Holiday Reckoning

The holiday season is in its last day for me.  I took the two weeks around the holidays off from work, as is my usual pattern unless I am saving up vacation time for some big trip, so I have been off since December 20th.

Tomorrow though, tomorrow it is back to the office.  Back to work.  Back to reality.

Back to getting up early.

I say I am turning into my grandfather because I get up early like he used to.  But that might be as much habit from work as anything, because it turns out that after a couple of weeks without work my sleeping habits will change.  I cannot sleep until noon, something only the young seem capable of, but I was in bed until nearly 10am a couple of mornings.  And while I started off my vacation time going to bed at a reasonable hour, Friday night I was up gaming until past 1am and didn’t feel all that tired. (Though, granted, I had taken a nap that afternoon.)  So my sleep pattern is all messed up.

But it was a good two weeks or so off.  The holidays themselves went well enough.  We also saw a few movies in the theater (Star Wars, Jumanji, Knives Out), and more on streaming (The Irishman, Dolemite is My Name), as well as binging on a some TV (The Witcher, The Expanse, and finishing off The Madalorian).  I am sure there were a few more titles in there, but those are the ones that spring to mind.

I even managed to find some time to read.  For no good reason I decided to go back and knock out The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series again.  It has the advantage that I am able to knock out a book from that in about a day.  I think going after that was something of a reaction to my attempting to tackle Life and Fate again, a grim work by Vassily Grossman about the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union.  I will finish that some day.

And, of course, I got in a lot of video game time.  ManicTime says that I spent most of it playing EverQuest II.  I have been into the Blood of Luclin expansion pretty heavily.  I have two characters at both the adventure and trade skill level cap at this point.  Expect a few posts about that as well as the efforts to get a third character along that path… and wondering what other characters I ought to look into.

I did play a bit of WoW Classic, but with the holidays the instance group was often busy with other plans.  We’ll get back to that in the new year.  And I did go on a few ops in EVE Online.  But hours played is about 7 to 1 in favor of EQII against everything else.

Tomorrow it is back to the regular routine.  My alarm clock… which is an iPad these days… will wake me up a little after 5am and I will get in the shower, get dressed, and be on my way to work.  The fat and happy times of the holidays will be over.  The next official day off of work is Memorial Day, way out in May.

I only have a couple more end of year posts set to go before that is all a memory.  Then it will be back to the more normal pattern here as I adapt the old ways to another new year.