Friday

Out of bed this morning at 5:45 to shower. Downstairs on the sofa with freshly toasted bagel and this laptop by 6:20. Sparky comes downstairs around 6:30 and cuddles up to me, saying, in response to my greeting, "I threw up all night last night."

Well, only at 1. And twice at 4. And he didn't wake either of his parents up cuz he thought we'd be mad! But he tried to clean up after his mini-mess (don't worry--not going there), somewhat effectively.

Beast arrives in the living room at about 6:45 where the situation is explained. He immediately falls on his sword and says he'll stay home. We know Sparky isn't faking because today is a half-day of school with all of it being movies and other fun stuff. He doesn't have any interest in going. In any case, Beast was taking half a day off work anyway because I have another Cataloging Extravaganza to attend. [I've just realized that I didn't get into that last meeting at all! I'm shocked. Shocked. It was high drama.]

I leave the house (late) at 7:17, arriving at work a few seconds before my boss who is driving to the meeting. We pick up Amy, and head south.

The meeting begins at 10 and devolves (heh heh) into a fiasco by 11. There is shouting, accusation, counteraccusation, eye-rolling--and, to be fair, many attempts from the moderator to steer things back to the subject at hand, all roundly ignored. People with Midwestern high-pitched nasal voices who shouldn't be allowed to speak in public are speaking far too often just behind us. It is mayhem. At noon we break for lunch, having accomplished about 20 minutes of practical work.

There are suggestions of duct tape and big sticks brought to bear for the remainder of the day. The upside is that I haven't worried about Sparky much.

The afternoon improved, at least to the point of getting another 80 minutes' worth of practical work done (in about 3 hours). Who knew librarians could be so incredibly contentious and turf-guarding? Who knew that I could NOT KILL something who is, for 6 straight hours, crying out desperately for martyrdom? Who knew that I would be told at the end not to sit in front at anymore of these meetings?

On the other hand, I'm now part of the subcommittee that gets to wrangle out all the details of the stuff that we couldn't solve with 30 people shouting suggestions (oh, wait, only 3 or 4 were shouting suggestions--it just seemed like 25 voices in the two chairs behind us). Lucky me. At least the Noisemakers aren't on the subcommittee.

We left to find ourselves under cloudy gray skies. In 10 minutes the rain had commenced. Not more than 20 minutes later, it was snowing enough that people had gone off the road in front of us. The trip home took twice as long as the trip down to the meeting, most of the last bit staring into blowing snow against the darkness of two-lane roads.

Sparky is, thankfully, mostly recovered. He ate his first meal of the day at 8:10 p.m. when we sat down to dinner--his was about 3 tablespoons of homemade mac 'n cheese. He's gone to bed now. My eyes are killing me. My head hurts. Dinner is not sitting well. I feel like I've been talking to Headache Woman (at work) for 24 straight hours. Or have a terrible case of altitude sickness combined with jet lag.

I'm sooooo going to bed, to sleep, perchance to dream (about Item Category I coding).