I had an interesting weekend last week.

First off, I woke up Saturday at 3:00 am and could not get back to sleep. What made it worse I had to give a talk about one of my books at Baytown, 30 miles from my house, at 10:00 am. That is a long drive when you’re exhausted. On top of that I got lost looking for the place (Baytown apparently has a West Main Street and a North Main Street. They do not connect. The first exit named “Main Street” when you are coming from the west is West Main. It took me an hour to find the right Main and get to the venue.)

I also had a book to finish, about 2000 words worth. I had to fit that in between the talk, and all of my normal weekend shopping and cleaning errands, while totally exhausted.

And I woke up again before 3:00 am on Sunday morning, and again could not get back to sleep. Now I am going through a second day where my combined hours sleeping for both days were less than I normally get in one night. And I have to get a roast in the oven before church because a bunch of guests, including my middle son and his wife, coming over for dinner at 5:00 pm.

Then at dinner that evening, my son says he is likely to be leaving Houston (where I live) to take a job in San Antonio.

Does that sound like a lousy weekend? Some might say it was.

Except, there is the rest of the story.

There was a good crowd for the talk. Moreover, I sold 25 books to the audience. I sold every copy of the book on which the talk was about (The Battleship Texas) that I brought and ten others on top of that. I normally consider myself lucky if I sell five books at a talk. Twenty-five doubles my previous record of twelve at a talk on the Cruiser Houston at the annual Cruiser Houston dinner. Plus the hosts paid an honorarium and gave me a quart of peaches and a pint of mayhaw jelly. It was a morning well spent.

Dinner Sunday was a shoulder pork roast that had to cook eight hours, it was worth the effort. I think it was part of the best meal I ever prepared. We had the mayhaw jelly with the buttermilk biscuits I baked. I host a family dinner every Sunday. With my nephew staying in my house I sometimes joke we are a low-rent Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin; kind of in the same league as Leo Haig and Chip Harrison.

And the job my son is likely to land? He just got his P.E., but the company he is at had to let him go. An engineering company in San Antonio contacted him the week he was let go. They want him to head up their newest department, which is in his specialty. He is to start it up: Hire the people. Run it. And they are offering a generous salary and benefits to boot. It is a lot of opportunity for a man in his mid-30s, and opportunities like that don’t come along often. Of course, he should grab it.

I got the book done, too, despite being dog tired.

If I concentrated on everything that went wrong I would conclude I had a bad weekend. Some people I know would do that. Me? Despite all the aggravations, I have to say it was one of the better weekends I have had this century.

Some time back I used the following quote as my quote of the day:

When you wake up each morning, you can choose to be happy or choose to be sad. Unless some terrible catastrophe has occurred the night before, it is pretty much up to you. Tomorrow morning, when the sun shines through your window, choose to make it a happy day. – Lynda Resnick

What happened to me last weekend is an illustration of what she meant.