Womack Report

This has ended up being a very frustrating week.

I had two unusual tasks for the week.  First, I’ve had a ski trip planned for a couple months now, leaving tonight, getting back next Thursday.  Promises to be a good time.  Peter and Erin did most of the organizing.

My plane actually leaves tonight at 5:30.  I took the whole day off, just so that I wouldn’t have to get in a hurry and could spend the day running errands.

Then, I got serious about Harvard thing.  Needed to fit the GMAT test in.  Went looking for test centers to register, and Eureka! there’s an appointment open near me on the 5th, the day I’d already taken off work!  This was about a month ago.  All worked out pretty cleverly.

This makes for a busy day, mind you.  Four hours of testing in the morning, then three hours of airplane travel, then a few more hours of driving from Denver to Steamboat.  Going to be packed, but, hey, nothing I can’t handle.

Monday this week, T minus three days from leaving, I help Dad reshuffle a few things in his garage.  Picking up a sheet of plywood, my right wrist make this little twang sensation.  Whoops.  Trick wrist acting up again!  Stupidly, I then went shooting with Mom, since she has a new gun, and that aggravated it.  Then, since it still felt fine, I mowed my lawn.  That probably didn’t help.  By the evening, the wrist hurt a lot.  Only when I moved it, granted.  Fortunately, you don’t use your wrist at all working an IT job, or taking a computer-based test, or skiing!  I’ve purchased a wrist brace now.

Then, we got a sudden call that Grandpa was in the hospital.  He had an infection in his elbow that looked scary.  So, went to visit him.  He’s fine; any medical issue is alarming when you’re dealing with an 80-year-old who’s had multiple heart attacks, but they put him on an antibiotic IV, and he responded just fine.

Tuesday was not too bad.  Some issues at work; boss’s laptop is being weird, but I’ve got it fixed.  Wrist was bothering me, but the brace helped enormously, and it improved hugely overnight.  Spend a few hours that night working remotely to update servers and make sure everything’s OK, since I’m going to be out of town for almost a week.

Wednesday is going to be a day for packing and working on the last bits of my application.  Easy living.  Except, right at 4:15 or so, I get a call.  It’s the GMAT testing center.  A transformer blew up, and they can’t administer the test Thursday.  When would I like to reschedule?

This is a problem, of course, since I have a deadline to take that test of January 10 for Harvard’s admissions, and I’ll be flying out to the mountains from the 5th to 10th.  No other testing center in Houston has anything available the 5th.  Some digging produces a center in Austin that has an available slot, and my flight to Denver stops in Austin!  Score!  I reshuffle flights to meet the plane in Austin, and call the testing people to get on the schedule. 

Sorry, in the ten minutes since you last looked, that appointment was taken.

There’s another appointment available, in Beaumont, at 9:00 AM.  Beaumont, Texas is not remotely near either the place I was at, or the place I wanted to be.  But it’s only a two-hour drive from Houston.  Hour and a half with a tail wind.  So, grab that slot.  Call Southwest Airlines again, have them switch my flights back to the original configuration.

So, now I need to do everything I already had planned for Thursday, but with an extra four hours of round-trip driving.  Hooray.  So much for my padding, and my leisurely day for packing.  I instead spend Wednesday night getting everything together so that I can hit the ground running, borrow a few things I need for the trip, and get five hours of sleep.

There are two particularly irritating things about this.  First, I left plenty of error margin in my initial plans for things to go wrong.  I thought this out.  And it worked.  I sit here, in a Fuddrucker’s, half an hour from my airport, with three hours until my plane takes off.  I had to run like a hamster for a while, but it’s looking like things may, in fact, go off without a hitch.  Which is great, but vaguely unsatisfying.  Doesn’t make for a very entertaining story.  “Yeah, all this stuff went wrong.  I was prepared for it, so everything was fine.”  Lacks punch, it does.

The second irritating thing is that I don’t have anyone to blame for all this.  The Pearson testing center people would be very satisfying scapegoats, since it’s their inability to give me the test I booked well in advance that caused the most trouble.  Except, well, a power transformer blew up.  They probably didn’t cause that.  And they went out of their way on my behalf; they could have allowed me to just show up at the testing site that was having problems and be out of luck, but instead they called me up and helped me reschedule.  I’ll admit to being mad at them, but it was irrational.  And the people at Southwest who helped me reschedule my flight…twice…were nothing but polite and helpful, and made that whole process easy, even when it seemed evident from my side of the phone conversation that their system was being squirrely.  I can’t even blame myself, because, hey, I’m pretty awesome, jumped on this issue and surfed it to a solution.  Even my wrist is back to about 90% function; I’m still being cautious, but it doesn’t hurt in normal use.

