A Whole Lot of Nothing

Dearest Rachel –

Standing out in the parking lot, waiting for the parents to arrive on a Wednesday evening, listening to the chorus of cicadas in the hot summer air, I feel like I should be telling you about my day – or at least starting in on the story, as things are about to get busy here as we dismiss the kids for another day. I’d been out and about for the entirety of the day – more than ten hours of doing one thing or another – and that doesn’t include the time spent at the gym in the morning (since I came home after that to wash up and eat). It’s been a busier day than I can remember having in a very long time; you’d think I’d have so much to talk to you about.

But the more I think about how I’ve spent the day – when I break it down into its component pieces – the less it feels like there’s anything worth telling you about, the less any of it seems at all interesting. Unusual it may have been, but that doesn’t guarantee an interesting story. It’s a whole lot, on the whole, but when you come down to it, it’s a whole lot of nothing, really.

At the same time, it’s really all I have to tell you about at the moment, so I might as well go forward with it all.

The truly unusual part about it was knowing that I wouldn’t be coming home until well after sundown right from the start. And granted, on a winter’s day, that would be a perfectly ordinary situation, but that’s because the sun gets lazy during the winter, and knocks off work before literally anyone. This close to the solstice is a different story entirely, as it means being out and about until nine or so.

And I realize that there are plenty of people out there putting in late nights and ten- to twelve-hour days on the regular, which gives me that much less reason to say all this about the day. My days in the work farce often tended toward the lower end of that scale, in fact; it’s just that nowadays, being semi-retired and all that, this isn’t the expectation for a given day. But this is how the dance card fills up; you’re needed here, there, and elsewhere, and the next thing you know, it’s already dark and you haven’t been home since morning.

To be sure, the first few hours were much of the usual; putting in some time at the ‘office.’ The only thing odd about that was bringing Mom downstairs to have her sign a form for the lawyers to take care of Dad’s estate – and that more because it was on the computer, in electronic format. That’s the thing about modern technology; physical paper doesn’t have to be involved anymore (although, as anything can be scrubbed from the internet – albeit imperfectly – they will probably make a hard copy of the form on their end, just for the sake of reference).

But I couldn’t stay long, as I’d committed to heading over to church headquarters – and it’s weird to refer to the flagship campus as such; it used to be just “church,” throughout most of our time together, but with the newer and nearer locations, I’m almost never over there anymore – in order to discuss the preparations that need to be made for the upcoming audit. And as with insurance from yesterday, I get that this isn’t a particularly exciting topic to discuss, but it needs to be dealt with. Moreover, there are a few tasks that need to be sorted out before can really even get started on assembling everything for the reviewers – and it took the better part of two hours to establish what those tasks were to be. Hopefully, I can get them taken care of before this time next week, as several of us on the finance team will be on our way to Honduras at various points in the near future.

(Goodness knows how this will work out next year… but I’m getting ahead of myself).

With that meeting wrapped up, I actually had some time at liberty before having to show up at the local campus for VBS, but it would have been a hassle to go all the way past it to stop at home for a few minutes. Besides, I hadn’t been in the area for some time, so I decided to check out a place that I hadn’t been to in a while for a late lunch. Caught the futbol match while doing so (completely inadvertently), so I’ll have that to discuss with Lars later today; granted, he’s a Messi fan, and I tend to support Cinderellas when I’ve no other stake in a game, so we’ll be on opposite sides of the discussion, but whatever.

And I realize you’ve probably no idea what I’m talking about. Don’t worry too much, honey, I don’t have much idea, either; it’s soccer. But Lars is big on “the beautiful game,” and probably would welcome the opportunity to talk about something other than, say, politics. Then again, there’s always my travels…

Anyway, I’m getting off topic, not that there’s a whole lot to add. Once I was done with “lunch” at about four, I decided I might as well head to church. True, the evening wouldn’t start until six, but going home and coming back would take some thirty or forty minutes overall. There was no point in doing that and getting too comfortable at home; that’s when you lose your resolve to do what you’ve committed to. Best to just get there early and wait it out until things start rolling. Odds are, I’ll be doing much the same thing today, too, given how things work between Lars and myself. It’s how things go.

So, yeah; the day was different, sure, but not particularly exciting or interesting. Still, it feels like the sort of thing we would talk about before moving on to philosophy or other musings. So I hope you don’t mind too much.

In any event, I hope you’ll be able to keep an eye on me again today, and wish me well. I’m still going to need it, regardless.