¡Feliz Año Nuevo! (Weeknotes

🎄 Since I didn’t mention our Christmas celebration in last week’s update, I’ll just give you the short version. My mother came down and stayed with us starting Christmas Eve. I had to work most of the week because I burned all my vacation time. Marlene and Eli spent most of the week in Paris. And of course my dad is no longer with us. It was a strange week on many levels. But we were all together on Christmas day, and it was good.

🍣 We celebrated New Year’s Eve as we have done for many years now, by going out for sushi with friends. Between friends, kiddos, and significant others, the event has grown to 18 people! We all meet for an early dinner together, then everyone fans out to party or (in our case) go to bed early.

🌴 On New Year’s Day, my vacation time reset so we traded the Ohio cold for six days and five nights of Caribbean sunshine (and warmth) in the Dominican Republic. We stayed at one of those all-inclusive resorts where we celebrated our 31st anniversary with unlimited food, unlimited drinks, swimming in five of the six pools, and walking on the beach. It was a very nice reset before jumping into what we expect to be a very busy new year.

🛂 My new passport now has ONE stamp and doesn’t look quite so sad any more!

😇 I don’t really do new year’s resolutions any more, but I have been reading some interesting things around the idea of setting themes and intentions for the year, so I’ve been ruminating on that.

Speaking of anniversaries, January 1st marked my second anniversary on social.lol. I love the community there. Thank you all!

📐 In case you’re wondering why you’re reading this on a Tuesday instead of on Sunday or Friday, it’s because I choose to celebrate the ISO 8601 date and time standard, which defines the week as starting on Monday and ending on Sunday. I like the definition because it is consistent with my way of thinking about the weekend as coming at the end of the week.^[1]

This Week In Media

I’ve been out of the country and haven’t watched any television. And I 👏 didn’t 👏 miss it 👏 at all.

I finished all 44 volumes of Drops of God by Tadashi Agi. I liked it a lot, but I’m a little annoyed that they didn’t actually wrap it up. Now I have to read the sequel series, which is 10 volumes and still in progress.

I started reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s the third in what I call my “spider trilogy,” which also includes Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar.

It’s Tuesday morning, January 7th, as a write this. It’s my last day off before returning to work tomorrow. Some of you may already have returned to work. I hope the week is going smoothly for you, and that the new year brings satisfaction and fulfillment. Cheers!