Back at work

After a lengthy holiday, I'm once again back at work starting this morning. Probably won't get to getting anything meaningful done for at least a day or so, as I now have a month of admin to catch up on (email, cleaning up after all the chron tasks that have been churning away in my absence), but that's a good thing as I always have to ease back into work after such a long time away.

This year's holiday was a pleasant one in one respect: our family suffered through a minimum amount of sickness, which means we only had to deal with the exhaustion of the endless social events without heaping illness on top of it. I know that a lot of you all were not so fortunate, and you have my sympathies.

However, this year's book catchup was a bit of a flop compared to last year. I did manage to clear a few books off the pile, but I still have one or two sitting there staring at me ("Lies of Locke Lamora", I'm look at you). However as mentioned in a previous post, I'm pretty committed to the notion that this year my project will be to chew through as much of my collection of Gene Wolfe's books as I can, spelling that task only with reading for my Dickens book group ("Our Mutual Friend") and the odd breather between Wolfe books or the "carry around" book I have for line-ups and the like (currently "The Prisoner of Zenda").

This holiday season I managed to try out a few new boardgames, the most memorable being "Cuba", which seems like a lot of fun despite the fact that I got absolutely pantsed in my first playing of it. I still haven't tried "Race For The Galaxy" yet, but it also seems like it will be a great deal of fun (from reading the rules) -- sort of a crunchier version of "San Juan". However, I rather expected to get more boardgames played over the holidays than I did, just as I rather expected to get more books read. Oh well.

I spent a fair amount of time watching some rather mindless films, and some not so mindless (the most not so mindless was "Oldboy", a very thought provoking work about which I still haven't completely made up my mind). I also managed to get through the entire third season of "The Wire" and was glad I did: very, very solid. Depressing, but solid.

Back at work

After a lengthy holiday, I'm once again back at work starting this morning. Probably won't get to getting anything meaningful done for at least a day or so, as I now have a month of admin to catch up on (email, cleaning up after all the chron tasks that have been churning away in my absence), but that's a good thing as I always have to ease back into work after such a long time away.

This year's holiday was a pleasant one in one respect: our family suffered through a minimum amount of sickness, which means we only had to deal with the exhaustion of the endless social events without heaping illness on top of it. I know that a lot of you all were not so fortunate, and you have my sympathies.

However, this year's book catchup was a bit of a flop compared to last year. I did manage to clear a few books off the pile, but I still have one or two sitting there staring at me ("Lies of Locke Lamora", I'm look at you). However as mentioned in a previous post, I'm pretty committed to the notion that this year my project will be to chew through as much of my collection of Gene Wolfe's books as I can, spelling that task only with reading for my Dickens book group ("Our Mutual Friend") and the odd breather between Wolfe books or the "carry around" book I have for line-ups and the like (currently "The Prisoner of Zenda").

This holiday season I managed to try out a few new boardgames, the most memorable being "Cuba", which seems like a lot of fun despite the fact that I got absolutely pantsed in my first playing of it. I still haven't tried "Race For The Galaxy" yet, but it also seems like it will be a great deal of fun (from reading the rules) -- sort of a crunchier version of "San Juan". However, I rather expected to get more boardgames played over the holidays than I did, just as I rather expected to get more books read. Oh well.

I spent a fair amount of time watching some rather mindless films, and some not so mindless (the most not so mindless was "Oldboy", a very thought provoking work about which I still haven't completely made up my mind). I also managed to get through the entire third season of "The Wire" and was glad I did: very, very solid. Depressing, but solid.