, after this last little bit of getting Firstborn out the door and Secondborn settled into school I'm amazed I had anything left at all. So I'm basically taking the win on this bit. 

Depending on how the schedule shakes out, I may spend a few extra days in the office this week instead of working from home. I've done a lot of working from home the past two weeks, and it's good to show up and be seen, plus I have some things to follow up on that I'd rather just go ask about in person. 

All in all, the goal for this week is just to find a decent balance between Get Things Done and Take It Easy, with a side order of Run All The Laundry. I will also be considerably relieved somewhere around the end of October, when the weather finally drops back down into sensible temperatures, but some things you just can't force.

 

The Emptying of the Vault

We got Firstborn moved into his dorm room. 

Again. 

Left our house. 103F in our area right now. 

Arrived at the college some time later. 104F there. Checked into the hotel, rested up a bit, and then went and got some truly excellent Chinese food for dinner. 

That was when the storm blew through. Big storm. Massive storm. Huge amount of falling water, amazing display of lightning. Just absolutely a blowout. Dropped the temperatures by... I'd say nearly thirty degrees during the night. 

So the next morning we got up, ate the hotel breakfast, and then zipped off to get the key to Firstborn's room. Gave the room a quick check and filled out the preliminary survey on what was already damaged, then headed over to the storage unit and emptied most of it. By now it's gotten thoroughly, painfully sunny -- but the air is still in the mid-eighties.

We get everything unloaded into the room, then go for milkshakes -- or in Secondborn's case, a banana split. 

Went back to the storage unit and emptied the last four items, then got them up to the room and started assembling things. Got the whole thing done was it while still relatively cool, before 2:00 p.m. Secondborn was a huge help with both the lifting and the unboxing, and after that we were able to go back to the hotel room and just collapse for a bit. Firstborn elected to stay behind in his room, I think just settling in and feeling smug about having it all set up. 

Then it rained again. So we got up the following morning and had breakfast while watching the rain and savoring the comparative chill. Secondborn attended a class online from the hotel room, and that gave Firstborn -- who had slept in a bit -- a chance to catch back up with us. So then, before we left, we went to visit a Cat Cafe. I had a nice latte -- something with dark chocolate, cinnamon, and vanilla, and probably also the most concentrated caffeine I've had in the last couple of years, and got to sip and sit while kittens climbed on me and ran around and swatted at things. 

It was healing on an existential level. 

Even more impressive, we managed to leave without any new cats. 

The trip back was overcast, drizzly, and cool for the first half, and then reverted to crazy-hot as we got back into Texas. But it was done, everything is finally settled, and I can return to my ongoing project of learning how to be Normal About Things again.

Now We Burn It All Down

Last week was... fraught. Secondborn started school. Our Internet went out on Thursday. Various other issues came up, some work, some personal. Some weeks are just one damned thing after another, and that was one of them.

This week we'll be back to having one kid left in the house. She's doing classes and assignments, some synchronous and some not, online -- which seems to be working better than whatever trainwreck her former school was inflicting. So we're cautiously optimistic, there. Firstborn is back at college, ensconced in his dorm room, and given firm instructions to quit pushing people away. He could have friends, he's just chosen not to, and we're doing our best to steer him back to making connections with people or at least be open to them. A lot of that is just him (he gets it from me, sort of) but I feel like Covid isolation also robbed him of some critical socialization experience. 

Anyway, I've taken some time off from work and I'm generally trying to have a normal sleep schedule and not be crazy, but I swear to all the gods, known and forgotten, that the world is trying me right now. 

Let Freedom (Ear)Ring

We went and got Secondborn's ears pierced at a lovely little local place. It took us three tries; state law has come a long way from when I was sixteen and got my ear pierced at a kiosk in the mall. We needed picture IDs for at least one parent and Secondborn, a birth certificate for her, and a bit of paperwork attesting that yeah, I was okay with this. 

The style of the initial studs is completely different, too. Forget the  rough, spike studs with their stupidly-large backs; today's versions are sleek, a tube inserted from the back, and a selection of fronts that slide into it. The tubes are a bit overlong, in case of swelling, but apparently we can come back in and get them shortened/replaced with something that fits better once they've finished healing. 

