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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A week. Yes it was. The most exciting thing I did besides voting was buy tires. Otherwise it was conference calls, plugged up sinuses, a little cooking, a little music rehearsal, some push-ups, and just getting through it. Yep. Tonight I’ll take a drive out to SBC for the fall dance concert, Saturday I’ll push […]