A Rough Couple of Weeks

I have not done much more than work for the past two weeks straight. We had visitors from Washington, which left me one day to attend to the usual week's worth of emergencies and redo most of their schedule after something got cancelled. They were OK guys, but it meant being at my desk by 8 a.m. and then picking them up at the hotel by 8:30 to start a full day of meetings and ending with a working dinner that was over by about 10 p.m. They had meetings on Saturday and then I took them to the airport on Easter Sunday.

In the midst of it all, I barely saw my children in clothes other than their pajamas. They were out of school for the week, so I was relieved of having to get them up to start getting ready for school.

I didn't finish my taxes or much of anything else at home. I was so brain dead by the end of the week I was not thinking when I opened the closet door with my older daughter standing there, and she saw the Easter baskets. She realized immediately that there is no Easter bunny, and then we had a long tearful talk about Santa Claus. She is still hanging on to believing in him, and I want to preserve her innocence as long as we can. It is a losing battle of course, but nine is too early for a child to know about people like Cho Seung-Hui and what they are capable of. She already knows that every time we return to the embassy our car is swept for explosives because bad people might put a bomb on it. Whenever we enter the gates, she sees the Russian police outside with their AK-47s.

All this left me with hardly any time to get on line. I found some time to download the Annex update for GoW. I've run into Timmies before on line, but these two "teammates" I wound up with once I got on XBL were the most malicious and abusive couple of ass clowns I've ever played with. I took them to be in their late teens, and they made me so angry with the shit they were saying to me that I couldn't sleep for a couple of hours. I consoled myself by saying they have wonderful future of minimum wages jobs and living in their parents' basements ahead of them.

I did find something to enjoy. We got real, American-made Mountain Dew in our commissary for the first time in three years and a rare shipment of Sam Adams. I've got cases of both them in my man cave, and if I can get the family to go to bed early, I might make a late night of it on XBL.