Since we were there, and since my own piercings haven't had earrings for decades, I signed up to have my old piercings re-pierced... except they didn't need it. Apparently the holes were still open, so they just stretched them back out to receive the new studs. Which was shockingly easy, and also much cheaper. I'm still not going to grow my hair back out, but I am going to cultivate my pirate earrings again. 

Secondborn was thrilled with this, I think; not only did she get what she'd been wanting, but her father jumped in to restore his version of it too.  Yeah, I'm old, but also I kind of feel like it's time to get back to reclaiming my identity as a freak. 

...Which reminds me, I need to do more sewing on the Patch Jacket MK II.

Wrangling My Schedule

I spent last week sort of half-sick, and would have like to spend the weekend recovering. Alas, 'twas not to be; Secondborn decided that she needed a second prom, and went to one that a friend had mentioned -- at a community center about half an hour away. Which made for two one-hour round trip journeys Friday night, followed by the child's birthday party on Saturday. The birthday party theme was "Build Your Own Boffer Weapon" and I did an initial demonstration before turning the kids loose. They had some kind of Capture The Flag game over at the nearby park, ate a pretty fair amount of pizza, and generally had a good time. 

One of her friends gave her a harmonica, though, and I'm not at all sure we're going to survive that. 

I did my best to have a restful Sunday -- a bit of D&D (playing, not running), a bit of writing, a bit of reading Vampire Smut -- but was still a bit later getting down to sleep than I would have preferred. Not as late as Secondborn, though. I'm pretty sure she was still bouncing around at 4:30 a.m. and I think I'm going to have to inflict a bedtime on that child.

::SIGH::

I'm back at work and catching up this week, at least, which is kind of a relief. Still need to pull together some follow-up from the conference, and jump back on some things that slipped through the cracks and/or have proven ridiculously recalcitrant, but at least I'm in a condition to work on them again.

The Burden of Schoolwork...

Spent a big chunk of Saturday night getting Secondborn through an overdue assignment. 

It was a rebuttal paragraph for an essay, with a quote from the text. Maybe five sentences in all. 

This, somehow, took us hours. Like, I could have re-read the whole damned book in that amount of time. I don't know if she was just procrastinating, or didn't know where to find the source text -- she says she was trying to find a usable quote online, but I found one in about twenty minutes and we built a paragraph around that and got it turned in with maybe two minutes to spare before the deadline. 

I'd hoped we were making some progress, but apparently we're not. Which is depressing as fuck-all, because I can't have her struggling through this school year the way she was struggling through last school year. And I mean that in a strictly logistical fashion: I don't have the spoons to do my job, help keep the house running, and drag Secondborn through her schoolwork. 

The school is trying very hard to work with us, but it feel like trying to run cross-country on a treadmill: all effort and no progress. 

I'm so tired. 

First Day Of

Brought Secondborn to school a bit earlier than necessary -- at his request -- and found a bunch of his friends parked at a table out front playing Magic: The Gathering. Apparently there is now something known as a "squirrel deck" and apparently it is the most annoying thing in creation. Anyway, got a nice shot of all them flipping off the camera for the first day of school (which, sadly, I won't share here for privacy reasons) and a couple of good First Day Of shots of Secondborn by himself. Dare I hope this will mark a good start to the school year and a better attitude on his end? I mean, hope springs eternal, but frying pans without fires are few and far between...

Anyway, he's due to go inside and pick up a Chromebook as soon as the place opens properly, and he seemed pretty chipper. We stopped by Starbucks to grab some breakfast, which was expensive but worth it, though the poor Starbucks workers were absolutely inundated by the First Day of School crowd.  He didn't even ask for any caffeine, so I guess he's about as ready as it's possible to be. 

A Theoretical Murder

Okay, storytime: 

So we're on a cruise a few years back. It's over Christmas, so the ship is absolutely jam-packed with people -- apparently this is the favorite/worst time to take a cruise. But my in-laws are paying, so we go anyway. Towards the end of the trip, we manage to get tickets to the onboard magic show. 

Now, the magician and his assistant are really good, and I remain jealous of his leather trenchcoat to this day. We're all sitting in a row, but owing to the way we came in it's kind of haphazard... with the result that I'm kind of seated at one end of our group, with my niece on one side of me and Firstborn sitting next to her. 

