Under Siege

My writing schedule called for me to make a blog post last Thursday. But on Wednesday, while I was preparing to teach a noon-hour brown bag class on a computer program for hydrology studies, the chairman of the board came to see me and said they would need my help on a certain project. It was to be advertised in the paper on Sunday, but he was concerned certain things were not being done correctly. He was mostly concerned about the drainage design and whether the calculations had been done correctly. I was able to go through the drainage report Wednesday after the class, but there was much more to do to check the drawings and specifications to see if they were in good shape. So I cleared my day Thursday to hit it hard.

On Thursday, I learned that the project was far along, but no engineer had yet looked at it, except for the drainage report. Thus began a two-day siege of intense quality control checking of the project on my part. I won't go into details, but it included work all evening Thursday at home. I got to bed about 1:30 AM on Friday, then was up at normal time on Friday and to work at 7:00 AM to continue. I completed what I could by 4:00 PM, and gave it to the design team in bits and pieces during the day. They had three people working on the drawings and one (an admin assistant) working on the specs.

It's good to work hard, but that was more taxing than it was when I was a younger man. I was exhausted by Friday evening, and did next to nothing. Well, that's not true. I did some crossword puzzles and watched the 9-11 programs on the History Channel. They had some excellent programs, of footage I hadn't seen and of people and situations I hadn't heard of. Saturday I did the usual work around the yard, and some work with Lynda on stock trading, but otherwise did nothing but study to teach adult life group this morning at church.

I tried to take a nap early this afternoon, but made the mistake of turning on the television and watching the Dallas Cowboys not do so well against Tampa Bay. So got up, came to the computer, finished my latest article at Suite101.com, and played a bunch of mind-numbing computer games. Then came here.

The siege will continue Monday morning, as I left the specs with about eight items to be resolved that I should look at some more. But right now I'm going upstairs to read. I haven't read for pleasure in about a week, and it's time to. Hopefully I'll have a more meaningful post tomorrow or the next day.