1000 buffalo stampede

… and I mean hot. Like born-on-the-sun hot. We’re having a bit of a cold snap out here in NorCal, and lemme tell ya, for NorCal, it’s cold.

Yea, yea … all my East Coast friends can stop snickering and chuckling. I know it’s not cold to you, but then again, I don’t call you mockingly in the middle of January and tell you how glad I am that I’m not commuting in two feet of accumulated slushy, dirty snow, or ask which order the insurance companies will be letting folks out in advance of the blizzard (Hartford, CT, I’m talking to you).

So, yea, I’ve acclimated. 11 years does that to a person.

But, I’ll tell ya – it’s 48 outside my office right now. 48. It was below freezing last night. Yes, below.

I’m on my 3rd (?) cup of hot coffee today, which followed the two pots of near boiling green tea that I swilled to get motivate to even come into the office.

And, of course, there’s the fact that I gave my old thinsulated long coat to the One Warm Coat project last winter, on account of having never needed it in the 10 years I’d been out here. That’ll teach me to get rid of something, eh?

Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and a Festive Season!

With all the crazy hectic-ness that’s been going on between work and elsewhere lately, I up and took a much needed (and, to be fair, long-planned) break this past weekend, and headed down to Anaheim for a short vacation. Technically, the event was GenCon SoCal, but really, the four of us who went treat it pretty much as our early winter vacation.

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Ha – if Hallmark and the retailers can do it, so can I. Now that we’re just clear of Halloween, it’s time to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, and a Happy New Year.

Of course, the former do it because no time like the present to make a holiday sale (cha-ching!) – understandable in our market economy. I do it because there’s a very good chance I’ll simply forgot to get the appropriate posts in for each of the holidays. So this, a pre-emptive holiday strike.

On the Halloween front, last night I got no trick-or-treaters – not-a-one. To be fair, I didn’t get home until 8 pm, probably long after any kids had come ’round looking for treats. I was out helping some friends get their home wifi connection up (with, sadly, zero luck), and they live out in the ‘burbs … where they had roving gangs of little trick-or-treaters. Doorbell went off every 5 minutes, if that, for a few hours. Actually, it was kind of nice – I haven’t seen that sort of Halloween activity since I was a little kid.