Temporally Challenged Weekend

This past weekend there was some kind of time flux going on around my house.  Both my wife and I got the date and times of a couple of events totally screwed up.  She was very late to a baby shower she initially thought was on Sunday and then came downstairs to make breakfast on Saturday and realized she had 30 minutes to get to the shower which was 45 minutes away.  High adventure followed as she tore around the house and then flew out the door.  Fifteen minutes later I was helping her negotiate with the car’s navigation system over the phone.  On Sunday we were scheduled to go down to Rhode Island for my nephew’s birthday party.  I thought it was at 2pm and we received a call at 1:30 from my sister wondering where we were for the party which began at 1.  I was intensely embarrassed and very angry at myself as we flew down to the party, arriving disastrously late.  We later figured out when I received the invite from my sister I told my wife the party was from 1 “to” 3 and my wife wrote down “2” to 3.  I was still extremely disappointed in myself.  Being on time is something I take a lot of pride in.  I actually feel very anxious and out right angry if I am going to be late for something.  This was something of a challenge early in my marriage because I married a Panamanian gal.  Panama is a beautiful country and the people are some of the nicest I’ve ever met but as a culture they are incapable of being on time.  It’s something that doesn’t seem to bother them.  You can only imagine the clash of priorities when my wife and I first got together.  It came to a head early in our marriage.  We were supposed to go to the battalion commander’s house for a party.  As a junior officer, I could not be late, something I reminded my wife of several days before and constantly the day of the party.  As we got closer to the time she was no where near ready despite several warnings that I would leave without her.  She still puttered around and was not ready.  I left without her and arrived on time.  After several days of sleeping on the couch we talked about it and I explained how important timeliness was to me.  She has gotten much better over the years and now gets exasperated when some of her Latino friends exhibit their typical tardiness.  We used to host parties and invite groups of friends from both the military and the Latino friends we seemed to acquire whenever I was stationed.  If the party was at 8pm, by 8:15 all the military friends would be there.  They would start leaving around 11 and that’s when most of the Latinos would be arriving – it made for some really long parties.  The rest of the weekend was very restful.  I even completed the first of the many 1000 piece puzzles that I received as Christmas gifts.  I was proud when I looked the puzzle up and found out it was an “advanced” level difficulty (I don’t know if that meant advanced for kindergarteners but what the hey, I still took a little pride).  The puzzle, pictured below, tugged at my heart because it was of three dogs.  The three dogs in the picture reminded me of Buddy our current dog, and two dogs that died a couple of years ago that we absolutely adored, Skyla and Estrella.  It was kind of eerie and appropriate to have all three together and the picture was an almost perfect depiction of how they would interact if they were together.  I’m sure the person who gave me puzzle thought he same thing, it was a lot of fun putting them together.  My wife wants to frame the puzzle and put it over Buddy’s kennel.

From the left, Skyla, Buddy, and Estrella, together at last