Anyway, the magician does one of the classic tricks: puts his assistant in a wooden box, sticks a few swords through it, and then saws it in half and swings the two halves apart. At which point my niece, who's about ten years old at this point, leans over to me and stage-whispers: "He killed her!"

And by the dark and forgotten gods, the only way I could think to reassure her was to whisper back, "No he didn't. Not enough blood." 

Recovery and Self-Care, 2025

Oh thank the dark and forgotten gods. 

I've been... not feeling well... for the last few days, mainly because I've been pushing way too hard with way too much stress for, I don't know, the last three weeks of May. I spent part of Monday just napping, took most of Tuesday off as an exhaustion/mental health day, and have just generally been feeling like I was right on the edge of making myself really, really sick (and I did have stomach/digestive issues, not to mention a truly horrible headache yesterday that may have been partly dehydration from the digestive issues). I've also been sleeping mostly in five-hour chunks, which isn't ideal. 

So yesterday I worked from home, but... cautiously, with breaks when I felt I needed them -- including napping for a bit of the afternoon and working to make it up in the evening -- and then went to bed with Beautiful Wife (also exhausted) at about 10:30. Didn't even pause to set up the CPAP, just climbed up and burrowed in. 

Finally -- finally -- had all the deeply weird, semi-narrative REM-sleep dreams that I've been missing. Woke up about 5:30, sweaty as anything, and just lay there thinking about random crap, the way I seldom have time to do anymore. Legit feels like I just shook off a fever, though I don't think I've actually been running one. 

The dreams were absolutely wild, too -- a three-part or three-element ceremony involving a circle of monsters (half feline, half canine -- so werewolves and were-panthers, maybe?) who had to move in and out and weave together in particular ways, a human at the center, and... something else that was important, but I can't remember it now. Probably wouldn't do me any good, since I don't seem to know any shapeshifters in real life and couldn't teach them the choreography anyway. Come to that, I don't actually remember what the ritual did, either, but  it was still pretty cool. 

I should put it in a piece of writing, somewhere. 

Next set of dreams started with younger-me and a whole bunch of other people in a fairly large house -- but there were a lot of us, so we were sleeping sort of wherever we could. (My parents showed up in this dream; my brother did not. I don't know if that means anything.) We were pulling together some sort of caravan, and there were a lot of decisions to make about what to bring and what to leave behind. Also, it was raining outside and the house had several significant leaks. 

Then we were actually in the caravan, and we were moving slowly because it was early morning and there were still traces of mist on the ground -- along with a lot of death and destructions -- fires, burned-down or smashed buildings, one truly spectacular corpse that was a badly-burned person(?) on a motorcycly, with the back half sunk into the ground. Looked like a war-zone, or the aftermath of a particularly bloody riot. Apparently the mist came out of the north, and it rises at night and anybody caught out in it dies -- or starts killing each other. 

Then we got to the place we were looking for, which was some kind of... factory? Power generation? Anyway, lots of cool ladders and bridges and big metal equipment. Also a couple of very friendly dogs, which turned out to be unfortunate because the dogs were helping to chase out some monsters that had gotten inside. The monsters were... weird. There was one like a two-legged balloon or egg. It did have a mouth, but it was awkward and not very dangerous, except that when it died it exploded into a small cloud of that death-mist, which did horrible things to the dogs until there was only one dog left. Unlike most of my dreams, I was both young (like, late teens maybe?) and unarmed, so I was avoiding the beasties by climbing ladders, jumping platforms, and like that. There were some other monsters too, at least one that stalked around like some sort of human-sized, featherless hunting bird, but at least those didn't explode into mist when they died. 

Anyway, I woke up before I had a chance to find out why we'd come there or what the workers were doing there, but it was intense and interesting and left me feeling more connected -- to my dreaming or myself, I'm not sure -- and just generally like I'd finally gotten a little bit of my breath back. 

Like I said, thank the dark and forgotten gods for that.  

