Weekend Plans Post: First Weekend of 2021
I’m no longer really a “stay up to midnight, Happy New Year!” kinda guy. It went from being something that I wasn’t allowed to do, to something that I was allowed to do but fell asleep waaay before midnight anyway, to something that I was excited to be able to finally do, to something that I did because it was what one does on New Year’s Eve, to something that I thought about doing but just went to bed instead, to something that, yeah, I’m not going to do.
I mean, seriously. Midnight? Three minutes after Carson’s monologue, I’m asleep.
Let’s face it: it’s been a long year. A rough year. Heck, I had it *EASY* and it was a rough year. So it’s good that it’ll be behind us soon. And, yeah, it looks like January and February are likely to be rough too.
But it’s behind us now. This next year is going to be a lot better than this year. Sure, it’ll have a bad start but once the vaccinations happen and the post-vaccination quarantine… oh my gosh! We’ll be able to eat at restaurants again! We’ll be able to go to the movies! We’ll be able to go rock climbing!
Heck. We’ll be able to go to the grocery store on a lark. “I only need garlic bread.” And we’ll be able to just waltz in and not think about it.
It’ll be nice to go on vacation instead of a staycation. It’ll be nice to just go back to work. Build a server. Go over and ask a question of the change management team, talk to the programmers, talk to the hardware guys. Wander over to the cubicle of my buddies and say “who wants to go to Culver’s?” and just drive over to Culver’s. Talk about pop culture with friends. Oh jeez, go back to playing board games on Saturday nights.
2021 is going to be better than 2020. And this is the first New Year’s Eve where it feels like that not just plugging numbers pro-forma into a formula.
And this weekend is going to be the first weekend of 2021.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Giving Thanks for Naptime”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
Oh, rock climbing. I was just thinking sometime during this past week that I need to get out a rope and start practicing the figure-9 loop knot and remind my muscles how to properly belay. Jeez, we’re going to need a refresher before I trust myself on the wall with an actual person on the end of a rope again.
And MAN. I want to go visit my parents and the rest of my family. And I’d LOVE to go to London again and overpay for a ticket to see Arsenal.
I wonder, though, how many people will choose to return to the office. I mean, I will…I think you will…but this year has demonstrated a level of flexibility I don’t believe employers or employees understood before.
And also, I’m not much for journaling or anything, but I definitely need to sit down and think about gratitude and positivity and silver lining, because my brain is melting. I’ll be first in fishing line for that vaccine when it gets to us, I tell you what.
Happy New Year, y’all. I hope the coming year is everything we could all hope for.Report
Colorado Department of Health estimates that those of us who are not high-risk due to health conditions or front-line healthcare workers will get the vaccine starting Summer 2021:
https://covid19.colorado.gov/for-coloradans/vaccine/vaccine-for-coloradansReport
This hits pretty close to home as well:
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Frankly, I don’t have a lot of expectations of life returning to normal any time soon. Maybe not any time ever. I don’t mean “not back to normal” in the sense of “people have the option to WFH if they want” but “not back to normal” in the sense of “I still can’t travel, it’s still not really safe to do ‘nonessential’ trips out” The news of the truly Keystone Kops roll out of the vaccine (coupled with criminal mischief on the part of some) has me discouraged again.
As for this weekend? Another blank, like so many weekends have been. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. I could clean house, I could read, I could knit. But I’ve done all that so many weekends. I would like something different but the weather will be too crappy even to go for a walk.
I will probably have to sleep late on Saturday, or else try to nap in the afternoon. This is my first New Year’s Eve in the South (every other year I was up in Illinois, or before that, Ohio) and people had told me “oh people shoot off fireworks” and I was thinking bottle rockets but holy heck, it sounds like they’ve got mining explosives out there. I didn’t SEE any fireworks stands open (then again, I am not driving around much these days) so I don’t know where they got them unless someone robbed a construction site or somesuch.
