We’re almost at mid-December, and I’m really stumbling through the holiday season this year. I got a bit sick last week, and had some trouble making it through the work week. I worked from home on Wednesday, but then decided to go into the office on Thursday, and I think that was a bad idea, because it left me really drained on Friday, enough that I had to take a half-day. My intention for Friday afternoon was to fall asleep on the sofa, but, of course, they started playing Christmas music outside at noon, and that made it impossible for me to fall asleep. Instead, I watched the latest episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and several episodes of Godzilla Singular Point on Netflix. Nothing drowns out Christmas music quite like Godzilla!
The Christmas music thing this year has been a pain, but it could be worse. They’re only playing it on certain days. I guess it’s just when there’s some kind of Christmas thing happening on Main Street. And it’s generally just been noon to 6 PM. (And no one has screwed up the timer this year, so there haven’t been any surprise midnight Christmas music incidents. Yet.) But it’s been noticeably louder this year. Hence the necessity for Godzilla shows to drown it out.
I think I’m now over whatever it was I had last week. I was still pretty bad yesterday, but I have a lot of energy today, so far, for some reason. I just came back from a 30 minute walk, after getting zero exercise Friday and Saturday. (The reason I have so much energy this morning might have something to do with the fire alarm we had at 6:45 AM. Nothing gets the blood pumping like having to throw on your clothes and run outside early on a Sunday morning!)
This coming week is going to be interesting, I think. My boss at work is retiring at the end of the year, and there’s a lot of uncertainly about what’s going to happen to my group next year. I got an email late Friday from the guy I assume I’m going to report to. The email was a heads-up that the transitions that would have happened in January have been moved up, so I should expect an email from our “talent team” next week with my new assignment info. He didn’t come out and say exactly who I’d be reporting to, but I guess it’s either going to be him or somebody under him. He works out of our Austin office, but will be in NJ next week, and I have a one-on-one meeting scheduled with him. So I think I’m going to need to stay healthy next week, and make it into the office on all the days I’m expected to be in, so I can get some “face time” with the new guy.
Meanwhile, I haven’t sent out Christmas cards this year, and I’m not sure if I’m going to. It’ll be the first time in a while (or maybe the first time in my adult life) that I haven’t. If I can work up some Christmas spirit this afternoon, maybe I’ll do it. I only really want to sent out a half-dozen or so, so it shouldn’t be too hard to manage.
One other work thing: We’re supposed to be doing a company-wide Windows 11 upgrade this month. They’re sending out weekly status emails, and apparently we’re 90% done. But I have a Windows 10 laptop, desktop, and VM, and I haven’t seen any sign of the update getting pushed down to any of them yet. And there’s no way to “force it” on my own. So, on top of all of my other anxieties, I’m also worried that they’re going to push out the update to me at the worst possible time, and it’s going to fail and screw up one of my machines or something. Oh well.
I have a bunch of other stuff I want to blog about, including:
- my efforts to figure out if I can upgrade my personal desktop PC to Windows 11, despite it being unsupported, and whether or not that’s a good idea.
- some notes about shopping around for a new Windows 11 PC. (And thinking about a Mac Mini instead.)
- my mixed feelings about the three new David Doctor Who specials.
- my thoughts about starting a reread of Jaime Hernandez’s earliest Love & Rockets stories, in Maggie the Mechanic.
- Instapaper doubling their price to $60 per year, and getting me to rethink read-it-later services.
- more thoughts about the Godzilla shows mentioned above.
That’s all going to have to wait though. This post was probably useless to everyone but me, but felt necessary, just to clear my head today.