Soon after the summer, however, is an even bigger deal; Ethan starts first grade! From 8 am until 2 PM every day I'll have time to work on this: writing, documentary film, fund raising. I can't believe the time is fast approaching, but I also have a hard time not getting torqued on days like yesterday.  Nothing worked the way I wanted yesterday. I realized I had booked airline tickets to bring the boys to see my parents for the wrong departure date. I kept thinking we'll be there for five days, forgetting that coming from the West Coast means accounting for a day totally wasted travelling. Then I realized a field mixer I purchased f-- or mixing the sound from multiple microphones into one source of audio going into my video camera -- sucks. It just outright sucks. Now I either need to spend more money, or figure something else out. I don't know.

Then by the end of the day came around I realized I had not written a single word for Virtually Real. Nothing. I have to put it into perspective, though, since I spent the two hours I was going to use to write speaking to a fellow Cornell grad three years my junior. He happens to not only understand the space I'm writing about in the project, but also is involved in documentary film production, on top of venture capital funding. I have to put all of that in perspective, but I REALLY wanted to have my second draft of this whole thing done before leaving for my 20th Cornell reunion on Thursday.

No such luck. Looks like it'll be slipping by a week, unless I can get an appreciable amount of writing done on the plane, which, realistically, I won't since the phase of the rewrite where I am right now requires being in front of my video editing workstation so I can transcribe scenes out of the interviews I've done. *sigh*

So with all of this going on just yesterday, when I picked the boys up from school -- the youngest was in the after-school program from 11:30 until 2 -- I was quite short-tempered. I had a REALLY hard time being in the moment and remembering they didn't care about what I was going thorugh, and they didn't need to know. The both of them had had a really great day at school, and I was about to be bringing them down -- hard -- because MY day hadn't gone the way I had wanted.

For the first time in a while, though, I finally caught myself before taking my shitty day out on them. One of the friends of my oldest son came home with us. They all had snacks. They all ran around. We went up town. We all got haircuts (except for my son's friend), and they all goofed around while I stopped off at the bank and Radio Shack. I watched them having a great time, laughing and chasing each other, and smiled. After where I had been in my head only an hour before I was smiling. Will miracles ever cease?

I wish that I could do this every time that these kind of days arise, but I am not there yet. I must say, though, on the days when I have more time to wrangle and wrestle with the hurdles I'm presented in trying to self-produce a book and film, those days I find easier to adjust to the kids. When I've had nothing but time for myself from 8:30 AM until 2 PM I can more easily step back and remind myself that "I've had the luxury of that time to myself" since this phase of my vocational path is not making me or our family a dime. It's the days when I have to pick the youngest up from school at 11:30 AM, when I've barely had time to go home and clean up the kitchen after breakfast, and pick up the rubble left from the boys just being, when I most usually remain pissy for much longer than I need to.

Those times are rapidly coming to a close, from both the standpoint of practical application, and learning how to control it.