Running to Stay Still

This week has been, inexplicably but relentlessly, busy. Secondborn is trying to catch up last semester's Physics plus some late assignments in English -- and today he's having his STAAR test for Algebra, so that's going to keep him occupied -- and I've been trying to stay on him so this gets done and he doesn't wind up in summer school. Work has been -- for no good reason that I can see -- just one thing after another. Nothing particularly catastrophic or unpleasant, there's just a lot going on right now. 

And, obviously, I've tapered off on the writing. Too much else going on; not enough energy left over; body needs sleep and lots of it. 

I'm still working on the Horny Superteens project, which -- while absolutely 100% pulp -- is doing a lot to preserve my sanity; the snippets of things here are me thinking through what's happening behind the scenes, so I guess those would count as bonus content. I'm hoping to jump back into it as soon as my system resets, but apparently this week is for catching up on the real world and Getting Some Sleep. 

Sleep is good. I like sleep. Sleep with long, weird dreams (that would be last night) is so damned refreshing that waking up from it always feels like a bit of a revelation. 

 

The Climbing Gym

We have, once again, visited the climbing gym. I have, once again, climbed. I am reminded, yet again, of how very much out of shape I let myself become. I have no real idea of just how sore I'm going to be when this post goes up, but my best guess is groan.

The good news is that I am, slowly, getting back into better shape. The bad news is I'm definitely not there yet. And the other good news is that everybody had a really good time, and we were there for about three hours. So, y'know, plenty of opportunity to wear myself out and remind my body of what kinds of things it used to do.  

And it's really not a bad way to exercise, either. Like, it's not impacting the joints; it's working both strength and cardio -- and balance too, for that matter. Even limiting myself to the faces with the auto-belays, there are plenty of different things to try. Plus, y'know, I like being way up in the air. Especially if I can just let go and know I'll get back down safely.

The Great Tree Battle

So, we have this one trash tree in the back yard, which has been extending over the back corner of the fence, and apparently it's intruded far enough to the alley that the trash truck has been hitting it. They got tired of that and started leaving nasty little notes on our trash cans, so tonight Secondborn and I broke out the saw, the clippers, and the step-ladder (from a previous marriage) and we *trimmed* that bad boy. It was an epic battle: tying the stepladder off to the tree so it couldn't tilt backwards, roping the limbs and pulling them aside so they wouldn't fall on the person doing the cutting, clipping things above my head....

The tree -- and the bush tangled up with it, which we also trimmed back -- fought back, launching clouds of pollen into our hair and faces, having new branches spring out to slap us as the cut branches were pulled out of the way, and generally being recalcitrant in all the ways that plantlife can. Jester the squirrel came skittering down from the treetop at one point when neither of us was on the ladder, but he, at least, was too traumatized to offer battle. With a panicked cry of, "My tree! My tree! What are you doing to my tree!" he slipped past us and vanished into the bushes. 

I've never seen such an expression of existential confusion on the face of a rodent before.

Secondborn did amazing work, using the main branch of the tree to stabilize himself while sawing away at the outer branches, explaining his plan for what he was going to if something went wrong, hauling massive branches away once they hit the ground. He had a great time, and got paid for it too; now he's in the bathtub. He says he's glad he was working Core today, instead of doing Arm Day.

I myself had to shampoo my hair twice to get all the Tree Crud out of it, and my shoulders are letting me know that I'm definitely going to feel this in the morning. 

...But by all the gods, it's done.

Writing Busy

So... I lost track of the previous dark fantasy project, as you might have guessed from the world-building stuff I've been posting here. Current project is Horny Superteens, and I'm... seven chapters in? Yeah. It's not smut, exactly, but it could be if I wanted to fill in the more explicit bits. So far I've been fading to black instead.

And yeah, some of that is probably because if I'm writing Horny Superteens I'm not reading the news and getting depressed about the fall of America and the fact that we're not going to have Social Security by the time I can truly retire. The chance to imagine myself as a horny teenage superhero just starting to decide how to build his powers is, well, a wonderful escape from all that. 

The new job remains a profound relief -- the extent to which this is just a much better environment to be working in is hard to overstate, even if yesterday's meeting drained most of my brain of anything resembling thought. But, I mean, that was the new CFO and the Director of Finance wanting to learn more about how our financial workflows were set up, and look at some possibilities for making them more efficient. At Old Job? Gods, I'd never have been allowed anywhere near a meeting like that, and the IT folks who were allowed to talk would have spent the whole time giving them incorrect information. 

