Merry Christmas

It just went past midnight here in the Central time zone, so I can officially wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

Or Happy Christmas, as I heard multiple times in the past week as well. Comes with working with lots of Brits. :-)

So, what have I been up to that kept me away from the blog for almost two weeks?

Work and having the kids at home. So, a good chunk of my audience (such as it is) is here anyway. Work has been pretty hectic, demanding, but also going alright. At least I'm doing even better than just keeping up now.

Of course, I've got to be on a call at midnight Pacific time, probably for an hour. So, I'' be up until 3am. I've done that a couple other nights in the past two weeks as well.

I've been holding the hotline phone since December 15, as I was covering part of the time for another person who's been out sick/disabled for a while. The worst of it was losing pretty much all of Saturday the 16th on a call. As of midnight, I'm officially done with my own coverage week, though I told another colleague that I'd cover a few hours tomorrow (well, today now) while he picked up relatives at the airport.

I've also been busy playing some D&D. We've gotten in the first chapter of "Red Hand of Doom", played another module to set our group up better for future chapters of "Red Hand of Doom", and got in a couple modules that will be retiring at the end of the year. One of those Kalen really wanted to play and all the rest of us were going, "Oh, we've heard that's so bad, so hard, kills everyone". I had it on my "do not play" list due to the stories I'd heard of it. As it turned out, that module rocked. It was so much fun, although they did try to cram a bit too much into it.

Christmas shopping: I hadn't done any ... ANY! ... until today. And just as I was about to go out shopping, the hotline phone rang. Fortunately, it was one of my colleagues letting me know about the stuff tonight, so nothing I had to deal with right that moment. So, I did get out this afternoon and did all the shopping I really needed to do.

Tomorrow we'll open present here, then go to a late brunch (1pm) at the Holiday Inn in Naperville (avoiding cooking, thus avoiding the need for subsequent clean up and generation of leftovers). First thing Tuesday morning we'll be driving to Iowa to spend the rest of the week.