The big day

Wordle 733 3/6

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Yesterday I got the kid up at the usual time for her last day as a second grader. It was raining, so we couldn't bike, and T. actually got her to school, since she had taken the day off and I hadn't. In addition to last-minute packing she worked on that parent advocacy effort.

Work was busy. It was the due date for those big, important documents. Some numbers: yesterday I sent 17 emails, and since the meeting a week ago I sent 52 despite time off in between, when on a normal day I probably send fewer than five. Two meetings yesterday, both unplanned (only one related to the big effort). Yesterday we published three documents to the library and last week three more, two of those as part of the same effort, when the average is probably between 1 and 2 per week.

T. took her mother out for brunch, so I had the house to myself for a bit. During that time I helped the kid pack. T. also picked the kid up from school alone. When they came home, the kid was crying; she had lost a stuffed animal she brought to school, and by being picked up early she missed a martial arts demo that was planned for the afternoon. We had thought after-school care wasn't an option on the last day and hadn't known about a martial arts event, so those are two more communications complaints to add to the very long list, but given that it was scheduled for 4:15 PM we couldn't have made it even if we had known. 

T. and I drove the MIL and the kid to the airport around 3 PM to see them off properly. Then back home. Traffic was terrible but not as bad as it looked, I guess.

After that I put in another hour or so of work. Still had to actually finish those important documents.

After they were out the door and the recipient had acknowledged them, we finally relaxed.

Dinner was a sort of chicken-basil pasta and a cucumber salad. Weird and following no recipe and in hindsight I would have done a few things differently, but on the other hand it was easy and used up some things that would otherwise have gone bad, so it was worth it. 

In hindsight I wish we hadn't scheduled the kid's flight on the same day as the last school day. I'm sure it was cheap, and it saved us from having to find childcare for even one day, but that plus general end-of-school stuff was a hassle. I'm not sure if I could have planned better around the crunch time at work, or kept it from being as bad as it was. The second thing is definitely going to be discussed with my team and management in a "lessons learned" sort of discussion; the first thing is more about personal time management and forecasting.