Cross Country Ski Weekend

Fifteen years ago, the last weekend of January used to be a weekend that I feared.

I worked for a financial services company, in the I.T. department.  Our team supported the field agent compensation system.  Every Friday night, our programs calculated and payed commissions to thousands of people across the country.  Each week, one member of our team was "on-call" in case anything went wrong with the system.  If a program had an error, or data was incorrect, one of us would get a phone call in the middle of the night and we would need to get things fixed by morning.  I hated being on-call, but I worked with some pretty amazing people, who I knew were just a phone call away.  They could walk me through anything I couldn't figure out myself.

But on the last weekend of January, two of those amazing people, the two most important and helpful people, were not available.  Those two women would be in the north woods of Minnesota, in a cabin, and unreachable.  (Seems weird that there was a time when people could be unreachable....but this was before everyone had the internet in their pocket.)  They had an annual "girls only" trip to cross country ski, play cards, and relax.

I dreaded that weekend like no other, and I tried very hard to adjust the schedule so that my on-call week for the month did not fall on those days.

Several years later, my wife became very close friends with those two co-workers of mine.  In fact, they would be her co-workers too after she took a job at the same company...in the same I.T. department.  I had transferred to another area of the department and no longer had those stressful Friday night pay period runs.  But when my wife was invited to come along on the ski weekend, and I was left home alone with two toddlers....it was just as scary!  Who would feed us?  Or bath us?  Or make sure we went to bed on time?

So here we are, several years later again, and my wife just left for the ski weekend in northern Minnesota.  And you know what?  I'm not scared.

Not even a little nervous.

Sure, I'll get a little lonely, and we'll miss her.  But we'll also be ok.

Last year, we had a "camp out" in the living room.  The two kids, the dog, and I slept in out sleeping bags, and stayed up late watching movies.

Other years, we've attempted secret projects (like recovering the kitchen chairs) with varying levels of success while she was away.

We don't have anything planned for this weekend....just relaxing at home.

I hope my wife, and those friends of ours have a great time skiing and hanging out in the north woods all weekend.  I've got things covered here.