Weekend Plans Post: The Last Few Normal Weeks of the Year
In the meeting yesterday, management mentioned that they expected people to start flaking off starting next week. Now, they didn’t *SAY* “flaking off”, but they mentioned that this PM had family flying in and the Chief Software Engineer had National Guard and that they were going to be shutting down one of the sister buildings in the week between Christmas and New Year’s (not ours, but you can never be too careful) and so we really had to lean in during the next week because, after that, well… it’s all over until January. The people who benefit from seeing our faces walk around the building will be finding excuses to leave early and the people in charge of getting status reports from those people will be doing the “work from home” thing (wink wink, nudge nudge).
So, this weekend will be spent in prep for the last real week at work for a while. Oh, I’ll still be going in during the intervening weeks and I’ll still be doing my assigned tasks and making sure that we meet the upcoming milestone (management asked “why is the milestone December 29th? Why isn’t it January 5th?” and no one had the heart to say “because you insisted, sir”) and, heck, we’ll have it met by the 22nd. Knock wood.
But next week is the last week that the various VPs and people who have lunch with the various VPs will be wandering around the building. Which means that, after that, we will *FINALLY* be able to get some work done.
Prep, in this case, means “diddly squat”. We had plans to do one thing but they fell through and we had plans to do another and we decided to cancel.
So, this weekend, will be devoted to laundry and making spaghetti sauce.
And I can’t wait.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “The aftermath of accidentally turning on the ceiling fan for a second”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
One more week of classes, then finals. Then I finally get a longer break. Last week felt like it was two months long – I had a cold that may have precipitated with my dog allergy over Thanksgiving, several things went wrong (including my cell phone battery reaching the end of its life and my having to go and get a new phone), and we had a student with major problems, almost all of which were self-inflicted, but which the student chose to believe were the faculty not being able to drop things on 10 seconds notice and deal with the issues that had been brewing for a while, but which the student chose not to tell the faculty (I presume because: “if you wait until the last minute, it’s harder for them to say no” or some similar nonsense).
But I have a couple days now to relax and do not-work things. One of which is getting groceries, I literally did not have time last week. I wound up ordering a pizza for dinner last night partly because I had nothing easily convertible into a main dish in the house.
What I REALLY want – and one of my colleagues agreed with me and said she wanted the same – is to just be able to sit on the sofa and watch dumb Hallmark meet-cute holiday movies and knit or crochet. But since running errands during the week is not really a thing that can happen now, I have to gird my loins in a few minutes and head to the Target.
(Yes, I know: Target the first weekend of December, right after payday. I’m going to regret it.)Report
I had to go to Costco on Friday and I winced as I drove into the parking lot… first Friday of the month, Costco. And the first half of my visit there was awful. People somehow blocking entire aisles by just standing there wrong.
The second half? It was like the Superbowl had kickoff or something. The store EMPTIED. I went from being surrounded to it being a ghost town. I was in line for less than a minute.
So… I hope Target wasn’t that bad.Report
I got there early enough, I guess. The Brookshires (grocery) was fairly crowded by the time I got there (my last stop, it was slightly afternoon) but it wasn’t too bad. I drove past my local wal-mart when coming back into town and I don’t think there was a single parking spot open in their lotReport
it’s Lady Marchmaine’s birthday
weekmonthseason so we’re off to the big city, or DC anyway, for a hopefully absurd dinner at The Dabney (don’t forget the The).Yesterday we walked past Tiffany’s to somewhere else and I suggested that today maybe we could walk through Tiffany’s to somewhere else. It being her birthday season and all.Report
Googled The Dabney and it looks cozy… is the “Dabnog” any good?Report
It was very cozy; we had a nice corner deuce, the service was very good, and the food was extremely well prepared without ‘trying too hard’ for novelty (the besetting sin of places like this). The wine pairings, however, tried a little too hard for novelty and left me unimpressed for the price.
But YES, the Dabnog. I asked the waiter about the Dabnog because we were scheduled to have a Sauternes with dessert and I knew they would clash horribly. It was at this point he informed me that the Sauternes was scheduled for *second* dessert (some sort of Yam thingy) and that the Dabnog would go perfectly with the first dessert of apple crisp. So we popped for the Dabnog.
It was very boozy, too boozy, I’d say. A Boozy that added heat, but not a lot of flavor. So I was a little disappointed, but enjoyed trying it with first dessert. Back when we were milking goats, and getting raw milk/cream plus our pastured eggs we’d make a scratch eggnog that was sublimely airy and rich without being cloying and syrupy… so I was more focused on their promise of using fresh eggs/milk and hoping for a better base. Booze is easy to add, getting the milk/eggs right is the hard part. They got a B for the dairy aspect and B- for the booze.
But hey, we’re weirdos who make their own eggnog from dairy/eggs we harvest on our own farm, so not necessarily a fair judge.Report
This season is a little extra in that not only is it “end of year” but it’s also “end of contract.” There’s a lot of the government insisting we get tasks X, Y, and Z finished before handover. Each of those tasks has a whiff of, “If you had done THIS STUFF to begin with maybe you wouldn’t have lost the contract!’ to it. Complicating things is an ongoing race to fix a recently-discovered software bug, but after racing at top speed for a few weeks the government finally admitted that the best thing to do is to kick the can down the road to the new contract (well, really, it was more of “if you can’t figure this out by X day, just forget it”).
We also shut down the week of Christmas, which introduces it’s own complications for me, personally. I know I don’t have enough PTO to cover the whole week, nor will the contract last long enough for me to make up the deficit. I’m left wondering if I should just take the time off and let it all shake out in January, but I’m inclined to give my current company a heads-up that I’m likely going to be paying some time back at the end because of this. (It’s a small community and burning bridges is bad practice, and my prior relationship with this company also helped me land this job, so I’ll likely approach it this way.)
Anyway…I hope we get to play D&D this coming Saturday. That’d be nice and normal.Report