LinLog

In the spirit of not freaking out and overdoing it for the holidays, for Christmas this year I've scheduled another "from the archives" post.  If you haven't been keeping track, that's my lazy posting series where I slap a preamble on something that's been sitting in my drafts folder forever and call it "new content".

This one is actually seasonal, though, as it's dated December 28, 2007.  It's also completely non-technical and yet was also tagged "Software Engineering" for some reason.  Maybe I intended to add something to it, or maybe I just fat-fingered the tag widget.  But that's neither here nor there.  The point is that my scheduled Saturday post falls on Christmas day, and this is related to Christmas.

Since this one is super-short, I'm going to add some inline commentary to it because, well, otherwise it's just boring.  But this is also purely biographical, which means that nobody else cares anyway.  So this is largely a "me" post.

The post is below the line with current-day comments in italics.  Hopefully it'll be at least modestly entertaining.  Enjoy and happy holidays!

Boy, it's been a long time since I did any blogging. (Now: Exactly a week, to be precise.)  I've been meaning to get back to it, but it seems like I just haven't been able to find the time or energy.  Hopefully that will change now that things are finally settling down.  (Now: This actually still applies, sadly.  Despite being part of the "zoomocracy" and hence managing the pandemic as well as can be expected, I've found the whole thing has been a constant slow sap on my energy.  I've tried to maintain healthy habits and schedules and have managed fairly well, but still....)

There's been a lot going on here in the last couple of months.  Of course, there was the usual holiday hubbub.  My wife always insists on making a big production for Thanksgiving and Christmas, even when she doesn't have time to.  (Now: One up-ish side of the pandemic is that this hasn't been an issue the last couple of years.  That's not precisely a "good" thing, it does put the stress of big holiday plans in perspective.  Although I do miss some of it.  For instance, I was just thinking the other day about how every year I would make and package a bunch of cookie dough for my grandmother at Christmas.  She passed in early 2020 at the age of 89, in the first wave of the pandemic.  She was never very good at making cookies - when they were kids, apparently when she mentioned to my uncles that she might make some cookies, they would tell here that maybe she should wait for my mom to come home and let her do it.  So every year I would freeze her a bunch of pre-rolled cookies that she could just pop in the oven.  She would take them to events at church and people would tell her what good cookies she made.)  We also found a buyer for our house in Corning and moved the last of stuff out.  I've been trying to unpack and organize things, but it's very slow going.  

In the moving process, we also acquired a piano.  It's actually my mom's piano, which she doesn't play and has been wanting to get out of the house for some time.  I, however, do play and I've been immensely enjoying trying to get back in practice.  (Now: This is also still relevant.  I don't play that much anymore, but I still find it relaxing to do every now and then.  The last few weeks I've broken out the old Christmas carol sheet music in honor of the holidays.  Even though things are better than last Christmas, we're still not really back to normal.  So in these weird times, I find playing the piano a nice way to decompress, put aside the worries, and think about better days.)