Today is the last official* day of my work year, and I’m counting the minutes, as the watermarked stock photo image above suggests. I haven’t taken that much time off in 2018, and given my level of seniority and the kind of leave I earn, the concept of “use-or-lose” comes into play, so I have […]

So, I ended up getting two days off of work thanks to the twelve-to-fourteen(!) inches of snow Mother Nature saw fit to dump on my section of the mid-Atlantic starting early Sunday morning; so early, in fact that they cancelled the 5k the youngest and I were going to run that afternoon. Oh well, I […]

Today looks relatively quiet, especially after yesterday, where it seemed I was stuck briefing all the important people everywhere. As I said on social media, even two decades in public service, up here near the top of the pay scale, it’s weird to know that on a semi-regular basis, my voice echoes through the august […]

I’ve been pretty busy this week so far. At work, it’s lots of meetings, testing, decision-making, and setting things up so I can disappear for two and a half weeks’ holiday break starting in eight working days (since tomorrow is the “National day of Mourning for President Bush*, and thus a federal holiday in practice). […]

Greetings from Friday morning. It’s been a long week, not the least of which because I’ve spent it primarily on the phone while sounding like a frog, or blowing my nose, or coughing up yellow/green mucus, all while surrounded by freezing temperatures, sometimes on the inside (my office yesterday was weird). Except for Tuesday, when […]

Happy Monday. My holiday weekend was relatively relaxing. After I wrapped work on Wednesday (ending my week with some good news for once), the crew went out and had dinner and caught a screening of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which was problematic, but pretty. I missed the fun character moments and inherent sweetness […]

Got a nice long holiday weekend queued up, and I largely knocked down all the big rocks at work on Tuesday afternoon. It’s nice to be able to pass along good news at status meetings. Weather was also pretty nice on Tuesday; I didn’t have the bike, but I stopped at the park and briskly […]

Winter came on like gangbusters, huh? No snow here in the RVA, but my friends in DC and environs farther north and west got spanked with snow, ice, and power outages. We just got tons of rain and a bunch of wind. One of the trees in my back yard fell down, though sadly, it […]

This was another weekend for putting a bunch of miles on the car, but as is usual, there’s some pretty cool stuff at the other end of the drive. Friday night, we drove out to SBC for the fall dance concert, where Mary had a couple of performances, including a self-choreographed solo piece that was […]