Being Non-Productive

I had plans for the weekend. I have approximately 40 poetry books to grade. Know how many I've touched? One. I was going to clear the living room and get the furniture ready to paint. Know how much of that I got done? Nada. I did get Monster #2 moved into his newly renovated room, and I completed around eight loads of laundry.

So what got in the way? Life.

Saturday morning, 4:46. Phone rings. It's my mom, telling me my dad, who runs a local morning paper route, had had a wreck (he'd hit a cow, in Mama's new car). She was on her way, but I was closer. I toss on clothes, jump in the truck, run out the rural highway, not nearly as fast as I'd like to, because, well, there could be more than one cow.

I knew Daddy was talking and said he was okay, but at the same time, I wasn't prepared for my first glimpse of Mama's Alero either. The hood was crumpled, the windshield smashed and twisted inward, the roof was dimpled and crinkled. When Daddy hit the cow, after dodging 5-6 others, it went over the roof of the car. Daddy could easily have been killed.

He has one scratch. One. On his hand.

He was irritable because I was fussing over him, and of course, his first worry was that his customers wouldn't receive their papers on time. Mama's car is totaled. But it could have been so much worse.

I did manage after that to do laundry and move Monster #2 into his room. Today, I had a three-hundred-mile round trip to do, driving the DH and a friend of his to pick up new trucks. Six hours or so on the road. Didn't get any poetry books graded.

So . . . tomorrow I have to be productive.

But there are only five more days of school! Whoo-hoo!