This was definately “one of those weeks”. It all started innocently enough, a great weekend where the three of us just had fun, drove around, went for a nice long walk, and generally did very little of consequence. It was a pretty perfect three day weekend. It wouldn't last of course.
After three days without having to go to day care, Kaylin was pretty much sure that silly experiment was over. Imagine her surprise on Monday when after having a fun breakfast and playing for an hour or so with daddy, he took her out to his car, strapped her in the fancy new car seat, and they headed over to the dreaded place which shall not be named.
As soon as we arrived in the parking lot, she started crying. The face skrunched, the tears welled, and the bawling began. She and I sat down in the grass outside and I talked to her, telling her that mommy and daddy would be seeing her again really soon, and that we'd play lots when daddy got home.
Of course I'm a big fat liar, because daddy didn't make it home until well after she had gone back to bed…but mommy had fun with her.
When I got in to work, my boss sat me down to tell me about an accident a co-worker had. My friend, and TSN.ca's graphic designer, Liam managed to really mangle himself up, and had spent the last four days in the hospital having a series of surgeries to fix a litany of injuries. He broke his hip, fractured his pelvis, smashed an elbow, and broke his nose. Needless to say he is in quite a bit of pain.
I got in touch with him, and we chatted for a while, but he didn't sound great, and considering he was just 48 hours removed from some pretty big surgery, it's no wonder why.
I don't remember much of Tuesday or Wednesday, other than they were more of the same. A lot of work, driving Kaylin to the day care, and a trip or two to the gym.
Thursday was another day at day care, but Kaylin and I had a lot of fun in the morning. We played, sang, danced, brushed our teeth, and practiced being bears. Around noon, another work friend, Loc and I headed down to do some work for Off The Record, and planned on visiting Liam on our way back to work. What should have been an hour at OTR turned into a two and a half hour ordeal involving showing up at the wrong building, and then driving even further into the heart of downtown, then when I got there the software I needed wasn't installed, and the IT guy who could do it wasn't returning my calls (oh, and the media he left was blank). All in all, a useless trip.
We dropped by the hospital next and took Liam out for his first walk outside, which was pretty cool (by walk I mean we wallked, he got pushed in a wheelchair). He's definately in rough shape, but he's getting better every day. Just the difference between the conversation we had on Tuesday, and his state of mind on Thursday was literally night and day, and I'm totally confident that he's going to be golden, which isn't to say that he doesn't have a lot of work ahead of him, but he's totally got the will to get better, and that's a huge thing.
Friday though was the worst of it. First, Kaylin and I had fun, but the morning felt rushed. I had a 10:30 am meeting to get to, and I wanted to make sure we could take our time at the school. We were bears for a while, we played cars, and we brushed our teeth (and I taught her how to spit after brushing, which was fun).
At work there were a ton of things to do, and seemingly no time to do them in. To make matters worse, I couldn't find the necessary files to get certain things done, and I had to do a ton of stuff from scratch (and things kept coming in that had to be done “right away”).
We finally managed to launch the stuff that needed to be launched, not exactly as I wanted to, and not always looking the way I wanted it to look, but we can tweak on Monday.
Then as I was leaving (around quarter after 7), I was given the icing on the cake. After having a record year, wherein we nearly doubled our profits…I got a massive 2.5% increase! My staff nearly doubled (from 3 to soon 5), my responsibilities doubled, and I'm a “key member of the team”, and I get 2.5%, which unless I'm mistaken wasn't even on par with inflation last year.
What a week.