I’m at my best when I have a lot going on, as long as it’s something that I can do something about. Give me a series of crises at work, and I can hit my peak performance. Make me juggle two businesses, a job, someone else’s bills, and a sick kid, and I can hit each note at exactly the right time.

Of course, the flip side of that is that I’m not so hot when I have too little to do, or when the main issues in my life are centered around emotional stuff. Sure, I can rebuild your backflow preventer, even if I’ve never seen that brand before, but present me with a problem of the heart, and I just don’t know what to do. Even if the crying person is me, I’m at a loss.

Fortunately, (I guess) this week has been all about things that I can take care of.

I can’t fix Jeff’s dangerous situation, but I sure can take care of things back here for him. If I don’t dwell on where he is and what he’s doing, I’m fine.

I don’t have a lot to do in my day job, but what I have is done well.

Seamus has a sore throat? I know exactly what to do.

And I really got a chance to shine with my business over the last couple of days. We had what could have turned out to be a major public safety incident, in which a valve stem broke on a chlorine cylinder. And it still contained over a hundred pounds of gaseous chlorine, enough to kill off any number of people, first of which in line would have been me, trying to fix it.

My manager for that system was deep into other things, so he dropped it in my lap. Since I’m the operator anyway, that’s appropriate. The County gave me approval to hire whoever I needed to to take care of the situation. So that’s what I did: I called in the vendor and the manufacturer, who helped me correctly diagnose the problem (it was exactly what I had thought it was, and was also an exceedingly rare situation) and came out today to lay their own eyes on it.

I had correctly assumed that if anyone had the equipment to handle live chlorine, it would be the manufacturer. Sure enough, he came out with a steel casing called a coffin, which is designed to slip a faulty cylinder into to contain the gas. Sadly, it wasn’t big enough, as the only valve holding this gas in is on my chlorinator assembly, and that wouldn’t fit into the coffin. We can’t take that off without causing a leak, and we really don’t want to do that if we don’t have to.

So we put it back where it belongs, tied it up all securely, and they’re coming out next week with bigger equipment. Lucky me, I was able to go back to my boss (and his) and give him a summary of what happened, but also what we were doing to contain it and how soon that would be. I’ve been able to rattle contingency plans off the top of my head as if they were written down (and maybe they should be) and I’m going to come out of this smelling like a rose. Good thing my other well came on line last week, or it really would have been an emergency. It also doesn’t hurt that while I was doing this, I ended up diagnosing an operations problem that we didn’t even know we had yet, and even suggested the best solution to the controls guy. Man, I really hope I get credit for that call.

None of this can do anything but make me look good, and to the agency that I really want to hire me.

So if you break your arm or want to be picked up at the airport or need a nice cheesecake recipe or have to have a nice piece of roadkill skinned, I’m your woman. If you’ve been dumped, I’m just going to stand around awkwardly and pat you on the shoulder because I don’t quite know what else to do with you. We all have our strengths, and mine are firmly on the practical side. But what I’m good at, I can be very good at.

I got an email from Big Jeff this morning. He says that he’s going to be unavailable in the near future, to the point where we need to stop sending him packages for a while, as he won’t be there to get them. He told me that his mom and I are going to have to handle his bills for a while too, which makes me read between the lines: he’s going to be incommunicado for at least a month.

He can’t tell me where he’s going, obviously. It’s classified. He can’t even tell me when, or when to expect him back.

When he left, we knew that he’d be headed into danger this time (last time, he was deployed to Fresno. Not so much with the getting shot at in Fresno.) But with all the communicating that we’ve been able to do, in which I’ve even been able to see him with my own two eyes, I may have become just a little complacent about his safety. Combine that with his protectiveness of us women in his life, and how he doesn’t tell us the really scary stuff, and it’s a little too easy to focus on how much weight he’s lost (he’s frighteningly thin) or how soon he’ll be back.

