I originally planned to take off sooner, but my colleagues came together to launch a webinar series, and Thursday would be the first one. I was asked to do introductions and be the moderator, so I pushed back “vacation” until Friday.
Since everyone involved in this webinar was in different cities, we ran several practice runs earlier in the week to make sure everything would be ship-shape. Being a somewhat meeting-averse Gen-Xer with an allergy to overthinking things, I of course thought a few times that some of this was maybe overkill.
But better safe than sorry. The organizers, the speaker and I even called into the webinar an hour early to make sure audio sounded good and everything was working. Spot on. We spent the last 15 minutes before the webinar shooting the breeze because this would indeed be a breeze. We had over 400 attendees, the speaker was ready, I was ready, audio sounded good, we were in great shape. We were in great shape in the same way that the Titanic was unsinkable.
The intro went great and the first few minutes were fine, and then everything went to crap. The speaker’s audio went in and out and got so bad we had to interrupt and ask him to call back in. Three times. And then after a good 3 minutes of dead air and tons of panic, I was getting texts that he couldn’t even get back in. The networks were jammed and our expert speaker was locked out. And your’s truly was left in the position of having to get on and say, “Gee whiz everybody, isn’t this wacky? All part of the show, folks! Where are you from? How about this weather, huh?”
OK, I didn’t say that. What I actually said probably was significantly lamer than that.
After what seemed like 10 years but was probably a few minutes, the speaker was graciously allowed back into the webinar he was presenting and we actually made it through the rest of the thing pretty smoothly. Shockingly, we only lost about 15 attendees through all of that, so I will chalk that up as a positive.
On the home front, the kids have been busy with some fun arts and crafts activities that their Grandma and Grandpa Liddell sent them. Today’s big activity was window ornaments. Amelia carefully painted and delicately crafter her ornaments. Henry literally dumped enormous globs of paint on his.
In the end, they all turned out very nicely (though Henry’s took much longer to dry) and add a little cheer to our back window.
The kids were in great moods and had lots of fun playing outside. At one point, though, I heard Erin shout out, “Guys, stop digging by the fence.” I knew this quarantine was hard, but I didn’t expect them to try to engineer an escape by digging under the fence.
Well, OK, maybe I DID expect Henry to try to engineer an escape by digging under the fence. I just didn’t expect it yet. They grow up so fast.