So there’s no funny story and no useful indignation.  Just fault-tolerant planning and good customer service.  Which isn’t all that entertaining for anyone.

Mom and Dad are out of town this week.  I was supposed to be in my house by now, but that got delayed.  Seller screwed up some paperwork, so I won’t be able to close until the end of the month.

Mom and Dad want to be able to put their house on the market right after they get home, so they asked me to move James’s stuff to a storage unit.  A lot of that stuff was going to go to my house, but we’ve had to switch plans.

I’ve spent a couple hours now moving James’s stuff downstairs and staging it to put it in his truck and take it to the storage place.  And it’s just been an incredibly painful process.  I didn’t expect this. 

I’m not usually a sentimental person.  Lord knows, I don’t give a rip about any of my own stuff.  I’ve always thought it was ridiculous how much junk James has piled up here.  But when I try to touch it, to look at it, to pick it up and move it, it’s like touching his life.  Here’s a bunch of West Point stuff; he spent four years there, with us only seeing him on holidays.  His West Point ring, Class of ’08, is sitting on a box of playing cards.  What can I do with that?  That thing is important.  It should be on his finger, and that finger should be here, where we can see him.

And the ring isn’t the worst of it.  There’s a cardboard box full of magazines and newspapers.  Obvious trash.  Except the first magazine cover is showing Saddam Hussein when he was captured.  And the next one is about soldiers.  And one of the newspapers looks like it’s written in Arabic, and they’re all about Iraq.  Where he served, when he got called up from where we were living together and going to SFA.  They’re all about him, and how can I take that box out of the house and put it in a storage container?

There’s a shaving bag, with his initials.  I have one like it with my initials.  That should be safe.  Razors and toothbrushes.  Except it jingles when I pick it up, so I peek inside.  It has his insignia.  Dozens of little pins from units he’s served in.  Buttons.  Crests.  some patches.  Two little pins that look like a pair of playing cards, ace and jack of spades.  Those mean something.  They’re pieces of his life, his past.

His camera, from high school.  His weirdly eclectic DVD binder.  His collection of beer bottle caps.  All his army books.  Lots of Bibles.  Bibles of various shapes and sizes, different translations.  I mean, I have a bunch of Bibles, too, that family have given as gifts.  But James’s are different.  Literally different, as in didn’t come from the same source.  He bought these himself, or was given them by people outside the family.  Four or five of them.  Eight or nine pairs of shoes.  All his clothes.  A compass that’s gritty with sand; easy guess where that came from.  His diploma.  A long box that I’m pretty sure is a display case for his sword.

It hurts.  I didn’t expect it to hurt, and there’s no good reason for it.  He’s not in trouble.  He’ll be home in less than three weeks.  This should be the easy part.  Heck, I exchanged some emails with him just this week.  It’s not like I’m worried about his safety.  I just want him to be around.  I want to see him.  I want to talk to him.  What I don’t want to do is go and pick up a roomfull of his life and take it to some sterile garage in a U-Haul building.

I’m sitting here weeping, and I absolutely dread going back and working at it again.  It’s ridiculous.  I’m going to keep moving stuff.  I said I would, and I do what I say I will do.  Besides which, if it affects me like this, I can only imagine how painful it would be for Mom and Dad to have to move it.  But I’d rather do just about anything than go back in there right now.

I want my brother to be home.  I want to have my house, so that I can set up a room for him, and put his stuff in there, and give him a key to the door, and then say to him, “Look!  Here is a place for you!  Stay here!  Make this your home!  Come and go when you want, do what you need to do, but always return to us.  You’re my brother, and you’ll always have a home with me.  Things are better when you’re near, I’m better when you’re near.”

I want James home.

I haven’t been good about updating this page for a while.  I’ve been too busy with work.

Work itself is going well.  I think I’ve mostly settled in.  I won’t be saying much more that that; I’ve been asked to keep the company off of my private website, which is fair enough.  That’s also why two previous posts have vanished. 

I primarily use this space as a personal journal anyhow; as far as I know, no one besides me and spam robots reads it on any regular basis.  There’s a valid point to be made that putting my personal thoughts about privileged conersations up in a public medium isn’t a good idea, so I’ll quit that.

Otherwise, things are mostly going well.  House hunting is frustrating.  James will be getting sent to Afghanistan in a few weeks; that’s going to be tough on everyone, but we knew what the score was.  Need to do some more drawing before I forget how.

Had a fire drill in the middle of class.  Irritating.