All-Nighters

I've done three of them in the past four months, after avoiding them since around my first year of college. The two most recent ones were both in the last week, and both due to work on the house. Last Thursday night, Sam and I were preparing for the installers to come to put in the kitchen cabinets the next day. As of 4:00 Thursday afternoon when we arrived at the house, there were still missing pieces in the floor, holes in the walls, and wallpaper gunk still stuck on various surfaces. In short, the place had been gutted (thanks, Dad!), but the reconstruction had not yet really begun--we had wanted to be prepped earlier in the week, but a long traffic-jam of delays had held us back. We worked until 5:00 a.m. Friday morning, and the place was ready when the installers arrived three hours later. I had never fallen asleep standing up before, but it happened twice that night.

The crazy thing was that in the middle of that evening, I had to slip out to host a little party for my students from last semester (we're hoping to recruit some of them to go to Greece). I literally rushed from the new house to my place, changed clothes, put some cookies on plates, had the students over, and rushed out the minute they left to get back to the house. So many days have been like that lately that I've been losing track of things . . .

Every now and then, there are periods of life that just seem way too crazily busy--periods that you know you'll look back on and think, how did I survive all of that? It's been something of a blur, but Sam said something nice about it--that because so many of the things going on are good ones, he feels like he's really living.