Gut Check

There's nothing like an emotional roller-coaster ride to start your year out right. A week that began with the warm glow of family in Grandpa and Grandma's house and the anticipation of getting settled in to our new house and new job, and that favored us with a relatively uneventful drive home from Idaho, quickly turned to mush. We got a decent night's rest on Monday, but Tuesday morning dawned way too early in a time zone that's an hour ahead of what we'd become accustom to and so I threw down some coffee and made sure the kids were upright before heading into work. Andrea got Kenrick and Anthony ready for school, hoping to get a nap before going in to pick up some groceries, but the bus didn't come when it was supposed to. So, she scrambled to get Paxton and Anya dressed and took the boys in to school herself. It's only a few miles, no big deal, and there's a small grocery in town, so she stopped off there, but when she got home she realized that her key was still with the house sitter and she'd locked herself out. To make matters worse, she'd left her cell phone in the kitchen in her rush to get the kids to school. So she tried to get in one of the windows. Fortunately, she chose one that I was going to replace anyway. After lunch, she was just putting P & A down for a nap when the phone rang. Kenrick isn't feeling well, could you please come pick him up? Great.

So she calls me on her way home from the school to tell me all this, just when I'm about to call her to tell her that we've just learned that our machine program has been suspended. As in, wrap up the work you've been doing for the last three or six or nine months, forget about the work you were thinking about doing for the next six months and get ready to start looking for a temporary position to keep you busy while we wait for the largest acquisition that Caterpillar has ever made to be finalized and figure out how these overlapping product lines are going to play together. Ah come on! Seriously!?

Then Anthony hit his head on Thursday and came home with a headache and an upset stomach. He seemed to be doing okay by that evening, so no harm done. I spent Thursday and Friday working on wrap-up planning, making sure that a few contractors could get their work finished in the next couple of weeks, and fielding calls from concerned colleagues and various managers offering potential positions. I'm very grateful to be working for a company that has the size to allow so many options and that takes care of it's people the way it does.

We slept in this morning.

Things were looking up today. The boys are both fine, the broken window can be fixed, the house is just going to be a mess for a while, and we'll catch up on our sleep and our exercise eventually. And all is not doom and gloom at work - we're proud of what we've accomplished in so short a time, and although we're all tremendously disappointed that we won't be able see our new machines take shape this year, we're optimistic that we'll be working on shovels again. We understand the business reasons for the decision and are thankful that the direction is to 'suspend' not 'cancel' the program. With challenge and uncertainty comes strength of character. If we have many more weeks like this you'll be able to see our character oozing out of our ears. Only 51 more weeks in the 2011...