post drafts
Welcome back weekday workers! Interested in how my Christmas went? I already wrote all about that on Saturday. Spoiler alert! I had a good day. The day didn't look anything like what we all wanted, or certainly what any of us might have imagined a year ago, but we still made it work. I don't think of it as any kind of failure or anything to write off. It wasn't "just another day" for me. It was as special as I could make it, and that made it still special in its own way. So there! Anyway if you want far more detail you can click that link.
I had no socializing over the weekend otherwise, which was just as well because I was very busy being very productive with working on my perennial year-end posts—when I wasn't watching movies, anyway. (Side note: on Saturday evening Shobhit and I watched the new Pixar film, Soul, via Disney+, and I really loved it; solid A, and I am eager to watch it again.) In fact I have already posted two of them: Book Log 2020 yesterday morning, and Top 20 Audio: Top 10 Albums, Top 10 Podcasts this morning. Tomorrow will be my Top 10 Cinema post—the draft of that one is nearly finished—and then on Wednesday morning I will send out my perennial "Year at PCC" email, which I will also cross-post here as well. And then of course, New Year's Eve morning, I'll post my "2020 in Ten Minutes" video, which necessitated a lot of painful editing in order to trim it down to exactly ten minutes, but it was kind of needed anyway. That is nearly finished as well. All because I worked on all of these posts quite a lot over the weekend, while Shobhit was at work.
I had actually intended to buy a ticket to another online Doug Benson comedy show on Saturday, but then I totally spaced it because of the work I was doing. Well, okay, and I also watched a couple more Christmas movies on Netflix: The Christmas Chronicles on Saturday (it was barely fun enough to be worth watching; I loved the Goldie Hawn reveal/cameo at the end) and then The Christmas Chronicles Part Two yesterday (this one was dumb and not really worth the two-hour investment, oh well).
So now I embark on the second of two four-day work weeks in a row, now that this year PCC has added New Year's Day to the list of holiday-pay days. At first it was just Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day and Independence Day; later they added Labor Day and now they've added New Year's Day. I especially appreciate this latest addition, as I have always taken PTO for this day so I don't have to worry about getting up early for work the morning after staying up past midnight to greet the New Year.
And! Just as the "office" (meaning, including home offices) closed at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the same will happen on New Year's Eve this week. Thankfully I have no major deadlines looming this week—though there certainly remains plenty of work to get done—so it should be a relatively leisurely work week to come, even being shortened.
Looking forward, and knowing it will be months before whatever "group" I am considered part of is likely to get vaccinated, I have been thinking a bit about how I may need to make an extra effort to be sociable in one way or another over the course of the rest of this winter, which is poised to be long and dark in multiple ways. I have nothing of note planned in my life until my next Birth Week, and that is at the end of April. The past three months or so have been through a holiday season which, though not what any of us wanted it to be exactly, was still busy and festive, in its way. I don't want to get sucked into any kind of post-holidays doldrums. As of right now we do still have New Year's Eve to look forward to (even that will have to be rung in at home—I do have an idea for an outdoor activity earlier in the evening though), but after that? Three solid months of just living our lives for the most part just inside our homes. I mean, we managed it for the past nine months, but there's also the point that the shutdowns of this pandemic in 2020 happened just as spring was beginning; this will be the first time experiencing it through solid winter months. The upside is that we won't have things like Thanksgiving or Christmas to spur ignorant people into foolishly long-distance travel, particularly by air, and hopefully the inevitable post-holiday infection spikes will gradually level off.
[posted 12:31 pm]