Monday, December 01, 2014

Week Wrap-up

Because I now accrue leave at a faster rate that I can actually spend it, I decided to take all of last week off for Thanksgiving. This is a far cry from the early days of my career, where I would come into the office on every federal holiday in order to get work done while the halls were quiet.

In fact, I went back through my old work records to see what Thanksgiving Week looked like 10 years ago and found that I actually worked all 7 days out of that week. To be fair, 99% of that time was probably spent waiting for WebLogic Workshop to compile and deploy portlets. I spent that Thanksgiving with Kathy and Chris in Falls Church, dedicating my minimal non-work time to the inception of "Cheese Soup", a recipe that chugged along fitfully for about seven years before I finally accepted that the demanding preparation steps did not give it a good cost-deliciousness ratio.

The first couple days of my 2014 vacation week were lost to proposal work, but the remainder were quite relaxing.

  • I watched the new season of 24 on Amazon Prime, and was happy to see that they took my advice to slim it down to 12 with most of the fat trimmed off.

  • I pulled my trumpet out of storage and played for a grand total of about three hours over the week. I performed the Halsey-Stevens sonata very poorly for Booty.

  • I discovered that Mists of Pandaria had been added for free to my World of Warcraft account and, smelling a loophole, reactivated my account to give it a try. I then learned that this expansion was so old that everyone had gotten it for free and I had not actually stuck anything to the Man.

  • It rained and snowed on Wednesday, but only in a conversational way. "Conversational" snow means that no one can shut up about it even though it's mostly slush.

  • I had my first trip to Morton's with the visiting Gillises, to spend a work-bestowed gift card (from yet another proposal effort) on steaks. They were good, but not exponentially better than the ones I can buy at Costco and make at home -- I continue to remain convinced that there is no meal in the world worth spending more than about $28 on.

  • We had Thanskgiving lunch with Rebecca's parents, and then went to see the unnecessary bio-pic, Theory of Everything.

  • We went to a family reunion for Rebecca's mom's side of the family in Taylorstown on Saturday where they played their traditional chaotic group solitaire game, in which everyone plays solitaire but shares the ace stacks with the rest of the group. We also stopped off at Crooked Run again on the way home, enjoying the ambiance, but finding that their rotating beers weren't quite as exciting this time around.

  • We used a gift card we got from Mike for a dinner at Chili's (first date nostalgia) on Sunday night. We had only been to a Chili's once since that first February 2007 experience, and our local version had been renovated to resemble a luxurious... Pei Wei. The food was plentiful, and exactly what you would expect from a Chili's.

How was your week?

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