Fire Fighting

Picture this. I'm in a sealed room and the water is rising around me. It's up to my nose now, so I'm straining my head upwards to keep the water from drowning me. That's the dream I had last night. Not too difficult to analyse that one. As a colleague said to me today, "Just keep up the fire fighting".
Fire; water; it's the same difference. At work I'm juggling a quite absurd array of diverse projects and dealing with a lot of other people's stress. Some of the other people's stress seems, quite frankly, meaningless. Meanwhile, at home, Eden has had a tummy bug and been off school; there have been hysterics every evening as we've all sat down for dinner whilst she has plain white toast for the umpteenth time. Nathan started nursery today; he settled in relatively well, but Paul found it quite emotional separating from him for the first time, and called me in tears after he'd dropped him off. Ava is probably the sanest one of all of us. She's popping teeth like there's no tomorrow, though, so she can get pretty noisy.
In amongst the absurd range of projects, I'm organising the small matter of the leaving party for my CEO (I blogged about his departure here). The logistics are quite mind-boggling, with staff being flown in from all over the place to wish him well, coaches to be laid on to bring in people from non-London offices, RSVPs to be logged, entertainment to be booked, decisions to be made about the number of warm / cold / meat / vegetarian canapes to be ordered, catering and cloaks staff hired for the evening, cars arranged for the VIPs, flowers for the reception viewed and approved, PA system hired, etc, etc. On the train to and from work, I'm squeezing in arrangements for my daughter's rather less ambitious sixth birthday party. I just hope I don't get muddled and order the pirates and princesses storyteller for my CEO's bash and have the champagne delivered to the six year olds ;-)