Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Busy week. Began with a visit from my SIL and her 3 boys. They drove over from Idaho to visit with Mrs. Perils’ mother, who lives with us. Space was pretty tight at Chez Perils for those three nights. At least it felt that way, because my nocturnal insomniac ramblings were circumscribed by the bodies strewn around the living room.

My MO - frequently, as it turns out - is if I wake up and can’t get back to sleep in 15 - 20 minutes, I abandon the marital bed, stumble downstairs, fire up the laptop and crash on the couch. This week, however, I was forced to cleave to my pillow for the duration. As a result, I made a lot of progress in Inheritance of Loss, at the expense, I’m sure, of troubling Mrs. Perils’ REM bliss with my page-turnings and light-shinings.

There was further distress midweek because I had to assist a client in terminating an employee I’ve been working with for a year or so. I’d been helping him interview replacements for a few weeks, so I wasn’t completely unprepared, but it was stressful nonetheless because we all liked the employee, and the reason was cumulative dissatisfaction with performance, and not some clear-cut for-cause event like theft or misbehavior. I carried a certain feeling of guilt, as well, because I wondered if I could have done more to make the person better. As it turned out, the person said she thought it might be coming, and that she knew she wasn’t keeping up in those areas, so we avoided some unpleasantness, but it’s still an experience I wouldn’t want to be around all that often.
The rest of the week, including Saturday, was spent furiously training her replacement, and trying to find where lots of mundane stuff was squirreled away around the office.

So, today, I’m on a 6:10 am flight to Atlanta, ultimate destination Milwaukee. I’m on this circuitous itinerary because I wasn’t really paying attention when I was making my reservation through Northwest, and assumed when I saw the 6:20 departure that it was their usual routing through Minneapolis. Only after I had purchased the ticket did I notice that they’d booked me on Delta (with whom they code-share). I didn’t want to pay the change fee plus a substantial fare increase, and I’ll get more FF miles this way, so what the hey.

Another time sink this week was the beginning of March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament. My Buckeyes are a #1 seed in the South region, so I have a big dog in the fight. Plus, this first 4 days is always just delightful mayhem. Starting Thursday morning, it seems like a game starts every 10 minutes or so as 64 teams get winnowed down to 16 by Sunday night.

This year, CBS is offering online live video of most of the games. It’s been free for these first two rounds, so I, along with legions of others, I’m sure, began siphoning off bandwidth from various clients in order to check in on various games.

In just about the most exciting game this year so far, the Buckeyes came from 11 points down to tie Xavier at the buzzer Saturday, and then won the game in overtime to escape what would have been an ignominious early exit from the tournament. So, I’ll be sneaking peeks again this week, although I’ll be in the Central time zone, and the games will be at more reasonable hours.

So, off to the friendly skies. Perhaps I can post from Atlanta.