Heroism

Yesterday… could have been different, had I looked at it differently. Work was not great, and I felt pretty depressed, overall. I had gotten to work a half an hour late, so I left a half an hour late. Megan had gone to work early, so I figured she would be home early. When I left, though, I turned on my phone, and there was a message from her asking me to call her. I did, and she asked me to come pick her up, since Jim had dropped her off that morning, and she had to work late on an urgent project. She suggested that she would be done when I got there, and we could go get dinner somewhere. While part of me wanted nothing more than to just go home and play Skyrim, another part of me remembered that the last time Megan had worked late like this, she had called about how she was scared to wait for the train when it was dark, and I didn’t want to make her do that, so I consented. I drove to her work, which is a little longer than driving home. When I got there, she was not ready, so I found somewhere to park and met her in the lobby of her building, got signed in, and sat with her while she finished working. I listened to the remainder of the chapter of the audiobook I had been listening to on the drive, looked at facebook for a while, and then read a book on the kindle app on my phone. It took a bit longer than she had expected, but she did eventually finish. It was about 8:30 by then, so we headed home after that. We ordered Five Guys on the way home, and picked it up, and then went the rest of the way home and ate. I had a headache, which was helped a bit by eating. We pretty much just did that and went to bed. I could have viewed that as a wasted opportunity… since I would have enjoyed playing my game, and doing heroic things there. Instead, I choose to view it as doing something heroic in real life. I doubt Megan really would have faced much danger, but just the same, I got to come in and rescue her. I still got to play Skyrim a bit this morning, and accomplished some things that were cool. I got in a bit late. I need to watch my departure time a bit more. As it stands, I guess I will just stay late to make up the time. I have credit time, but it is probably for the best if I don’t use it. We finally booked tickets for our trip to Florida around Christmas time. Megan wanted a longer trip, but also has more leave than I do, so we are doing like last year, where she will be there earlier than I am, so I don’t have to use up as much leave, and she still gets to spend a good amount of time with her parents. I was willing to use up the leave that it would have taken to go for the longer trip, but I tried to explain to her that it would mean we would have to wait longer to take another vacation after that, and it seemed to have gotten through to her fairly well, because she has been itching to take a vacation again. This year’s events sort of precluded that, since my sister came from Egypt and Matt and Ryan got married, both of which took up extra leave for me. Still, I have enough built up that, hopefully, I will be able to get a decent start at the beginning of the year, and we will be able to do something this next year. Megan also mentioned that it might be important to have a leave buffer built up if we should have kids, since, while we are allowed to take leave for that, including a certain amount of leave without pay, you still have to have that leave to take. Granted, we have previously talked about my maybe becoming a stay-at-home dad, but I guess we haven’t fully decided that… any more than we have fully decided whether to have kids. Just the same, it’s always good to have a buffer of available leave, for a variety of reasons… and I think we are doing fairly well in building that back up with this plan… while still giving Megan’s parents what they want. Personally, I’m not that tied to going to Florida every year, or really doing anything for Christmas at all, but I know it means a lot to Megan’s parents, and by extension, is important to her, as well, since she wants to make them happy. I’m glad that our plans are at least set now, since it means we won’t have to keep thinking about it. I’ll get a couple of days of alone time before that time with Megan’s parents, which will also be a bit nice. I guess we should consider gifts, since Megan is resolved to try to make a bunch of them… so we might need some extra time.