Friday, December 16, 2011

Ok, you're way too busy anyway, Kevin

Friday may be dark and wet this morning, but he's still everybody's favorite.  Any other day of the week coming in this drab and damp would be scolded for dripping all over our floors, but not Friday.  We'll gladly invite him in, wet and all. "Just toss your wet togs over there, here's a nice warm mug of coffee (or mate) for you.  Come on in, stay and tell us stories of the day."

The weather has also warmed, just enough to no longer be really cold.  Not that we know intense cold here in the mild climes of the Pacific Northwest, but we do know cold.  Any time temperatures hover around the freezing mark, it's cold. Some recent mornings I was put in mind of A. A. Milnes's poem Furry Bear, which begins:

If I were a bear,
   And a big bear too,
I shouldn’t much care
   If it froze or snew;
I shouldn’t much mind
   If it snowed or friz—
I’d be all fur-lined
   With a coat like his!

We suffice with layers of clothing that can be donned or shed as the office HVAC system swings from too warm to too cold across its many-seasoned daily schedule, with special waterproof layers for stepping out between buildings on campus.

Speaking of campus, this is the last weekday before the campus closes up for the week of Christmas. This one-week rolling up of the sidewalks and rolling down of the shutters is becoming an annual tradition, a way to scavenge energy and operational savings to apply to the endlessly-on-rolling budget cuts. So next week will be a week off.

I had big plans for work-related things I would get caught up on with a whole week off (no meetings, no new issues to address!) but it has been a tough several months and I think I need a week unplugged to try and catch up/replenish some internal reserve.

I asked Siri (the voice-command system on my iPhone) to schedule a meeting for a particular time yesterday and she responded by pointing out this would conflict with five other meetings and asking if I really wanted her to go ahead and schedule it. When I said no she responded with:









Point taken. Next week will (mostly) be unplugged from campus-related stuff.

Today's commute music was complex. More complex than I would have called up for a Friday morning, but the iPod's shuffle algorithm had a different opinion about that, I guess.

The complete playlist:
  • Ablaye Cissko & Volker Goetze: Faro
  • Explosions In The Sky: Last Known Surroundings
  • Michael Torke Bank: Overnight Mail: Standard

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