The Weekend Plans Post: The Eye Of The Hurricane
It’s always nice to have a nice Thanksgiving dinner with the family and teach the boys the subtle nuances of burping in such a way that it catches the harmonics of the wine glasses in the cabinet. It’s usually somewhat stressful to hunker down in the bunker waiting for the first volley of Competitive Shopping to finish following the Thanksgiving Feast.
Then everyone staggers, bleary-eyed, back to work for a WHOLE WEEK. I made more than my fair share of jokes about how “four day weekends always make me want to buy a lottery ticket” and nobody laughed. They just nodded sadly. Then we got back to work and rebuilt some servers and took other servers apart and had meetings and sat in technical interviews and oh my gosh is tomorrow Friday?
Indeed it is.
So we have to plow through Friday nonsense that includes the meetings that could have been emails and the leisurely lunches at the sit-down place rather than the hectic ones where we get the stuff to go and eat it in front of our keyboards and then, at the end of everything, start the weekend that is the eye of the hurricane that is The Holidays.
Maribou and I will be going to Costco on the Friday night. We might go to the small batch artisanal gelato place afterwards. Maybe settle into a couple more episodes of Daredevil with the cats. And then the rest of the weekend is the usual litany of the stores we must visit and the chores we must do. (But, with luck, the evenings will have elbow room for couch time.)
2018 has been kind of nuts. It’ll be nice to wind it down.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “between autumn and spring” by glasseyes view. Used under a creative commons license.)
*sigh* a recruitment event. That will eat pretty much my entire Saturday. And which I am already slightly salty about because (a) the office that is tasked with planning it is doing the standard thing for first-time things here: “We’re not really gonna plan a lot and we’ll let the faculty involved with it tell us what we need to do better for next year after it’s over.” I am JUST far enough on “the spectrum” that lack-of-planning and stuff like “you’ll find out what room you need to go to when you get there in the morning” really bug me a lot. and (b) We got wind that a number of the students from local schools signed up did so exclusively because their teacher offered extra credit, which I take to mean there will be bored/uninterested people there who just sit and dink on their phones (or worse, because I’ve seen it: ask rude, snarky questions or make rude comments) and just generally waste our time.
I’ve informed my department chair that if it’s either too much of a dungshow, or if turnout seems to be really low and/or uninterested, I am going home at lunchtime. I get tired of how much our alleged free-time (weekends, sometimes evenings) gets imposed upon. Yes, that’s what we made the moderately-big-bucks (low to mid five figures) for, but….
If I can get away at lunch time and the weather is okay, I might drive to the town a 1/2 hour south of me and either go to the bookstore or the antique shops. I have a tiny tradition of going antiquing some weekend around the end of the semester, and there are precious few weekends left: this one, next one, and then the following one is graduation, so again I’m required to be up here for the day.
I also really need to get a couple specific ingredients as I have a “finger food supper” to go to next week and I usually make a turkey-meatball-in-raspberry-sauce thing for that, and I need to get decent ground turkey and seedless raspberry jam, which can be hard to find.Report
“Daredevil with the Cats”
Seriously, Hollywood is completely out of ideas.
Last two days of Rifle season and my wife’s birthday month… hoping I can sell venison as a present.
The birthday month is interesting… since her date falls on or around Thanksgiving – year after year – followed closely by Christmas and all the obscuring effects thereto attached; the marriage contract stipulates an entire month of celebration. The fact that our third-born arrived the day before her birthday, erm, heightened the contradiction.
My birthday, though, always falls in Lent, and regularly on or around Ash Wednesday and invariably in the early part of Lent… the part where we’re all good about Lenting. Once I pointed out that as annoying as it is to have your birthday around Thanksgiving… it is always a feast, friends and family abound, the wine flows freely, and not only is there cake, but pie as well. But Lent and a Lenten birthday? That gets a shrug and “suck it up, buttercup” (with an implied, hey, Jesus died on a Cross for you, and you want a party?). By the time Easter rolls around, I’m just a year older and the idea of a Birthday month for an event 6 weeks in the past just seems silly.
Then again, her love language is gifts (if I believe in love languages, which, well, suck it up, buttercup) and I’m more of a “I Love you… until further notice” kinda person… so one month a year where I get outside my comfort zone is probably why we’re still married. I did, at least negotiate away Valentines day in exchange… so on the whole, advantage buttercup.Report
X-wing tourney tomorrow. It’s been a hectic semester and I haven’t played much, so I anticipate losing, but that’s okay. Lunch with a former colleague on Sunday; it will be nice to catch up and complain about our former boss (who, fortunately, is no longer my boss).
Next week is finals week, so I may do a bit of grading, or I may just relax to prepare for next week’s storm.Report
Bohemian Rhapsody tonight. Hoping to sleep in tomorrow and I suppose I can no longer put it off, so I’ll dig out the Christmas tree and the lights and put those up, too (is it the baby duck’s turn to be the tree topper, or Opus? I don’t remember…). Sunday morning is the North London Derby (Sp*rs visiting Arsenal–I’m expecting an Arsenal defeat but I hope to be pleasantly surprise.
Then I suppose, Jay, that we should seriously consider visiting the climbing gym since we missed yesterday…Report
In about four hours I will complete this work project, getting my product out to the clients. And outside of possible complaints from said clients I only have one business related thing to do between now and Xmas, which is to send my next location mailer/reminder out.
In other words to see which of my clients hasn’t passed away in the last year. The antique business can be rough that way.
So, no plans outside of the Big Winter House Project, which is refinishing the stairs. When we bought the place, the one part that was still carpeted was the stairs, telling me that there were still issues with the flooring there, as the rest is wood. And sure enough, there was, as four of them were MDF, not original in a 100-year-old home, to say the least. And someone had very visibly used screws to keep them from squeaking, which is not the proper method. So, striping, staining, coating and in general fixing someone else’s mess. Should be fun.Report
Sandwiches.Report
This past week I was in Michigan on business, and I just got back last night. Tonight, we go purchase a car, so I can give my old car to my son, who has finally found a job. Tomorrow morning, we take my wife’s car and my current car for their state inspections. We also get to sit down and figure out our budget and start figuring out how we will pay for me to start the MBA program. I had been postponing this until I got accepted, since it would not really matter if I was not accepted.
Hopefully, somewhere in this weekend, we will also get to take some time to enjoy ourselves.Report
@reformed-republican Hey, congratulations on your new budgetary problem!Report