I have sensitive ears and I startle easy, so I guess I don’t get to sleep until they knock it off. Which probably won’t be until after midnight. The only mercy is it’s raining hard so I don’t have to worry about stray fireworks starting a grass fire.
I know I’m a stick in the mud, wet blanket, but I don’t get the fascination with loud dangerous things that go boom and scare the literal crap out of people’s dogs.Report
We manage to roll out flu vaccines pretty regularly. It’s pretty much a solved problem. I think manufacturing, rather than delivery, is eventually going to be the main bottleneck. It’s also likely that herd immunity will be reached before the whole population is vaccinated, as long as people keep wearing masks.Report
I disagree on the distribution being a solved problem. My state ran rehearsals once they knew about the Pfizer requirements. If I understand the press releases properly, we are declining some of our weekly allotments from Pfizer right now because we know that we can’t distribute it.
My care provider is Kaiser Permanente Colorado, which handles something over 10% of the state’s population. They have a terrific flu vaccination program, much higher take rate than for the general population. Kaiser’s an approved distributor for the Covid vaccines, and none of the conditions that make their flu program so effective apply.Report
My Boss’s, Boss’s, Boss’s, Boss’s, Boss (i.e. the head of WW Field Ops) gave us next Mon-Weds off as thanks for a tough year… so, I guess that makes it a 7-day weekend! That was a nice gift.
Then she resigned.
Generally C-Level resignations haven’t meant much to me over the years, and likely this one won’t either… but we’ve seen a few in the past year… and usually the C-Level’s that actually do things don’t flip that much. I mean, Marketing and HR C-Levels flip all the time, but let’s be honest… those are purely courtesy C’s. But you never know… we’re still recovering from one particularly bad C-Level Field Ops hire… so there’s always a chance. Once my [work-]life got marginally better by an almost C… but they fired him before he captured the C… to hire the really bad guy directly at the C level.
My favorite C-story is the guy who parachuted in to our lowly regional QBR (everyone was in NYC office… so why not). He gave us some wildly outdated fire and brimstone 1980s Sales bullshit then concluded with an incredibly labored analogy about evaluating all of us by whether we ‘over-committed’ our numbers (i.e. lied on our forecast) to show we were ‘in-the-boat’ with him… and that he only kept people who proved they were in the boat and would do anything for people in the boat.
I kid you not, he jumped ship less than two weeks later for a company that IPO’d three months later giving him a sh*t-ton of (unearned) IPO cash. Which means, of course, that as he was giving us his bullshit 1980’s sales talk and belaboring his Boat analogy… he was in active negotiations to leave.
Strangely, he was not *the* bad C-Level Exec… just *a* bad C-Level Exec – the kind that has no idea what we do at the field level and just rakes in compensation he doesn’t really earn.
But, what to do with a 7-day weekend? I kinda have no idea. Like having no curfew on Prom Night, but taking your sister as a date.Report
I’m on day 9 of an 11-days-off stretch, and lemme tell ya…I could do another 11 easily.Report
Yeah, I’m thinking 3-day work week should become a thing.Report
What to do with a 7-day weekend?
Well, there’s always Cyberpunk 2077…Report
Heh, Not enough pew pew for me… I’m allergic to stories and narrative… the only good narrative is the narrative of pavlovian loot reinforcement.Report
Well, before the game came out, I was worried that there would be too much combat.
There is *NOT* too much combat.
So… yeah.
Are you familiar with Grim Dawn? 80% off! $5! “Cheap”!Report
Yes! I’ve been playing it again since Path of Exile punted on their quarterly release out of an abundance of caution regarding Cyberpunk 2077. I like it ok, but I burn out after about 2-3 days vs 3-4 weeks for PoE. If Diablo could get their heads out of their asses, I could probably sustain a solid rotation.Report
What? You don’t have a phone?
(Anyway, Blizzard appears to have suffered from the very particular corporate disease where the marketing guys got promoted and the engineering guys got stolen. So it may be a while before things get fixed over there.)Report