I wish I was mistaken, or even bitterly exaggerating, about that. 

I'm not. 

This is SO MUCH BETTER. 

Meanwhile, in my copious spare time, I'm plotting out a possible future book where a necromancer and a mad scientist find themselves in competition over the fresh graves at the local cemetery. So hey, I have a likely future project. 

Secondborn has been doing better at school; I've also bought him some axes, and he's been taking apart some excessively large stumps that we'd brought over to our back yard. I figure, it gets him outside, in the sunlight, and exercising, and even given the cost of a good axe these days it's still cheaper than therapy. I had given him one of my old knives to work out his angst with, but, well...

 

Yeah. He has a lot of angst to work out.

Grappling with Parenthood

Things I have learned from grappling with Secondborn in the kitchen. (It was supposed to be a hug, but no: he's a teenager. Apparently a hug is an invitation to a Sumo-style contest. Kids these days, amirite?)

1. Do not grapple with your son on a tile floor when he's barefoot and you're wearing fuzzy slippers. The claws on those slippers are purely ornamental and do not help you grip the floor as he's sliding you down the hallway.
2. I am apparently still just barely enough taller than he is to lift him off the ground, thus denying him his advantage in traction.
3. He is tall enough to try to slip out of this.
4. Getting the cabinet behind one foot helps, but is not sufficient by itself. 
5. Secondborn has no training in judo, jujitsu, or wrestling, so it is possible to get him into a controlled throw and set him carefully on the ground. 
6. I'm too old for this shit.
   

Having a Moment

Had a rough moment a couple of nights ago. I believe I've mentioned before that two of our married-couple friends (that is to say, two couples) have abruptly moved out of town. The first couple moved away about a month ago, just before the start of school; the second couple finally managed to sell their house, so they finished packing and departed this weekend, while we were away visiting Firstborn for Parent's Weekend at his college. 

I found myself awake in the middle of the night, feeling sad. Those two couples were largely responsible for me having any kind of in-person social life these past few years. Three of of them were my camping buddies, and as much as I love the state park where we used to go, the thought of camping there without them is almost as depressing as the thought of never camping there again. 

And I don't know why that was suddenly hitting me that hard, right then, though I suspect there were some extenuating circumstances: the trip up for parent's weekend, and the afternoon we spent at the renaissance faire. The trip up was always going to involve some complications, and I knew that going in, so I was coming into it with this weird combination of anticipation and resignation. We're staying in a hotel, and I didn't bring the CPAP machine -- which is okay, but not ideal. I can sleep without it, I just don't sleep as well and I need to keep my head tilted in a way that hotel pillows don't always want to cooperate with. My father -- Firstborn's grandfather -- and his wife wanted to come up as well, which meant bringing her brother along. (Her brother is living with them owing to a pretty comprehensive lack of any other options.) So that meant trying to coordinate with them (best case) and trying to wrangle them so everybody got where they needed to be (much more often the case). 

Beautiful Wife had spotted an advertisement for a local renaissance festival, and we decided to eschew the on-campus activities on Sunday and go try it out. This turned out to be a great decision, in that the event was quite a lot of fun despite being in its first year and still getting its feet under it. That did mean getting a bit more sun than I'm used to, though, which frequently knocks me for a loop. And, of course, before we left for the faire we took the time to figure out why Firstborn's car refused to start. 

Turned out the battery was dead, so completely dead that it wouldn't even unlock the doors when we hit the key fob. We were able to jump it, so it wasn't a completely loss, and I moved the car around to a spot where we'd be better able to park beside it if we needed to jump it again. Which seemed likely, seeing as I was unable to get it to start a second time. So we got back from the renfaire and dropped Firstborn off at his dorm (he had homework to finish for Monday), and then had dinner and went back to the hotel room to collapse... but, y'know, with the awareness that we were still going to have to deal with the car before we could head out in the morning. And honestly, a really happy afternoon with a lot of stimulating new things to see? It leaves a kind of emotional hangover.

