As Nate said earlier today, it’s a snow day. As a 10-year-old, I would’ve considered that the best possible treat. But when you work on a weekly magazine, you can’t shuffle work from day to day as you can in some places. Deadlines are measured in hours, and not in doses of 24. In our case, most of the magazine goes to press on Wednesday and Thursday nights, trailing into Friday morning. And one of this week’s Friday pages had my name on it, which meant I couldn’t really stay home. Add to that some Web work that I’ve taken on — stuff that was meant to go up online no later than noon, or thereabouts — and my day was no longer my own.
None of this would matter if we were a single-income household, but of course we’re not. My wife’s job is plenty demanding, too, and since she runs a lot of her company’s finances, and today is the last workday of February, nobody would get paid if she didn’t go to the office. So that had to happen, just as sure as I had to hit (some approximation of) my deadlines.
We split the difference: I worked the morning, she got the afternoon, and each of us hoped a nap might occur during our shift. So far, no sleep this afternoon, and in fact that means… I gotta go. Snow’s just about stopped, and we have no driveway, but I’ve still got to (metaphorically) shovel out.