In my entire adult life (my entire life, really), I’ve never had a job that respected weekends or holidays—federal, religious, or otherwise. If I wasn’t working in newspapers, I was working in restaurants, and neither field acknowledges that standard, time-honored American tradition of not working weekends. My days off have usually been a Monday here, Tuesday there, Friday there, or on very rare occasion, a whopping Tuesday AND Wednesday. In fact, it took me until owning a publication and being four years in to eke out two weekends a month off. Time off for me is kind of like serving in the Army Reserves, two weekends a month, two weeks a year. The Army Reserves is one weekend a month, but you get the point. And, yes, sometimes I have to fight to get those, but it’s a far cry from when the Sun Day first started, and I was working approximately ALWAYS.
You can imagine I treasure the weekends I have off. My staff knows not to call me, my bed gets ready for its unaccustomed burden of me actually sleeping on it, and my wife prepares her lists…her never-ending lists (maybe I would prefer working every weekend).
As I write this, I’m not heading into one of those weekends. Right now, I’m preparing for the Monday production of this edition, and my head is ready to explode under deadline, processing stories that have come in, processing ads that have come in, waiting on stories that haven’t come in, waiting on ads that haven’t come in. I’m not even scratching the surface of what’s actually going on, and I’m mostly grumpy about it all. Not to mention, I dropped my camera while on assignment this morning (the first time I’ve EVER dropped my camera) and dented the lens body. But that’s all part of the job, and believe it or not, I relish the feeling and work well under deadline. “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline,” after all, says video game inventor and technology entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell.
Still, give me my weekends any day, and I mean that literally: ANY day. In truth, I hate actual weekends—Saturdays and Sundays—despite what I said a few paragraphs ago. I just want the days off, freedom without consequence.
I don’t like weekends because if anything goes wrong, you have to wait until Monday to start fixing it. In fact, I don’t even go the mailbox Friday or Saturday (especially Friday) because I don’t want the outside world blowing up my time off, which is exactly what happened to me two weekends ago, which turned out to be a very unlucky weekend in deed.
Here are the bullet points. This happened all in the span of two days:
– My dog’s ongoing bladder infection worsened
This is another story for another Happy Trails, but in brief, I was in the middle of mowing my lawn (and like main character Detective Marty Hart on HBO’s True Detective tells his partner Rust one afternoon, “I like mowing my lawn.”), racing against an impending storm, when I had to run to the vet to pick up another round of antibiotics after we thought our dog was starting to kick an infection she’s been battling since November. - My dishwasher broke (with a full load, of course)
This at least turned out to be an easy fix. The problem lasted a week, but it was an easy fix, determination and a couple plastic dinner knives could handle. - One of my credit card’s info was stolen, and someone racked up almost $5,000 of charges through about two dozen transactions in less than six hours.
I couldn’t do this legitimately if I tried. And of course, we discovered something was amiss with this card, when I tried to pay for the antibiotics at the vet, and the card was declined. Always an awkward moment. - Someone vandalized the front door of the building of the condo I own, and the management company wants to charge back the repairs to the homeowners.
We all know who did it. Enough said on that note. - The bank who holds my mortgage on my house decided to increase my monthly payment by nearly $300 dollars to cover a $63.00 monthly increase in my property taxes and a $7 monthly increase in my home owners insurance (if that makes any sense at all).
This one is a buyer-beware story I’m planning for another edition, but let me tell you that I went from zero to enraged in less than two seconds, when I found out the reason … on Monday, of course.
