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February 20, 2008
My February 19
Let's take a look at my yesterday. We'll start at 4 p.m., which is when a meeting between my department and our Administrative Department was supposed to start. The problem with the 4 o'clock start time is that the Engineering Department had the 3 o'clock slot and you know how engineers are; they drone on and on and on.
Well, maybe not.
Anyway, 4 o'clock came, went, and eventually turned into 4:15. I had to pick a child up at 4:30 and while some of you might wonder about the sensibilities involved in leaving a meeting with the bosses thirty minutes into it, let me assure you it would have been OK. As I hoped missing it entirely would be, as that's the route I took. (I hoped the meeting would end up canceled.)
I had the child picked up by 4:30 and had pork chops in the oven at 4:50.
At 5 p.m. I had an Olympic bar on my back and was doing squats. The boys, all three of them, were in the house doing homework.
Dinner was served at 5:50. Dishes were in the dishwasher at 6:15.
At 6:30 I had Haydn back at the school for a play audition.
The younger two boys and I shot back to work where they continued homework while I rebooted the phone system (it has to be done after hours) and did some quick work on a PC (that also had to be done after hours).
While at work I ran into the CEO who asked me about the meeting I missed. He was never peeved about it and, as a father, understood my absence. And he saw me at work after hours, which is always good.
I had Haydn back in the van by 7:30 and we were at Staples minutes later. We had to buy some transfer paper so we could make iron-ons for a shirt he needed for school the next day. (I picked up 50 DVD-Rs for $5.00, after Instant Savings)
Between 8 p.m. and 1:45 a.m Haydn made the iron-ons which we ironed onto a clean, white T-shirt. There were four iron-ons in all and it takes more time to do than you would think.
He also put the finishing touches on a Puerto Rico project; this involved making a short video that he needed to burn to CD. Without going into all the details let me just say that the short-in-length video was 2.1 gigs in size. I sent Haydn to bed at 1:45 and told him I'd take care of the CD (now DVD) burning and started a file transfer to my notebook. Then I went to bed.
This morning I got up just before 7 a.m. and copied the file to DVD. The audio kept dropping out so I listened to the original. It sounded fine. I made another copy which also sounded like crap. I opened some software I owned and converted the file from and .avi to .mpg. It reduced to 25 megs, copied to a CD nicely, and sounded fine.
I got the boys out of bed at 7:45 (a full 45 minutes later than usual) and they repaid my letting them sleep late by getting ready and out the door in record time. Haydn and I tested the CD on the way to school.
All was good.
It is certainly easy to wonder how a child's projects took until 1:45 a.m. to complete. Haydn started being apologetic for the lateness right around 11 p.m. Looking back, well not even looking back, at the time I could see several ways the projects could have been completed faster (too much time on transfer design was one big time suck), but Haydn was having a good time with everything and I admired the attention he was paying to detail. And this has never happened before.
[My favorite quote from last night: "What?! Two point one gigs? How?" Which was an indication to me that Haydn learned the sad truth that just because a video is short in length, it isn't small in size.]
Posted by delmer at February 20, 2008 7:22 PM
Comments
That's what I keep saying, "Short in length doesn't mean small in size." Maybe Haydn will have better luck with it than me.
Posted by: Icy Mt. at February 21, 2008 12:27 PM
Wow. And that you were coherent enough to write about it later... Impressive.
I can handle illnesses. Not sure about after-midnight school projects. Maybe if they don't happen in the same week...
Posted by: heather dugan at February 22, 2008 10:38 PM