Back in the Saddle

 I've been here, just haven't been particularly inspired - or had the free time - to get here and accomplish anything.

It's been a month.  We celebrated my birthday, my daughter's, our 33rd anniversary, and a few other things.  Last night we went out for dinner with the whole family for my son's birthday, which is still up ahead, calendar wise.

Weather-wise around here we've gone from upper eighties to snow - yeah, that happens this time of year.  Curiously - or perhaps it was just freakish timing, our snowfall was literally on Halloween.  Yeah, I know, I lived through the blizzard we got 32 years ago on Halloween and after.  I had not yet started this writing thing, but we sure as hell got nailed by a heck of a lot of snow.  The history books do a better time of recording the whole process.  I do remember it was a day where, at work - it was a Thursday - I spent in meetings, mostly about benefits and the direction they wanted the company benefits to go.

Mind you, it was damned clear that my employer of the time really wanted us to go in one direction only.  They asked if we wanted better health care - there were quite a few of us younger folks who had started families, or had families, and the health insurance options we had at the time were utterly non-existent.  I mean that.  Seriously.  The company is no longer in existence in the same way, but it's out there, so I'm not going to detail too much - but they were a company that I often think about because I had a heck of a lot of opportunity to learn, grow, and accomplish things.

But I'll put it like this - if you have five options to offer people, four of them are health care plans, and one is a 401k retirement plan, and you tell your people you'll implement one of the five options, what do you think is going to happen?  That's right, the four health insurance plans will split the 75% of the votes for health insurance, and the 401k plan will keep all 25% of those votes.  So when the health plans did not get a majority - and frankly none of the plans did, gee, what do you think is going to happen?

Snowpocalypse.  Yeah, like that.

Seriously, though.  I do recall looking out the window and realizing that the trunk of my company car had accumulated a whopping 4" of snow by about 2 pm.  Yeah, it was kind of messy.  Thursdays stuck in my head because I was the guy who wanted to get in to work early, get done, and go home.  And there I sat, looking out the window, and seeing that it was going to be a bit of a drive home.  I lived less than ten miles from the office, but the major geographical challenge was "the river".  I lived south of the river, where rents were much cheaper because there were at the time a whopping four bridges to get across it.  Furthest west was the Chaska crossing, some 30 miles to the west of where I worked.  There was the at-the-time Eden Prairie bridge, which had been upgraded from the two-lane crossing it had been to a new, much grander bridge.

Side-note.  If you have ever seen the movie Purple Rain with Prince in it, you might recall the scene where Apollonia (I'm sure I'm misspelling it, but you know, the pretty lady costar Prince picked) gets into the water, thinking she has 'baptized herself' in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.  Well, she was actually in the waters of that Minnesota River, which doesn't feed Lake Minnetonka, just flows into the Mississippi.  And they shot that scene next to old 18, a beautiful bit of road that ran through the river bottoms there, and flooded annually.  

The third crossing, working back eastward, was right in front of my then-office - I35-W, the western passage of I35, which starts up in Duluth, Minnesota, and runs all the way south to Texas.  North of the Twin Cities, it splits into two freeways, one running more westward, through Minneapolis, one running on the east side through St. Paul.  It's river crossing is so far north that it's not even one I regularly used, though I did, at times, have to make that big a detour.

On this particular night, though, my normal options were either to cross via 35W or go a few miles over to Cedar Avenue - which runs right next to the Mall of America.  Should really go back through here and stick in some linky bits, but I doubt I will.  Anyway, I remember going out of the office at a little after 5 pm to clear off my car, since I figured it was going to be a darned long time before I drove it.  At 5:45 I went out, started the car, left it running in the parking lot to warm up, and at 6 pm I phoned home.  My wife and I were still pre-cell phone (yes, kids, it was 1991, the dark ages), but I told her "I'm leaving work, I hope to see you soon, it's 6".  She worked in Eden Prairie at the time, and should have been home as she had gotten off work at 4:30, the same time I normally did.  Bad nights, it would take me 20-30 minutes to go those not-quite ten miles, and this was one of those bad nights.  

A little after 8:30 I was able to get off the freeway and pull into the parking lot.  I got a spot right near the door of the apartment building where we lived, my wife had the indoor spot, so I parked the car, and had the brains to park nose-out so I didn't have to back into what ever sort of snow drift I would encounter.  We lived on a ground floor apartment, so I had no stairs to worry about.  The next morning, I woke up at 6 am, did the usual shower and routine, then turned on the TV and ... well, we'd accumulated another foot and a half of snow, by that point.  I woke my wife - I knew her commute was going to be a hell of a lot harder than mine, when the morning TV news announcer said "the state is recommending no travel, as most roads have not been cleared."

Yeah, that was how the weekend started.  I spent a few hours on Friday digging my car out after I'd called into work and left voice mails for my boss, her boss, and changed my greeting to "Sorry, I'm snowed in, I'll be back Monday."  We managed to get dug out enough to go down the block and across the street to the grocery store which is now a school office building, where we picked up a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and a few more items, just in time for blizzard #2 to hit, which dumped another foot or snow on the half-cleared city.  So yeah, it was a lot of shoveling that weekend.

This Halloween saw about 2" of snow - nothing to worry about.  Most of it had melted by the time the trick-or-treating was to start.  Was, or so we thought, having invested some $35 in candy (inflation, ya know), and about the same in a couple of lit, plastic pumpkins.  We got exactly zero trick-or-treaters.  

So other than that, I've been working a lot of hours.  I have not had a 40-hour work week that wasn't due to vacation yet this year.  Makes some nice money, yes, but I never realized just exactly how penalized I got for it.  I figure the percentage of my gross wages I get in "take home pay" each week, and those weeks where I'm over 50 hours, the percentage I keep plunges quite a bit.  

I know, I know.  I'm kvetching about overtime, where a few years ago it was a bad word that I could use to make the managers twitch, because in the retail world, overtime is usually a word that causes them to see their bonuses drop.  Not that I've been a retail manager since early 1991...  Thankfully.  It did keep my family fed and housed when needed, but it's not much of a job where you can stack up accomplishments on a resume.

Which, I hope, I don't need to use any time soon to find another job.  Yes, I keep it updated, but I also work my butt off to stay ahead of everything else.

Other than that, yep, folks, I am here, I'm just not getting much free time.  I get up at 5:20 in the morning, putter a little bit here after I get myself cleaned up, then head upstairs before 6 to feed the puppies and get them outside.  I then feed myself, fill my water mug with ice and water, and by 7:15 I'm upstairs in my "office" where I punch in at 7:30, and I'm there until about 10:30 am, when I take a 15-minute break to get the dogs outside so they do their business there, and not in here on pads - hopefully.  Then back inside, lunch around 1:30, and work until 6:30 or later...  Sometimes as late as 8 pm.  Then I punch out and feed the dogs, feed myself, and a little before 9 pm I get the dogs outside to go around the school parking lot across the street two or three times, then come in, clean up a bit after dinner, and head to bed, where I'm hopefully in bed before 10 pm so I get some sleep before the alarm starts the process again.

I know, I know, that's messed up.  But it is my life.  I bust my butt, and thanks to the laws about privacy and so forth, I can't post anything about the strangeness I see sometimes.  Which keeps me employed, so I got that going for me.  Hopefully before too much more time passes I'll get back here.  Hopefully.