TomFlannery.com

This weather is whipsawing us…..spring is close but seeming more and more like fake news. Getting home last night was a bit of a shit show…..but it ended well. A warm fire and stocked cupboards and a dog happy to see me….so happy in fact that he peed all over the comforter, which delayed bedtime for a bit. Max is my dog’s name. Cute as a button but not much for taking direction, and fully equipped with some serious bladder control issues. Anybody want him?

Sunday evenings are sad and lonely times…..we’re never quite able to forget the panic attacks of yesteryear….dreading the resumption of school days. Either due to the test we didn’t study for, the homework we neglected, or the bully we were hoping to avoid. Even though school is over for us grown-ups, the terrors it inspired remain with us. Forever. Like luggage or an STD.

The promise of sketchy weather always brought out the gambler in us……no need to study for that exam, or to write that graded essay due in first period,  or to plan an alternate route home to avoid said promised beating, with a Sunday nor’easter bearing down on us. No need, even, to pretend we have a fever by placing the warm washcloth on our forehead for 10 minutes before calling Mom up for her diagnosis. Right? All in good time….for tomorrow we rest and snowboard and drink hot chocolate (only on called days do we drink this, not sure why)….confident that one adult or the other will whisper those delightful words into our sleeping ears….”school is cancelled today”.

(“Two hour delay” is possible, but while it’s better than nothing, it’s still a massive letdown. This is the all or nothing section of our lives….)

Of course the promised snow-mageddon rarely happens as expected….and Monday morning bring roads highly passable, indeed often scraped as dry as a Mormon….with sidewalk snow that can be brushed away with a broom. And once again we’re furious at the dumb weatherman. “Vince didn’t say it would be like this…and neither did that annoying little Snedeker…”

The plan for the weekend was to sleep in. And Saturday morning arrives….and you are fully awake at the normal weekday alarm clock hour….desperate to sleep longer not because you need to, but because you can. This repeats itself on Sunday morning, despite your best Saturday evening efforts to make it not so….so come Sunday evening you’re knackered……and in bed early…eager for a repeat that never comes….for somehow Monday mornings don’t work that way at all. The alarm that you didn’t need the last 2 mornings will screech you into semi-consciousness, and you’ll beat on the snooze button 3 or 4 times before the necessity of adulting finally kicks in. Something inside the sleeping brain knows all about Mondays, and wants no part of them.

And then the day itself. If your job is not the life-saving variety, then Mondays are never quite as horrible as advertised, although they sometimes come pretty damn close. People start to care about real work actually being done around Tuesday morning…..and this care level steadily increases until late Thursday, when it plummets dramatically. Fridays count as real work days only in accounting. They exist to move your hours from 32 to 40.

And then you get home…..ram the garage door shut, pour yourself a tall one, and mumble and grunt your way through any conversations until it’s time for bed….which is generally around 9pm…..since that’s when you woke up from your 2 hour nap and decided to make your way from the couch to the bed. There is no better sleep than a Monday sleep…it’s deep and luxurious and no longer encumbered by it being a Sunday. The week has begun, you have once again survived, and will probably live to do it all over again.

In a bit..

–tf