Today is my last scheduled day of work for 2020. I’ve tied up everything I need to apart from one email response from one individual, who’s reply need only consist of “thumbs up*” for me to close the book on this particular item and feel like I’m keeping the project on track. Also, my body wouldn’t let me sleep past 4am this morning, so I got the day started early. Hopefully I can finish it early as well.

We’ll see.

As I said previously, once I wrap things up for the day, my plan is to go out for a celebratory happy hour drink at the grocery store, as one does, because it’s socially distanced and relatively low risk, and craft pints are three dollars. I also probably need some stuff at the grocery store, because with three giant children at home all the time, food, shall we say, disappears.

Feel free to raise a glass of whatever in solidarity this afternoon. Slante.

The big question, of course, is whether my scheduled holiday leave will be paid or not, because headlines are suggesting that passage of omnibus spending bills and the latest slimmed-down pandemic stimulus package are coming down to the wire, presenting the possibility that the government will shut down…again, on Friday at midnight. Why does this happen? Quoth the linked article above:

Asked what the hold-up was, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said: “Why this takes so long is because we procrastinate and we pretend just one more day and we’ll get a better deal.”

Thanks for the honesty, Congressman, it’s refreshing. Happy holidays. In the meantime, should such a thing happen, a few sales of this little ditty would help keep the lights on around here….just sayin’.

Otherwise, life will go on. It always does.

A few housekeeping notes: with me on holiday break, I will probably post a bit less, because a lot of my break is getting the hell away from screens for a while. I wanna cook some meals, and read the couple of nice paper books I got from the library the other day. I’ll probably pop in from time to time, because, well, in ‘Rona-world, internet-enable devices are the great window to communicating with other humans. Were I you, dear reader, however, I’d expect at least a couple of year-end wrap-up and reflection posts, because that’s how I roll.

So, to wrap this up…some tunes. I woke up (again, really damned early) with the first tune on this list running in the back of my mental soundtrack for some reason (I don’t know why – my head is weird); so I fed it into the spotify algorithms and it spit out this play list, populated, unsurprisingly, by lots of 80s hair metal and butt rock, with a few nods to my mid-life 120 Minutes habits as tracked by the service. Rawk:

1. “Wait” – White Lion
2. “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” – Quiet Riot
3. “Who’s Behind the Door” – Zebra
4. “I Remember You” – Skid Row
5. “Sister Christian” – Night Ranger
6. “Fire Woman” – The Cult
7. “Superman” – REM
8. “Got You (Where I Want You) – The Flys
9. “One Tree Hill” – U2
10. “Need You Tonight” – INXS
11. “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) – Kate Bush
12. “Semi-Charmed Life” – Third Eye Blind

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* – you don’t wanna know how long I tried to get the proper Unicode character to display here before just giving up. Ugh.