Like a lot of Americans, I've become a little overextended over the last couple of years, and have had to take a second job to keep home and hearth together. In my case, I'm borrowing from my near-quarter-century of experience as a forensic psychologist to do some mental health evaluations at the local hospital ER on an on-call basis.

This past Sunday, I got called in at four-thirty in the afternoon. I got home at seven in the morning on Monday. For some reason, people needing mental health evaluations and placement in hospitals came out of the woodwork over the course of fourteen hours. By three in the morning on Monday, I knew that I wasn't getting home that night, and I still had to be at work at my college job at 10:30 that morning.

It was a long day, with another ER visit that evening when my wife called to tell me she had to take my daughter in to be seen. She's fine, now, but the ER was getting a little old by Monday midnight.

I'm on-call again this weekend, and didn't sleep so well last night, waiting for the pager to go off.

It's been a long week. They say you can never get back lost sleep, and at this point I'd wager that "they" are correct.

Even so, I did manage to squeak out three thousand words on the new forensic procedural mystery I'm writing, and hope to get back in stride next week and pump out about ten thousand more. Could be tough, considering that we start registration for the spring semester at the college on Monday, which means I will be wiped out each evening until Christmas.

Are you sure Robert B. Parker started out this way?
R