I’ve kept the optimism turned up to ten in all of my interaction with him. I don’t want him to be worrying about us worrying about him. Maybe if I don’t acknowledge my fears in front of him, he can be just enough more confident. I don’t know, but I also don’t know that one additional straw on his back could be too much, so I’m doing my damnedest not to put one there.

I take care of everything that needs doing around here, and when I tell him not to worry about that stuff, I mean it. His mom and I kind of prop each other up as needed, but we don’t talk about the things that we don’t want to face either. We stick to the details and the superficial things, but there’s a strong undercurrent of fear swirling around interaction between any of the three of us.

I don’t have any experience in this. I’m not a military wife; I’m not a family member that’s been through it all, has been there as they’ve gone through training, and has the support structure that I think the military is fairly good about providing to the wives. It’s all new to me. But my gut feeling is that now, when he’s in the most danger, is exactly the time when I should padlock that mask on there. He doesn’t need my sense of doom hanging over his head, when I’m sure his own is huge.

So I’m deeply afraid for my friend, but I won’t be laying a bit of it on him. I’ll lay it on you all, what I’ll let myself face in my head at least, but not him. When he comes home and we go get drunk to celebrate, it may come up, as I’m sure his own will. By then, it will be safe to talk about. He’ll never know the depth of it, just as I’ll never know how he felt when he was there.

And if I’m scared, how does he feel?

While not a football fan, I do like football party food, and since I had the kids this weekend, I thought that I’d cook for them for once. I let them stay in their jammies all day long, and fixed up a spread of kid-friendly munchables for us all to graze on all day long.

It was great; an extremely low-key day, although I never want to smell cocktail weenies ever again. Seamus ate close to his body weight in cheese, I made some guacamole that I knew they wouldn’t be interested in for myself, and John ate an extraordinary number of the weenies. I’d really be surprised if he ever wants to see them again either. Heh, I should slip a couple into his lunch tomorrow.

I insisted that we turn the game on, partly because I had high hopes (sadly misplaced, as it turns out) to see some really great commercials. But they weren’t that good; nothing on the Herding Cats caliber of years past. But I also wanted it on because I was feeling a little gross and the sinus crap makes me sleepy. So I snoozed on the couch through most of it, cracking an eye when the ads came on.

While I’m not planning to make a habit of it, I think a lazy day hit the spot today. The week doesn’t look too intimidating from this perspective.

Grandma wasn’t thrilled when I told her that I planned to use her most generous Christmas gift on something for the truck. She wanted it to go for something fun and frivolous, not mundane utilities.

But what Grandma doesn’t know is that truck parts are fun and frivolous. I like to put cool stuff on my truck, and I have a whole laundry list of things that I want to do to it. Sure, some are fairly boring and basic, like the fold-out towing mirrors that I really need to get to one of these days, but some are entirely to support my hobby of goofing off by myself in desolate places, like the winch that’s now on my list.

I’ve been intending to get a set of gauges to go with my chip ever since I got the truck. If I’d had them over the summer, I surely wouldn’t have blown out my intercooler dragging Marv’s trailer back up the grade from Pismo.

Yesterday, my interior looked like this:

And today, it looks like this:

(Yes, those are bear parts hanging from the mirror. Dare you to guess which parts! Grouse knows.)

I had those gauges put on after one false start in which the money I’d intended for the project went instead toward replacing the intercooler which needed replacing because I hadn’t yet started the project. I put such a beefy replacement cooler in, that that definitely won’t be the next weak spot, but the hope is that watching my operating parameters a little more closely will keep me from pushing the performance too far and findiing the next weak spot. They let me keep an eye on my exhaust temperature, my transmission temperature (because I have a tendency to be hard on those too), and my level of boost from the turbo, which isn’t that useful until I modify the turbo. Also on my list.

So while it might be boring on the surface, it’s a fun tool that will let me play that much harder and push things a little closer to the edge. Grandpa would have approved!

There, a month in one flash. Minus the last day of course, because 31 does not make a rectangle.