All of which doubtless fed into me waking up at one in the morning, finishing a very good book, and then finding myself profoundly depressed and thinking about absent friends.

In the course of writing this out -- because that helps, strangely; I've always used writing to process things -- I keep reminding myself that it's not like they're lost forever. We're still gaming together online, fer Chrissakes. We can still go camping together, if I can quit burning through my vacation as fast I earn it at work and actually build up some time. It's not like we've lost touch and we're never going to see each other again. 

But damn it, I liked having them in town. I liked getting invited to go see a horror movie, or to come over for swimming and a cookout. I liked being able to just drive up for a weekend around the campfire. I liked playing D&D together in person. So no, it's not the end of the world; but yes, I do get to mourn this.

Back to Work

Okay, I'm officially back to work. Today is likely to be a slow day, except that we have a project this evening that will involve moving a bunch of workflows over from a training environment and getting them going in actual production; Firstborn seems to be well-settled in his new environment; and Secondborn should be ready to go out the door pretty much any minute now. 

I'm starting to get my breath back, but I've mostly been using my creative energies to get some D&D sessions ready to go. So for today... Oh, I haven't listened to this in a while: 

Annnnnd a day off

All right, yesterday was Collapse And Recuperate Day. Today, Beautiful Wife is back to teaching and I have dropped Secondborn, who A) usually rides his bicycle and B) usually doesn't oversleep, off at school. On time, yet. Go, team! 

...I need to set an alarm so I remember to go pick him up. 

I've also remembered the thing that I was going to order for Firstborn, so I'm going to go do that now. After that, I get a cup of tea and start on cleaning the kitchen, beginning with laundry and dishes and followed by... well, more laundry and more dishes, probably. 

Holy shit, we did it, y'all. 

I hope you all go out and have a really excellent day.

Update #2

Hit a point about 4:30 this afternoon where I was just like, "Did we really go all the way up there and get the boy all set up and then come all the way back?" Not, like, denial exactly. It just feels so surreal. 

And, of course, we have cell phones. We can text him. He can text us. In a real pinch, there might even be phonecalls. It's really not at all like it was when I went away to college, and I have to say this is giving me some interesting perspectives on that experience. \

I'm still off work tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be decompressed enough to start with some cleaning; the house isn't desperate yet, but it could sure use some attention. Secondborn stayed with his Nana and biked back and forth to school (pretty much the same way he would have if we'd all been home), and apparently the dog kept coming in to check on him while he was asleep; I am so, so proud of him. He and the dog are both back over here, and I'm trying to figure out how early I can go to bed and still reasonably expect to sleep through the night.

Update to Long Day

 I don't know whether or not this counts as "processing" but I am profoundly exhausted.

Another Long Day

Okay, this one's going up unedited because there's a decent chance that I won't even be awake yet when it posts. Basically: better day, a lot fewer issues, but still very, very long. 

As planned, we popped up and grabbed breakfast at the hotel, then drove over to Firstborn's new dorm, where we were greeted by a pack of upperclassmen who grabbed his stuff out of our vehicles and got it all up to his room. We then managed to get our vehicles removed to an outer parking lot, so other parents could do the same. 

Then we set about trying to get the room into shape, which meant opening all the boxes, sorting out items... and realizing that there were really only three full-sized drawers and one desk drawer in the entire room (not counting the, um, shelf? at the top of the closets). Firstborn's room is built to be a (pretty tight) double and he's occupying it as a single, so it had a good amount of room, but the furnishings were a dresser with three drawers, a desk, and a side-table with another drawer and a storage space underneath -- all three set up as a single desktop underneath the loft bed. (The loft bed looked rickety as hell, but I think it'll hold; it also completely lacked any sort of steps or ladder.) So, we did some creative arranging and Beautiful Wife -- an absolute life-saver -- started making a list of other things that we needed to purchase for his room, starting with shelves and some kind of low cabinet that could hold the microwave. 

By the time we got all that sorted out, it was time to go meet Beautiful Wife's aunt, whom I'll call T, for lunch. You may wonder why we would interrupt the dorm-room setup to go do this when we had only one day to finish; I know I did. As it happens, T is an absolute treasure: delighted to see us, absolutely thrilled to meet Firstborn as a near-adult instead of a kindergartener, and well-connected with the local community. She had some ideas about how to get the medical staples out of the back of Firstborn's head, and was more than willing to accompany him whenever this happened. Plus, the food was really good. 

