Month: July 2009

I had a terribly frustrating day at work today. I couldn’t get caught up to save my life. I came home to mow the shin-high grass in 100+ degree weather and now I have so many mosquito bites that I look like a leper. I got angry and yelled at the Zombie Eater for throwing fist fulls of dirt into the pool. I stormed into the house, grabbed my phone to check my email. There, glowing in my inbox, was a signed contract from a sales call I went on in L.A. back in May.

That made the rough day at work today seem not-so-bad. Now I’ve to make up for the sour attitude that I had with Maly this evening.

I came home from work this evening to total silence. Total silence. Well, not TOTAL silence – total is a relative word here. Maly is away at Grandma’s for a couple days and Elise is at her MOMS group until 9:30 tonight.

I put my bag down and opened the mail at the kitchen counter. I heard an odd and faint whirring sound. As I walked toward the entertainment center, the sound became less faint. The sound was the hard drive spinning inside the TiVo as it recorded a TV show. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sound before. It’s not a broken TiVo hard drive sound – more of a working TiVo hard drive spinning sound that I’ve never had the opportunity to hear.

I walked back to the kitchen to finish opening the mail. Still silence. The sound of me opening an envelope was almost deafening. Opening and closing the refrigerator door produced a thunderous reverberation throughout the kitchen. Because I could hear them, my footsteps seemed to be coming from someone else’s feet.

I stood at the kitchen counter and just looked blankly out onto the living room and out the windows to the backyard and thought, “this house will be like this one day.”

Fifteen years flashed before my eyes. I left the nest and moved to Austin to attend college 15 years ago. The 15 years that flashed before my eyes were not my own; they were my daughter’s. And each year, as it flashed, paused long enough for me to catch a brief gaze. The plays, recitals, games, classes, sleep-overs, slumber parties, trips, study groups, dances, dates.

And 15 years will have gone by like that, just like the previous 15 years have. At that point she will be 18-years-old. And I will be 35 because of cryogenics and human growth hormone. She will ready to leave the nest. Ready to pass through the ivory towers of the university or embark on whatever life journey so bewilders her. We will have done the absolute best that we can in that short amount of time to prepare and help her to be the best woman that she can possibly be.

One-sixth of our daughter’s life at home has already passed. I sit in a silent house hearing only the clatter of my keyboard and the squeak of my chair tonight. It’s nights like this that allow me to think about what’s really important in my life.

What’s important is now.

The next time she runs to me and asks, “Daddy! Want to play wiff my dollhouse wiff me?!?!”, there will be nothing more important.

I haven’t posted anything on Janicek.com since May 27th. Wow. Truth be told, I’ve been hanging out on Facebook. If you don’t know what Facebook is, your head’s been under a rock – right along side my wife’s!

By the time I get home from work, play with Maly, have dinner, work, bathe Maly, brush her teeth, brush her hair, work, give her new headbanging lessons, read to her, put her to bed, talk to Elise, work, it’s too late to recount my recently discovered high cholesterol count or a herd of ducks I might have seen on the way into work this morning.

So I post snippets here and there on Facebook, and I’ve been trying to get Elise to do the same. She won’t have it. There’s even a Facebook group, trying to urge Elise to join Facebook. I’ll bet if I became a Catholic, Elise wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in this Facebook joining battle.

But this battle hasn’t gone to that extreme. Yet. Elise raises a good point in that Facebook would be a total timesuck for her. And it would. If you know my wife, she’s not that great at managing her time. And I only write that because I had to step away from the keyboard to ask her if it was okay to write that.

I know more about what Elise’s friends from Iowa are doing than she does. Case-in-point, because of Facebook, I know that people in Iowa are experiencing their “summer” this week. Next week they’ll all be knee-deep in snow again.

In recent months I’ve come home to Elise with some exciting news:

“Jeff and Heather are having a boy!!!”

“That’s soooo two-day-old news”

“Facebook?”

“Yep. And I’ve already seen the ultrasound photos.”

“…”

“And I got an autographed copy! All done in “Facebook!””

We actually got into an argument as we were going to bed one night recently. I strongly urged my loving wife to adopt social media now, because in 5 years, when our daughter can send a MMS message via the Sonytendosoft Wii GPS Advanced720® Retina Sensorâ„¢ to her all-reaching, satellite-fed TwitBookr 2.0 account for all the world to read, except her mom, I’ll probably be standing before the open pantry, iPhoneMicro 9GTz Turbo in hand, downloading an application to determine if I’ve had enough soluble fiber for the day.