My current travel schedule has me on the road 50% of the time between January 29 and March 6.

My husband has threatened to take a picture of me and hang it on the refrigerator so my son would remember what his mother looked like.

I was not amused.  Not amused at all.

Thankfully, after March 6, it should be over for the year, but between now and then, my calendar reads like the Bataan March of Business Travel.  There are weeks where I will not spend more than 3 consecutive days in a single time zone.  And I am not talking New York City and LA here.  I am talking rural Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa and Idaho.

Oh yes.  Us professional girls.  Life is so very glamorous.

Isn’t he dreamy?

I could try to capture in words just how I felt as I listened to the swearing in ceremony of our 44th President.

I could try to explain that brief soaring of the heart I had during his speech,  that moment of teary-eyed elation that resisted the impulse of my inner cynic to suppress.

I could try to justify why, today of all days, at this very moment in time, I am very proud of my country.

Instead, in honor of the day, I am just going to turn the key on that cynic and just let myself have this moment of optimism and hope.

Tomorrow it’s back to work.

So.

I have several “investment products” in addition to my 401K.  I have a traditional IRA rolled over from my Federal pension program.  I have a Roth IRA.  And I have a tax-deferred annuity.  In a stroke of unintended genius, I closed my brokerage account last February to buy our last car.  I would have lost over 50% of that account in the market crash.  At least now I have a car to show for it.

But I digress.

I called my financial advisor because I wanted to start diverting some of the money that I currently put in my 401K into my Roth account.   We discussed that this was a pretty good idea for all kinds of financial-ese reasons having to do with taxable vs. nontaxable accounts and maxing out your pre-tax benefits, blah, blah, blah.  But we were all in agreement that this was A Good Thing, and I filled out the reams of prerequisite paperwork and everything was in place.  

Or so.

I thought.

Until December when I realized that the money was going, not into the Roth, but into my traditional IRA.

 Okay.  Honest mistake.  I called her up – “No big deal.  I can deduct that one payment anyway. Just get it fixed.  Yes,  the Roth account.  Please change the payment over to that one.  Yes.  Next month?  Okay.”

Soooo.

Imagine my surprise, when I look into my checking account and it looks a bit low.  And I check back through my records, and, lo and behold, instead of changing the payment over, she DOUBLED the amount being taken out.  

IN JANUARY.

POST CHRISTMAS JANUARY.

HIGH HEATING BILL JANUARY.

And now I don’t know where the hell it is going.

Is the doubled amount going into the IRA?

Is half going in the Roth and half in the IRA?

What.  The.  F.

Now.   People.  I am just a lil’ ole middle class kinda person.  With just three investment accounts that she manages.  THREE.

You have a one-in-three chance of getting it right, and she failed TWICE.

And just now, the financial collapse of the free world makes total sense.

Do normal three-year-olds use words like “famished” in perfect context, despite the fact that you know, for a fact that you have not used that word in their presence?

When you ask them to do something, do they say they will do it “eventually”?

Or come out with “That was unexpected…” when they are surprised?

Because, right now, I think my son has a better daily vocabulary than I do and it’s scaring me.

And with that little French-English Pun, I will announce this blog’s participation in National Delurking Day.

I know you’re out there.  Stand up and be counted.

Sometimes the measure of our character lies not in what we accomplish, but in what we survive.

 

Very young children have a notoriously fuzzy line between reality and fantasy.  Just read Piaget’s developmental theory – ages 2 to 7 are the years of “magical thinking”. 

Uh.  Huh.   Apparently Harry did not get the memo and neglected his Piaget.  

There was a general class movement at Harry’s preschool to put all the baby dolls in the refrigerator of the toy kitchen during open play.   The following conversation ensued:

Teacher: You kids had better take those babies out of there.  Don’t you think they are going to get cold in the refrigerator?

Harry-as-ringleader: <eyeroll>  It’s not a REAL refrigerator.  It’s just a wooden refrigerator.

Teacher:  Oh? So it’s not cold?

Harry:  And those aren’t REAL babies.  Those are just TOY babies.   TOY babies don’t get cold in TOY refrigerators.

 

Poor Harry.  

It’s tough to enter your Concrete Stage of development surrounded by such OBVIOUSLY Pre-Operational adults.

I am back in my office after an absence of more than two weeks, and it may as well be the landscape of the moon for all I remember it.

I suppose it is the sign of a good vacation when you can leave your work so completely behind you that when you return you can’t even remember where you stored the pens, let alone what the heck you were supposed to be DOING when you left.   Apparently, I must have anticipated the post-vacation fogbrain I am experiencing, because I keep getting pop-up notices from my calendar that some far more professional and together self managed to set before I left for New York.

Unfortunately my earlier self did not anticipate that my post-vacation self would have no bloody idea what the the heck she was trying to tell herself.  Can you use that many self-references in one sentence?  Hello, Alice, and just when did we fall through that rabbit-hole?

Sigh.

Can someone direct me to the potion on the pillow, please?

Apparently someone thought I was a good girl this year, because I am posting this courtesy of my new baby:

It’s so cute I could just hang it from my rearview mirror.  Now I don’t have to haul around my big(ger) laptop around on business trips or go iPhone-only and have to answer business correspondence on the teeny touch-screen keypad.  My days of lugging the giant “Computer Purse” on and off the airplane are over.

The little keyboard is taking some getting used to, but I can live with that for the fact that this baby doesn’t weigh much more than the bottle of water in my backpack.

Then again, dragging that computer case around was about all the exercise I got anymore.