Friday Friday

As I promised on a comment over at Reb’s Place I will give an accounting of my day Friday. It was a boring day. not much happened. All times mentioned are of course UTC.

00:00 – 02:00 : Brandy had made dinner as usual, and we were eating it as the day began. I think it might have been chicken related. We ate and watched some Jeopardy. And the local news. Not live of course on either. We do have Tivo and all. The news was actually from just an hour or two previously. The Jeopardy we watched was about a month old. Somewhere in the middle of Jeopardy, Brandy’s phone rang, and we paused the TV. Amy had already been put to bed about half an hour earlier. Once Brandy was on the phone and the TV was paused, I was alseep within seconds.

02:00 – 10:00 : And then I was asleep. I woke up twice. One around 3 when I moved from the family room to the bedroom. And again around 7 when Princely woke me up to let me know he really wanted to go out.

10:00 – 11:30 : The alarm to actually wake up went off at 10. I usually hit snooze until 10:30 or 10:40 at this time of year, but this time I accidentally hit the off button instead, and the clock is broken, so I can’t actually reset the alarm to any time other than 10, so I had to actually get up. I was not pleased about that. But I began the morning process, which is basically watching some local news and some BBC news, making sure Brandy is up too (she usually actually gets out of bed first), and then stumbling out of bed to do all the usual normal things like using the bathroom, showering, getting dressed, and of course emailing myself a set of six or seven vital statistics taken on myself each morning for the purpose of later graphing. While I am doing all that, Brandy gets herself ready, makes sure Amy is started getting ready, and then leaves for work. Then I finish wrangling Amy into the car, and we head out.

11:30 – 12:00 : First stop is delivering Amy at summer day camp. She really likes camp. I’m not sure exactly what all they do, but they keep her busy and active, and happy… and those are good things.

12:00 – 12:30 : Work begins at 12 with a daily status meeting. My status today, I intend to work on some documentation I’ve been working on this week and get it finished. Otherwise, I have some meetings and such.

12:30 – 13:00 : Back to my desk after the meeting. I’m never quite ready to go full speed first thing in the morning. I am barely awake. So half an hour for coffee and making my daily check of websites. Some are related to the field of my work, some are not. But it serves the needed purpose of getting me to the point I can actually think.

13:00 – 14:00 : Second meeting of the day. It is actually about how our tech team will be packaging releases in the future. I am not a direct participant, I am there essentially as an FYI, so I keep my knowledge up on things like this.

14:00 – 14:30 : Back to my desk, I start getting the things together I need for the documentation I am supposed to be writing. I get up the application I am documenting. I get the part of the document I’d already finished. I set up a few things I need to do what I need to do.

14:30 – 16:00 : Then I realize some stats I have been trying to do weekly, I had started earlier in the week but not finished. I am trying to on a regular basis gather statistics on some things relevant to our business, and then issue reports on important changes, and start charting trends. So, I put aside the document I am trying to finish today, and instead do all the stats and put out my weekly report.

16:00 – 16:30 : Quick conference call with a client to discuss progress on how they want to proceed with a certain part of their project. I’m on this one as an FYI again.

16:30 – 17:30 : I was supposed to have lunch with someone from work, but at the last minute they got called into something else. So I went out to Atlanta Bread with a book, and read for a bit while I ate my sandwich.

17:30 – 19:30 : After lunch, this was the time to work on my document. And I kept getting started, but never made much progress. I was always getting distracted. I would make a little progress, then stall. The day before I had gotten on a role and written close to eight pages in one shot. This time I had trouble making headway into just a few paragraphs. I had promised that the document would be done and ready to distribute on Monday, so each minute I delayed, meant more work I was going to have over the weekend. Even so, progress was alusive.

19:30 – 20:30 : Then it was time for the weekly sales meeting. Toward the end I got to present some of the stuff I’d been working on earlier in the week with regard to strategies for identifying and dealing with some of our active clients in terms of retaining and upselling them. That was fun.

20:30 – 21:00 : By the time I got back to my desk after that meeting, the day was almost over. Normally, days where I work go until 22. But Amy’s camp closes at 22. That is the after care part of it too. And I am the one with Amy pick up duty most of the time. In no traffic, the drive from work to Amy’s camp would take 15 minutes or so. But at this time of day, there is a two block portion of the route that takes over 20 minutes by itself. Pushing the time to about 30 minutes on a good traffic day, and up to 45 when you are not lucky. So I try to leave work soon after 21, just to be sure I am never late for picking her up. Cause who knows what they do then. I am guessing that they probably chop up all the kids who haven’t been picked up and feed them to the alligators or something. So I must be on time.

21:00 – 22:00 : So, off to get Amy. I got her with about 10 minutes to spare before alligator feeding time, then we rushed home.

22:00 – 23:00 : I had rushed home because earlier in the day, Brandy had emailed to say that her company’s CEO would be on CNBC during the 22-23 hour. So I rushed home and got the Tivo recording. Then Brandy got home. We needed pool supplies, so after Brandy put some things in the oven to start cooking, we all got in the car and headed to the pool store. Which was closed. So we went home.

23:00 – 00:00 : While Brandy finished getting dinner ready, we put the recorded CNBC show (Cramer’s Mad Money) on the TV. Brandy thought he was a nut. He is. But I find him funny. Anyway, we watched the whole show, but Brandy’s CEO was not on it. Turns out he was on 24 hours earlier. The people at Brandy’s company just hadn’t set out the notice saying “everybody tune in tonight!” until everybody had gone home the day before. So everybody missed it. And thus, the day ended.

OK. There is my day. Rebecca had assumed my description of the day would very detailed include an exact timestamp of every time I went to the restroom over the course of the day. I regret to say that I let her down. I’ll have to do that some other time perhaps.