The past almost-6 months have been crazy in various ways.

Work-wise I as given a project that is like living with a demanding, under-medicated chimp. It could rip your arms off and eat your hands, or just kinda hang out and cuddle, READY HERE WE GO nope, all good.

Life-wise, we’ve had some vacations (LegoLand: We Hope You Like LEGOs All The Time!) ed. note: We do…. and some trips to the ER (on my birthday! for me!)… and some other life-lessons (don’t have a discussion about money the day after you buy expensive stuff).

Societally, I now know the politics of 78% of my kids’ classmate’s parents, and some of them are pretty surprising, if not downright frightening. Lotta people buying bunker supplies already. Not sure if I’m nervous or turned-on.

ANYway, I wanted to say that I’m sorry for not writing more. Between the Project, the Infection, and the Election, my life was all sorts of crazy. I feel like I aged from 38 to 43 in the past 3 months. But as I always try to do, the lessons I’ve picked up have been wonderful.  For example…

1. Quitting Is Not An Option:  Look, sometimes, it sucks. Work. The day. This party. Stain removal from the party. Your kid’s friends. And I want to say F THIS S, and just stop doing what’s not fun and move on with whatever. But I don’t. I wake up, I thank G-d for another day to try to get it right, and I check “Didn’t Kill A Punk Bo-Hatch” off my list.  I can’t quit. I have bills.
2. Quitting Is An Option:  Yes, you can chuck it all and bounce. You can. Your moral level-line likely keeps you from doing so, but yeah, you can escape. My older son quit coach-pitch baseball this season after 6 weeks. 3 of which were rained out.  3 games. 90min practices. And the coach, meh, he’s a great coach for 10 year olds. But not 6-7 year olds, like my son. And my kid’s happier, getting to focus on soccer and football and reading. And I got 8 hours of my week back.
3. Apologetic Assertiveness: I’m not assertive unless what I’m dealing with is Wrong, on a moral, practical, or personally financial sense. I was called “a push-over” at work by somebody on another team, because I didn’t push back on a topic 3 other people had talked to death. When I remarked that any agreement and discussion on the call would have just been expensive noise, seeing as how we’re all being paid to talk instead of work on the problem we all agreed on, I don’t really care what he thinks of me. Then I had to assert myself when asked why so many people were in a particular meeting.
   1. Because the initial invite list was 8 people, and 3 of those people invited 2 other people (14 now), and 3 of those 6 invited 1 other person each (17 now), and 2 of them invited 2 other people (21).  And only 5 of the original 8 are even talking. So this went from a discussion to a weekend party when the parents are gone and everyone heard about it. Why don’t we ask the people who aren’t talking why they’re here?  (Silence)

So, yeah, I don’t dictate attendance, I just make the meeting go.

ANYwho, we’ll come back around to some stuff at some point.

The biggest news is that I’m down 20lbs from the start of the year, and my Flag Football team started the season with a 20-7 romp over the Northshore Vikings. So, things are good.

Thank you for reading. Anything I can write up for ya?