This summer is gonna suck

This post will be a whining rant. You've been warned.

Aside from the obvious difficulties that come with having our house on the market and trying to purchase another house at the same time, a new and much more aggravating issue has surfaced: Tim's department has gone to a compressed workweek for summer (four 10-hour shifts). While this kind of schedule would be ideal for many, many people in many situations, including me at some earlier point in life, and save energy and gas in many situations, it really stinks when you both work at the same institution and you have a child in preschool at same institution's campus.

Oh, you know I'll explain:

Tim's summer schedule will be 7am-5pm Sunday, Monday, Tuesday Wednesday. This means he has to be on campus for uniform and shift briefing by 6:30. This means he leaves the house at 5:50am to drive the 30 miles between.

Now, my supervisor and many of my responsibilities are generally flexible, and I probably could work out something out-of-the-box to coordinate with Tim's schedule and travel with him, but that's not the problem. The problem is pre-school. They won't be open Sunday, or even at 6:30am the other days, and even if I could have him there at that time, do I really want him there 10.5 hours!? No. No. No.

Next issue is days off - because I'm 11 month, I take a bunch of days off during the summer (I'm not paid for them). I took Sam out of daycare on Fridays for most of the summer because I was required to decide the summer schedule for him like 17 years prior, before any of this went down. Now, normally, if I need to take a day off during the week and not have Sam with me, it works well because Tim will bring him in at the start of his shift, and then pick him up at the end of his day (the normal 8 hour shift). With this new arrangement, we can't do this. If I need to be on my own for the day, like to go to the vagina doctor or something, I would have to make an hour round-trip drop off to campus in the morning, and hope that Tim won't get caught on overtime so I don't have to pick him up again too.

Of course, these are the secondary issues. Now, with this new schedule, Tim and I will be commuting to Delhi and back at least 9 times per week, totaling at least 540miles per week between the 2 of us. That will add up to nearly 6,500 miles over just 12 weeks. We only have 1 efficient vehicle, the other is a truck. I suppose we are fortunate to have 2 vehicles - can any working family get by with less these days? Ugh, that's another post entirely. So happy to be super-supporting the oil companies this summer (EFF you ALL), as we're going to be pretty much doubling our commuting costs.