Taking hours for minutes

I can breathe a little easier now.

During last Friday's Board of Examiners' meeting, I sat in the front row of the lecture theatre because I needed to power up my notebook to type the official meeting minutes. Also, I didn't think the battery would last more than 2 hours and thankfully I didn't take any chances because the whole session lasted over 4 hours!

The BOE minutes were required for checking and editing first thing Monday morning so I'm glad I brought my notebook down because the minutes were about 3/4 completed by the end of Friday's meeting. I just needed to spend time to reconstruct some sentences and check for factual inaccuracies.

Much as I dread to bring work home, I really had not much of an option since the minutes are expected to be out early on Monday. Plus, the hub offered to pick me up from work so I lugging around an extra file won't hurt.

On a side note: I grudgingly took over the wheel and drove back home - with the hub sitting beside me, of course. The fact that I'm trying this now is proof that I survived the 10 minute journey. A few baby steps at a time and hopefully in a few months I'll be confident enough to handle the car alone, I hope!

Anyway, on Saturday night (read: midnight) when the kids were finally asleep, I gathered my file and flipped through the reports with the intention of completing the minutes. To my utmost horror, the MS word programme crashed on me and I couldn't even open my file! It's been giving me loads of problems and I've even un-installed/re-installed the programme a few times.

Boy, was I hopping mad! That was my only window of opportunity to finish up my minutes since there's no way I can fiddle about with the computer when the kids are awake.

Since I was up and couldn't go to sleep, I created a Facebook Group for Woofy's Corner. Now that the hub owns the pet shop 100%, I thought I'd do my part to help him with some publicity for the business.

On Sunday, I came back to the campus to pick up my office notebook but couldn't squeeze out any time to work on the meeting minutes...

...until 4am this morning. Yes, I was up at 4am. It was peaceful and quiet, with no distractions and I thought I could finally finish up typing the minutes.

But I was sooooooo wrong.

At about 5am, the baby woke up wailing because she couldn't find her automatic milk dispenser. And then at 5.45am, it was Xian's turn to get ready for school. After Xian left with the school transport at 6.20am, I rushed back to try finish up, only to be disturbed when Wei screamed again for milk at about 6.45am.

*Sigh*

To cut a long story short, I managed to tidy up my minutes (on my way to work and in office)and sent them out at 8.45am. So far, there have been 2 rounds of revisions, and there are 3 more supervisors to go before I can upload the minutes into the system.

But at least the tough parts are done and I can relax for a bit before I start preparing for the new term.