This has not been the greatest of years, so I'm not upset to see it go. The final day of 2023 has been a typical Sunday in a lot of ways; laundry, lunch, call grandma, practice. Our tradition is to get Chinese food for dinner, then play a game, so we did that. I'd had a headache, which started while I was practicing--mild, possibly due to eye ( Read more... )

It's New Year's Eve and, while I'm home now, I did go out today.

First, though, 2022 is really ending on a downer. Pelé died this week; Barbara Walters died last night; and I woke up to learn Pope Benedict XVI died this morning. Goodness. A lesser-known person who died this week is Keenan Cahill, who made lip-sync videos when he was in high school ( Read more... )

Betty White died today ( Read more... )

The first day of 2021 felt suspiciously like 2020 for me, in that it was a Friday, normally a workday, and I was at home in my PJs. Hopefully this is the last weekday I'm home for a while. Next week should be the first full week I'll have worked since the week of November 9th, nearly two months ( Read more... )

I've had some great years; I've had some sucky years. Recently, 2015 and 2017 had their moments. But this year...it gets its own category for the sheer, unabashed steamroller it was over virtually every nook and cranny on the planet. I am not at all sorry to see this year go ( Read more... )

My now-retired coworker used to say to us, as certain timeframes ended, on behalf of the management, take the rest of the month/year off. In honor of him, my boss said to the manager and me today, you can take the rest of the decade off ( Read more... )

I've started re-reading last year's posts in preparation for my end-of-year summary, and I'd heard the weather people talking about the deep freeze we were in at the last turn of the calendar. I honestly had no recollection of how brutally cold it was, other than it being a whole 15F when we went to my cousin's son's birthday party last year. The ( Read more... )

It's blue, because that's the color your skin will turn if you go outside uncovered for any length of time. Seriously, it's brutal. I woke up this morning to -13F temps. Officially at O'Hare, today's high was +1F. That's it. That's the coldest New Year's Day on record; the previous was 5F in 1969, I believe. They've been talking about it for ( Read more... )

Another year down. I went back and re-read last year's NYE post. Not a whole lot changed from last year, in some respects, although with it falling on a Sunday that meant doing laundry in addition to other things. :P Dad felt festive and made pancakes and scrambled eggs, so we awoke to that smell--familiar yet unusual at the same time. And he ( Read more... )

We have less than six hours to go in my time zone until next year!

My parents went to the movies (Manchester by the Sea), and we got our traditional Chinese food dinner, but other than that, that's been about it. I've been working on my year-end round-up post and hope to have that up soon--definitely sooner than last year, but even though I've ( Read more... )