I am embarrassed to tell you how many times I quoted the movie "Swingers" in my lost three-day weekend to Las Vegas. I have been in a mad rush to organize all sectors of my life simultaneously, working from seven in the morning to eleven at night, virtually non-stop.

It all began last Tuesday when I put the kids on the plane to their grandma's by themselves. I was a nervous wreck, as you can imagine. I wrote every possible phone and cellphone number I knew on two index cards which I put in ziplock sandwich bags and secreted in Ava and Chet's pockets. I bought them a portable DVD player for the plane and had Ava train at home in assembling and disassembling the battery like a drill sergeant making a new grunt disassemble a rifle blindfolded. Then at the airport I thought I could walk them onto the plane but the gruff stewardess just grabbed their hands and started to yank them into the bowels of the plane. I grabbed them and hugged them and kept waving at them as they disappeared down the jetbridge. They looked so small next to the big, mean stewardess.

Coming home to a big, empty house was odd. As if my parents and my sister had suddenly disappeared and I was a single teenager. Then came the two free nights at the Palm that mysteriously arrived in the mail, a five-hour-drive and three days of staying up way too late and being as bad as a good dad felt he could.

While I was gone the house was being tented for termites. That meant turning the gas off. I left meticulous instructions about where the key was left to turn the gas back on but of course I returned to cold water, no dryer, no stove. Too lazy to go to the gym to shower I took a cold one instead. After two months without my girlfriend and three days in Vegas I could use one.