It is done

Which is not to say finished, but at least it's submitted so I can't fuss with it anymore right now. It's been a wild and crazy last couple weeks working on this project for my employer, and the last 48 hours or so have been the worst. My son and I have been working tandem, some 150 miles away from each other, on our end-of-the-year end-of-the-semester projects respectively. So, I've had to field his emails in the middle of the night with his latest draft for my comments (which he doesn't necessarily pay attention to -- he just needs to hear if he's on the right track and seems to think I know), while still trying to stay focused on my own work.

Meanwhile, since I turned in my final draft, and belatedly took the dog outside, it has come to me that I could have dealt better with the last section if I had moved it to an earlier part and checked again the federal regulations that go with the statute. Always these things come literally out of the blue when I am off doing something else. In fact, the first day I really understood the whole statutory scheme, it came to me as I woke up in the morning. Now I'll have to wait to make it look like I made the changes in response to my boss's critique (assuming he ever reads all 37 pages of it, including endnotes).

So, what do I do now to celebrate? I get to finally get cleaned up, run to the bank and the gas station, maybe shovel some snow, and get ready to go to my very first rock concert ever, 130 miles away, with a carload of teenagers, where we will eventually meet my son, who is coming up from college, and will all travel back home late at night. In the morning, I have an ordination to attend out of town, and maybe sometime after that maybe I'll get to BEGIN thinking about Christmas, maybe find a tree, and start shopping if need be. Then, maybe, just maybe, I'll stop long enough to read the ++ABC's latest, which I gather isn't very good, but who knows, maybe he's been busy, too, helping his kid with a Dostoevsky paper.

Then again, maybe what I'll do instead is get my Messiah music and see if I can really make some headway with the Alto runs in "To Us a Child is Born." A lot to tackle for an old person new to singing choral music. My goal is to make enough sound to support the "section" (well, there's only two of us for Christmas Eve!) but not enough to be heard if I get a note wrong. I guess that's pretty crazy (that's me!), so perhaps I'll just try to learn to sing all the right notes (in order, no less) with my electronic keyboard and see what happens at next rehearsal.

At least Mad Priest has already given me my present -- posting my first audio contribution to the mission work of his site. Thanks be to God, and to all a good night (or something to that effect).

Amen.