The Time Sink

Hey, there! Well, the sun came out yesterday around noon and hung around until nightfall (well, -duh; but you know what I mean). That pretty much broke the weather pattern we've had. Now it's time to see if it can stay that way for a while; we could use a break from the denser fog, what with all the Christmas activities coming up and all the people on the roads!

...and we'll be on them a bit this week also: we have my company's Christmas get together tomorrow and Brad's recital on Wednesday. ...and somewhere in there we're going to just spend an evening driving around looking at Christmas lights.

Hmm... Monday? Today will be Monday, Part II. Let's just put it this way: the staff at the closest Office Depot was laughing (with me) by my third trip in to handle an 'emergency' yesterday.

...time for a quiet moment of reflection on how the decades have passed in one segment of my life: In 1975 a couple of guys who really thought they could do a better job (both with clients and with employees) than the place they worked for split off and formed their own firm in the rather limited and competitive field of prehospital care. When I left the fire service to join them in 1978 I was something like the thirteeth employee hired overall. We had maybe five or six rigs...

In 1984 they proved the wisdom of their choice of how to handle patients and employees when we bought out the assets of the firm they left, this not long after entering a joint venture with that still larger firm to engage in an exclusive contract in our county. I'm recalling we had maybe twenty rigs and just over one-hundred employees around then?

(Sidenote: Shelley started to work for us in 1983; so yes, we met while working ambulance together. We married in 1990, and I left scheduled field work that year.)

Last night the "mom & pop" I still work for held it's annual Christmas party. Nearly four hundred people showed up. Considering less than half of the attendees were spouses or SO's, and considering we still had full staffing in our county and the county to the south, and even further the number of people who had children's school events to attend (we lucked out this year), I'm thinking I made a pretty good decision way back when...

Winding down... Oh, yeah. Tonight neither of the guys had homework. ...and even though Shelley had had a really long day, she and Brad frosted cupcakes for school events Friday. ...and I took it easy and caught up on a bit of reading (I'm not allowed near cupcakes <g>).

We took the night off tonight. Yep, the entire family... The boys were done in by too many parties (and too much sugar) at school; Shelley was done in by baking for those parties; and I was just done in from the week.

We were planning to drive around to look at Christmas lights, but dinner ended up out rather than in. ...and by the time we were finished the fog had settled in thick enough to make driving a bit hazardous.

...but the dinner turned out to be wonderful (and Brad discovered cannelloni with sausage thanks to trying some of mine), and all in all the evening was a nice wind down from the week.

The weekend? Hmmm... Maybe the short version: get up, take pictures in the fog, make coffee, deliver Angel Tree gifts (prison ministry thing), pick up gift certificates crosstown, visit sister (take pictures)(Squirrel pictures!), go out for an afternoon meal/breakfast, back home, take pictures, stand by to go out to see Christmas lights, get that shut down when the fog closes back in, look at the clock to discover the day, evening and most of the night are gone. WT???

Well, today wasn't quite as hectic as Saturday, but it had its moments <g>... We did finally manage to get out this evening and check out some of the Christmas lights in the area; we've had to pull aborts for the last several days because of the fog.

...and the house is presentable for out of state visitors and sundry others who may drop by over the next few weeks. Of course, that means I'm now unable to find some of the parts I'll need to do some upgrading to a couple machines around here, but hey, that's normal this time of year!

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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