There Are Some Days You Wished Never Happened

As the title says - there are truly some days that just should not happen and today was one of them.  It has just been a crazy out of control day in which nothing seemed to go right.

The first wonderful event happened very early this morning when I open my work e-mail for the day.  I had only two new e-mails in my inbox since last night at 11:00PM.  Unfortunate they were both titled "Brazil".  Ugh...  Yeah I am going to have to spend some time in Brazil.  I am not exactly sure of when and how long, but needless to say it will make my life interesting.  It has been 2.5 years since I had to travel outside of the country for work.  The last time I did so was in February of 2009 when I had to spend a week in Glasgow, Scotland.  No disrespect to Brazil, but spending a week in Glasgow is a much nicer proposition to me than Brazil.

I will be heading to Brazil because we have a very large project that goes live on August 1.  Due to the size and complexity of the engagement our leadership team is expecting problems.  As a result they are already getting ready for who will be going to Brazil to help sort out the mess.  I will be taking a lead role in that effort unfortunately.  Given the amount of time it is going to take me to acquire a Brazilian work visa it will probably be a while until I am actually on the ground in Brazil - which will give me plenty of time to line up care for Zack and the puppies.

That wasn't the greatest news, but the next activity in the day got things really sliding down the "crapastic" slope!  Nancy had a doctor's appointment at 9:30AM and she was not feeling up to driving because she has been experiencing dizziness.  So I had to take her.  They got her in to see the doctor pretty much on time, but she was back in the office forever!  Finally Daphne the nurse and Nancy's doctor Kendall came out and got me.  Nancy takes a drug called warfarin which thins her blood and significantly increases the clotting time.  The clotting time for Nancy's blood was off the charts which meant she had way too much warfarin in her system.  But because of the dizziness, Kendall was very concerned that she could have had a minor bleed in her brain.  So we were off to get Nancy and MRI to see what was going on in her head.

Due to the situation with insurance we had to go to a Sally Jobe Inivision center in Englewood to get the MRI.  It took loads and loads of time for all this to take place and then we had to wait for the center to call Nancy's doctor back.  By the time everything was all said and done, it was 1:00PM and Nancy got a clean bill of health.  (She has had this dizziness problem for almost 2 years and it seems to be more a situation with her inner ear than her head.)

One good thing about this incident is it forced a more thorough discussion of assisted living for Nancy.  This is something we have been talking about for 4 months and as much as I hate for Nancy to go to an assisted living place, I don't see what alternative we are coming down to.  It is becoming increasingly harder for her to do all the stuff she needs to do for herself.  She doesn't want to talk about so getting the conversation going and sustained to really get her moving towards it is like pulling teeth, but I don't see what choice we have.

The next craptastic event occurred when I got Zack from his camp.  He got himself into a peck of trouble today by not listening to his group leader.  He kept on acting like a goof/clown to make the other kids laugh so I got to hear about it.  Needless to say, Zack is the one who is paying a heavy price in terms of loss of privileges for today and for the foreseeable future.  He will get a break on his birthday but that is about it.  He has been doing so well with so many things this summer so this is the real first problem we have had all summer.  Nevertheless, I am not going to let up on him.  I am going to keep holding him to higher and higher levels of responsibility - heck he is turning 13 in 6 days!!

Finally things are now calm.  Zack and I went out and ran a bunch of errands early this evening.  I am getting ready to paint the wall in the basement in which my entertainment center is going so we went to Home Depot for some painting supplies, Barnes and Noble for a book Zack needs to read for school and then we picked up some Subway for dinner.  Given that Zack has lost all his privileges he is now sitting here in my office on my big overstuffed chair reading his school book.  (That's the only book I will allow him to read since he lost his privileges.

It is only 4 more days until we leave for vacation!!

Thanks and peace to all! ~J.