Windbringer's internal clock tells me that, as I write this the calendar date is 27 December 2025. To be honest, I kind of lost track of the date just before Christmas of this year. Everything started blurring together around that time, in part because it had been raining so much in California and in part because my schedule - my usual sense of how things are supposed to happen - no longer exists. I'm still searching for a new job and while I might have one or two leads I have no details. Plus, hanging one's hat on a single option is …
As I write this we're just a week or so shy of Christmas. It's been, to put it mildly, one hell of a year. Enough so that I've pretty much coasted into holiday break on fumes (again) and, probably against my better judgement, I'm trying to come up with something (anything, really) to write. If I were smart I'd give it another couple of days to relax and get my head straight. Maybe read some books or something to let the organics rest and wiring cool down.
This blog post is probably going to make less sense than usual. It's certainly going to be out of order semantically; I'll try to minimize the disjunctions as best I can and I apologize in advance. Lately I haven't had the time (thanks to log4shell) or the compute cycles (thanks to my mental health) to sit down and work on this post. Everything's been laying pretty heavily lately, and it's been an effort to just make myself sit down and work on this post. I keep thinking of little things to post to keep those switches in my head going …
May all your toys come with batteries, your books have ample margins for note taking, your clothes be just what you like to wear, and your chance to sleep in be long enough to get a good night's rest.
Well, the holiday season is upon us once again. Not that you could fail to notice unless you've been living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and your only link to the outside world is a 300bps modem connection over shortwave radio. As it's wont to be down here, the weather in the DC metroplex is a little erratic, swerving drunkenly from shirtsleeves comfortable to bone-chillingly cold to damp and rainy almost on a daily basis. Lyssa and I took a few days off last week to drive back to Pennsylvania and visit our respective families for Thanksgiving and …
The powers that be saw fit to give everyone at work an opportunity to go home four hours early on 24 December 2008, the better to go home and get ready for Christmas Eve. To that end, I sniffled and honked a bit and set course for home where Lyssa was still hard at work. I sat down to fill out my paperwork for the week (such is the life of a professional contractor), packed a duffel bag for the weekend, and slowly came to the conclusion that I'd somehow caught the beginnings of a cold earlier in the day …
Lyssa took sick last week. On Thursday she woke up having trouble breathing while I was in the shower, which threw our plans into a tailspin. I took a sickday and drove her to urgent care (where I seem to spend far too much time in the waiting room these days), only to discover that she has a sinus infection. Lyssa spent the bulk of the weekend in bed pumped full of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, with the odd sortie to get food in some form or go shopping.
This also meant that I was running solo when I went …