After that, we headed over to the local Target, which was absolutely swarming with incoming freshmen and their hollow-eyed parents. We went down Beautiful Wife's list, and I found a low cabinet which would fill in the space beside the refrigerator and a matching set of shelves, both of which were intended for garage/workroom/tool storage deployment, so they had sort of a cool warehouse aesthetic, were cheaper than the things intended for room furnishings, and also were much easier to assemble. Beautiful Wife managed, through what I can only consider a effort of pure will, to find a small and completely suitable card table, plus a couple of rugs and some cushions to complete her vision for the room. (I will note for the record here that I did not have a vision for the room; I just wanted to add places to put shit.) We checked out, taking advantage of a New Student Discount that Beautiful Wife knew about (and in the process endeared ourselves to the mother/daughter pair in front of us, who recognized Firstborn because they'd done the tour together and were thrilled to have a 20% discount to justify some extra purchases) then drove back to the campus. 

By then, though, it was time for the Convocation, which... I am bad at describing rituals and ceremonies. They don't do much for me, and I find them tedious. Beautiful Wife, however, tells me that she found it an emotional experience, and that it gave her kind of closure -- like, we were really here, this was really done, Firstborn was really getting started here. So this isn't a knock on the school or the Convocation, it's just One Of Those Me-Things. I will note that the invocation at the end was aggressively non-denominational and as generically religious as anything I've ever seen (while still being effective), enough so that ending it with the much-more culturally specific "Amen" was actually jarring for me. So really, well done on that whole thing.

In theory, after this, we were supposed to make our goodbyes and leave, but... yeah. Furniture. Still in the van, yet. 

So we brought the new purchases up to his room, and I assembled the shelves while Firstborn assembled the cabinet and Beautiful Wife unwrapped and arranged the rest of it. The three-step step-stool (which Firstborn described as a step-step-step-stool) allowed us to pull the broken-down boxes from the back of one of the closets and store them in the luggage space above the closets; it was later positioned to help him get up to his bed. Once we were finished -- amidst a certain amount of fuss over exactly how to arrange everything for the Optimal Dorm Room Experience(tm) -- we had about twenty minutes left before Firstborn was due for an orientation/socializing dinner, and it was definitely time to go. The furniture was arranged, there was at least one poster on the wall, and the room was comfortably his. The microwave fit perfectly atop the cabinet -- I'm still proud of finding something with exactly the measurements we needed to fit it into its little nook beside the refrigerator -- and the work- and play-spaces were arranged to his liking. So we said our goodbyes, Beautiful Wife got some pictures, and I grabbed the Giant Box Of Trash and carried it down to the dumpster. 

I could make some noises about how this was all such a Profound Emotional Experience, but if we're being honest I was too busy doing it to have much in the way of feelings about it. As I may have mentioned earlier, I'll probably do my actual emotional processing in a couple of days, so it's probably a good thing that I don't have to be back at work until Friday. (New Job takes a while to build up vacation time, but they also hand you a week of it the moment you start so as to cover situations exactly like this, because they're not idiots.) 

Then we turned around and drove all the way back home, because as much as it might have been easier to stop halfway and find a place to stay the night, I really wanted to just put a pin in this whole exercise and mark it as Done. 

So... Good day? I think so. Long day? Definitely. Emotional day? Yeah? Kind of? But also definitely, in some areas? I think we left Firstborn in a room that he can be comfortable in and has kind of marked as his own (which is a lot more important and a lot less superficial than it might sound). I think he was feeling a lot better after assembling the cabinet almost completely on his own, too. I know for a goddamned fact that we weren't the only parents in that particular emotional space, because we could see them all around us and also because we were far from the last to leave. 

This was the kind of quest where I really feel like after all that I should be able to level up, but of course I have to take a Long Rest in order for that to happen. So, on that happy note, good night! I hope you're all already sleeping well by now. You'll see this in the morning, or later, and I may even still be asleep when you do. 

Ye Gods, I love my wife.