Cheers if you miss daddy!

Pete has been gone for a week, but it feels like a year. When we were first married, he would deploy for 2 months at a time and somehow the time would go by. But this past week has been just brutal.

The day Pete flew out I sat in a meeting with the state & said "sure, I can organize & facilitate an industry workshop where we address a highly contentious and extremely technical issue. I'll facilitate it myself. Next Wednesday? You bet.

So today was next Wednesday, and there were over 40 professional mariners in the room and I think I held my own. But of course I drove home & replayed a million missed opportunities to say the right thing, stun them with my brilliance. I did get one really good laugh, but also a lot of stunned silence. On the plus side, I now know more about tugboat operations, and horsepower, and bollard pull, and crew rotations, and firefighting capabilities than I ever imagined, in my wildest dreams. And you just never know when that kind of information could come in handy.

Like tonight at Emma's Open House. I marched in, head held high, ready to exchange pleasantries with the Principal Who Hates Me Because I Coerced Her Into Switching Emma From The Lame Teacher To the Good One. I actually tried to make eye contact with her, and she ignored me with such purpose, for a minute I thought I was back in high school and she was a popular girl in the cafeteria willing me not to sit at her table. And at first I felt slighted. But then I thought...could it be that the 60-year old woman who runs Emma's school is afraid of me? Or are her people skills just that bad? Neither scenario is particularly comforting. But listening to Emma's teacher tonight was brilliantly comforting, she is just fantastic - so far ahead of the power curve, an inspiring example of all that is good about public education. Switching her was worth making the principal cry.

So Open House was a perfectly complicated ending to a perfectly crazy week. We managed to squeeze in dinner at Friendly's beforehand, and as we sat in the booth waiting for our food, Sofia raised her cup of chocolate milk & said "Cheers if you miss Daddy!" And it was so on point that for just the briefest of moments, I forgot how disappointed I was that there was no rum in my diet coke.