Against the Current

My cortex hurts. A fancy way of saying that my ability to think constructively has been hampered by a series of work and home frustrations. I have spent a lot of time over the past several months staring at a blank word processing screen, paralyzed by my inability to write anything I would find interesting while --edit: not finishing my sentences...

I have also attempted to ameliorate some of the frustration and stress by spreading some kindness – sending an old college classmate a vintage Esterbrook pen from my small collection. Waving that guy in the big ass truck into my lane. Driving slowly through downtown Pittsburgh streets while listening to electronic tango music to calm my nerves against the inevitable road rage.

This past weekend was spent playing referee between J and TA. J had a headache for most of the weekend and made the decision to power through it without taking aspirin, acetaminophen or ibuprofen for the pain. The headache made him impatient and short with TA, which trickled down to me.

The result was the two of us attempting to come to some sort of agreement on an appropriate standard of public behavior in restaurants. I am of the mind that as long as TA is eating the majority of his meal with a fork and/or spoon and is not screaming, crying, throwing food, running around or otherwise acting in a manner that would be disruptive to other dining patrons, then we can give him a bit of leeway in how he sits at the table, as long as he is not attempting to lie down.

J is of the mind that TA should sit up straight until the end of the meal. Which lead to two incidents over the weekend in which TA was chastised by J for slumping and cuddling up to J while we were finishing up our meal. As to the point of this mommy-blog entry: Guess which one of us had to remove TA from the table and deal with the tears?

By Sunday evening I was worn down by J's untreated headache, TA's totally appropriate 2.5 year behavior and refereeing their battle of the wills.

Only to get sucked into another battle of the wills. In this case, the battle being an extended “discussion” over the disaster that was this last development cycle following an official product release. A development cycle which was mostly spend fixing defects in the newly released product. Which could have been avoided with a short cycle of integration and regression testing before release. Which was scrapped in favor of adding new features. And the defects? My fault for not regression testing during the development cycles.