White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Its midnight. You're desperately trying to fall asleep but your mind is going 100 mph and you've got a nasty case of 'restless legs' again. You KNOW you need to get up early because the blissfully dozing figure beside you needs to be at the office early for an 0800 meeting. But there you are ... eyes focusing on the shadows dancing across the ceiling ... morphing, scampering, appearing and vanishing. You start to hear the groans and ticks of the old manor slowly settling into old age. You can even hear the Hounds downstairs rooting about the gate in an attempt to break out of the kennel room. Then a new set of noise starts to fill your consciousness. It's the peculiar voices you hear from time to time that sound like your children crying or calling for you. In a half-hearted attempt to extinguish the angst-bearing audible hallucinations, you saunter off to the bathroom to try and empty your bladder one more time. The voices, they are not going away. Instead, they are starting to coalesce into a clearly discernible cry for help. It's Jacob ... he's still fighting off the fever and my be talking in his sleep. Out of love, concern and just plain good parenting you go in to check on him and find a little shivering figure drenched in sweat. This is the beginning of a really long night.

I end up bringing Jacob into our temporary master bedroom and let him have my side of the bed. Small slice of territory it may be, but he'll do much better snuggling with the Mrs than trying to drive his titanium elbows and knees into my kidneys. I get to sleep on the sofa downstairs since the guest room futon is covered in laundry and not made up for use. It's a restless sleep and I have peculiar dreams of shooting bullets at European thugs holding the family captive. For some reason, they are lead by Bruce Willis and the bullets move really slow through the air. Slow enough for me to dodge but not for the 20 or so 'bad guys'. Except Bruce, he dodges them too and we launch volley after volley at one another. Strange. Soon enough, it's 0600 and the dogs start to whine. They just know. Who needs an alarm clock when you have these guys. I run (read: bumble) up the grand staircase and go to wake up the Mrs. Her pleas for just a few more minutes only buy her five. Jake is more responsive to those requests than the Groggy Mrs MDMHVONPA and wakes of his own accord. I escort him off to the bathroom and we take care of some morning duties. I hear more complaints from the kids room and find that Alexis is also waking up. Good. She will be in a better mood if she wakes by herself. While I take care of the kids and dogs, the Mrs drags her profoundly lethargic form off to the shower. I plop the kids in front of the TV and go off to make their lunches and breakfast. PB&J for lunch, waffles for breakfast. The breakfast meal is shunned as the kids are in no mood to eat. We don't have a lot of time to coerce them into eating so they will just have to go with what we managed to get them to put in their mouths. The will certainly be hungry for lunch.

It's already 0700 and we are loading up 2 little clingy children. The Mrs is not in a good mood either. I guess Jacob made sure she did not get any sleep either. Go figure. On the way to the Turnpike, I hear noise of a backup in the Westbound lanes between WillowGrove (my interchange) and Ft Washington. Some sort of accident. I have enough time to take an alternate route that will bring me to the slip-line that is near the Ft Washington interchange. I can avoid a lot of the backup. Unfortunately, I did not hear all of the broadcast and find that the backup is a damn rubber-necker delay caused by an accident (before 0700!?) in the East-Bound lanes. I still managed to save myself a lot of grief, but my hopes of getting to work exceptionally early are thrown down hard and fast like a cigarette butt behind a catholic school gym as the Sister Superior charges around the corner. As I listen, I find out that a truck hauling goats has jack-knifed and released it's charges out onto the turnpike. All lanes closed as the authorities try to chase down a carts worth of bleating, arrogant, and quite stinky beasts. It would be funny if I did not notice that the truck apparently split in half. This is going to be a mess. The East-bound lanes are backed up from just short of Ft Washington all the way out to the Schuylkill river bridge. This will cause the North bound Blue Route to back up and spill over onto the Schuylkill expressway. It's all bad news for the road-ways today. I get to work by 0745 and notice that the backup has spread to the KOP exit at 0800. As I look now out onto the turnpike, it is a parking lot going east and it's only 0845. Hey, have a nice day, mkay?

UPDATE: Alexis threw up just as the Mrs get's to Day-Care ... twice. Jake must have given her whatever he has been fighting off. Additionally the Mrs is ill too and never made it to the meeting. Just turned around, drove back to the Manor and crawled back into bed after calling her boss to stand in for her. It's going to be an interesting evening.