On Saturday, we joined our friends Jennyfer and Ted to celebrate Ted’s birthday. These folks (who we know via the dance studio – Jennyfer and Colleen are part of the adult dancer contingent), are in their mid-twenties, and have a wonderful kind of energy that I, as a fortysomething old man, don’t necessarily have. In […]

I’m funded, working, and got paid yesterday. I’m relieved and thankful, but I also feel exceedingly guilty about it, because 800,000 odd other public servants, including many good friends, haven’t been paid for a month, and there’s really no resolution in sight for fixing this stupid impasse. In fact, in the paycheck I got yesterday […]

Marscon was pretty damned great. I worked hard, made a bunch of great music (full five-piece band!), got to play some of my own stuff and it got some pretty decent acclaim, made some new friends, played some games, and shared the stage (and drinks, and fun and all kinds of things) with some amazing […]

Haven’t been all that active this week for a number of reasons. One, I’ve been feeling not great; it’s the time of year for weird sinus and whatever things, so I’ve been largely mainlining vitamin C and rest so I’m in better shape for the weekend, and it almost actually seems to be working. We’ll […]

Overall, this week, in spite of it’s perceived length, hasn’t been awful, at least for me. Yes, huge swaths the federal government is still shut down over temper tantrums, I spent most of Thursday bundled up in my coat and scarf in my office because the heat is really wonky, and the mid-atlantic is panicking […]

This is going to be the longest one in history. No question. As long as stuff like this happens, it’s going to go on. the federal workers’ scuttlebut is that we should gird our loins for a long one. You all know my political leanings. You all also know, more or less, where I work. […]

Although the weather is threatening to get weird again as we slide into the back half of the week, yesterday afternoon it was flirting with 70°, so I prepared by strapping the bike on the back of the car on Monday evening and threw some riding clothes into the man-bag, and hit the trail after […]

So. Yeah. Given the ennui bomb I dropped in the last post, I kind of set the tone for my first (albeit short) week back at the office. Yesterday was, in spite of some generally good news from the program (problems fixed in my absence, potential schedule shift giving me an extra eight weeks or […]

Today, January 2, is my last day of my so-called “Christmas Break”. All told, it was some time away from work. I got some stuff done, got some books read, played a little music, and, I guess, didn’t think too hard about project deadlines for a couple of weeks, but at the same time, it […]