Me, distracted and preoccupied?!?

Whew, survived that! I've been trying to get certified to teach a coupla technical writing courses at work. I was scheduled to "team teach" one of them starting Tuesday this week, the last or next-to-last thing I needed for certification. However. I realized last Friday that I didn't know a) what I needed to do to prepare, b) how to get a copy of the instructor's manual, or even c) who was teaching the course! I finally got that last bit of info late Monday, but because the instructor was out of the office all day, I couldn't reach him (although he did see my e-mail Tuesday morning).

And why did I wait so long to realize I needed all this info? Hmm, let's see - Aug. 24th, Dad goes into hospital for knee replacement. Aug. 28th, Mom goes for doctor's appointment, is whisked off to the hospital (not the same one Dad's in), which I don't learn until the 29th. On the 29th, as I'm preparing for an audition, I first get a phone call telling me Mom was in the hospital and then, 45 minutes later, my sister calls back to tell me they'd just learned Mom's got cancer. Aug 30th was Mom's biopsy, with no results at all for nearly a week! Then Mom goes home that Saturday, Dad pushes himself (and we worry that he might push too hard) in his PT and gets "sprung" the following Saturday.

Oh, and my immediate supervisor left mid-day on the 29th for a 4-month assignment elsewhere, and guess who's acting in his stead until his return? I've mostly managed to avoid jobs with a heavy supervisory role, but looks like the odds have finally caught up with me. Almost immediately, I had to deal with little things like attending meetings (no big deal, but it means I have to schedule around them), prioritizing the work and picking up customer requests, but I've also started seeing the sausage being made, most notably in the form of a sticky personnel problem that has refused to respond to the usual treatments and required more drastic measures.

Maybe that's why the 9/11 anniversary didn't phase me this year. I was too preoccupied with other things to think much about that day or the days thereafter, when I was working in the Pentagon.

So yeah, I'm just glad I got thru this class intact. I think I'd better do one more round of team-teaching, though, and this time I'll make sure I've got a copy of the course materials ahead of time, touch base w/ the primary instructor to see if he or she will let me do most of the instruction (I only did about half of the 2nd day; the primary did all of Day 1 and the review before the test), and actually be prepared to teach.