Let’s hope so.

Things started settling down at the office by Thursday afternoon (in case you hadn’t figured it out, we had what you can euphemistically call an “IT emergency” involving a shift into round-the-clock crisis management mode and contingency planning for a couple of days). I managed to get my regular Friday off (after having logged over 40 hours on the clock by Wednesday afternoon), and though I was “on call” all weekend, the call never came.

On Friday, I got to breathe a bit; or was at least a different kind of busy. Not so much crisis-management as “catching up on life.” I paid some bills (as well as allocated my tax refund to it’s mundane but noble purpose – paying down debt), did some shopping (including getting a new pair of Doc Martens, which I’ve been suffering to break in all weekend), and took my spouse out for a wonderful, amazing, relaxing meal at Ipanema Cafe, a neat little hole-in-the-wall basement establishment downtown that serves amazing vegetarian food for her birthday, which was on Tuesday (and got subsumed into the crisis wrangling last week).

Really, it was the being at work all day well into the evening on Tuesday that threw me the most – I’ve been pretty consumed with trying to get acclimated to the new job and learn everything as quickly as possible since the new year ticked over, and I haven’t exactly been the most available in other aspects of life, which has been the source of a lot of inner turmoil. Getting caught up in a crisis (not of my making) that kept me from doing something nice for Colleen’s birthday (or even seeing that much of her that whole week) hit me hard.

However, I think it’s getting better.

This week coming up looks normal, so far. We might even get some musical adventures in, as some folks we know are trying to get a beginning ukulele group going: I’m jumping in as a slightly-better-than-novice, and this weekend’s shopping adventures involved a stop by the music store to pick up a cute little soprano uke for my lovely wife, who’s expressed an interest in trying it out.

So, yeah, let’s visualize “normal”…I could use some.