tarotgal

According to the news, the House has voted to end the shutdown, which hopefully means I'll get the return-to-work order sometime today and be able to resume my regularly scheduled workday first thing tomorrow. Then again, every time we do this is the first time we've ever done it and we have to figure it all out again from scratch, so heaven only knows.

I had a decently productive day off, actually. Did a few loads of laundry and a bit of tidying, in addition to ferrying the boys to and from school (finally open as of today after more than a week despite sidewalks remaining largely uncleared). Recently I've found an immense amount of difficulty figuring out what to do with myself a lot of the time. It's frustrating. I don't have scads of free time but when I do I find myself feeling restless and irritable. Basic chores like laundry are done and I don't feel like reading or drawing or playing games or watching TV or anything else I can think of.

I think what I need is a project. Gluebooking used to fill that niche but I take so few trips anymore that there's nothing in the queue save generic ephemera and I need to be in a special mood for un-themed collage. Sorting Lego was good for this as well but that's finished until/unless Jason changes his mind on any existing sets. Jason and I are still doing our weekday drawings but that only takes me about ten minutes. I need something longer term that I can work on at home here and there, or even occasionally for hours at a stretch.

I think the main thing I'm missing is the feeling of progress. I want to feel like I'm accomplishing something. Obviously I don't need to feel that way every minute of every day but but even when I'm relaxing I don't like feeling like I'm wasting time. And to be clear, I don't think of reading or watching TV or playing video games as wasting time. I just don't want to do those things all the time. They also don't come with the same sense of progress. Some video games do, of course, but the one I'm playing most right now (WoW) does not, by design.

So I'll have to give it some thought.

Though the forecast leading up to the storm was for up to two feet of snow, I think the final total was somewhere around seven inches. Which is fine. The snow blower was the surprise MVP yesterday - I'd thought the freezing rain would have made things too heavy for it to work very well, but it saved us a ton of time and effort. Otherwise it was a quiet day of much video gaming. We'd done a fair bit of preparation: stocked up on groceries, got the fireplace checked out, brought some wood into the garage to keep dry, put the hose away so it didn't accidentally get shoveled to death, caught up on laundry, that kind of stuff. We were mostly worried about losing power, since there was so much ice in the forecast. Luckily, it turned out to be a bit of a nonevent in our household. Work is closed today (announced last Friday, which is unprecedented) so we can chill at home while they (hopefully) finish clearing all the roads.

Friday was fun. We saw She Kills Monsters with Zach and Dana. We met up at Buffalo Wing Factory for dinner, which Zach did not realize was not a Buffalo Wild Wings until he arrived, but it was still pretty tasty. The play itself was about a woman who finds her late sister's D&D notebook and plays through the campaign. It takes place in 1995, the year I turned 16, so every single song used between scenes was a kick in the nostalgia. It was silly and sweet and written for a pretty specific audience (which luckily was us). Reston puts on a lot of good shows so hopefully we'll go to more in the future.

Oh, funny story from the wedding: Dana said that she had somehow completely forgotten that I'm a singer, and when my quartet and I got up and she realized I was gonna sing, she was all, "Oh no!" Then I started singing and it was okay, of course. But man, the way she told it. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

Speaking of watching things, over the last few weeks we watched all three Haunted Mansion movies. The 2023 one is definitely the best, really leaning into the fun aspects of the ride. The 2003 Eddie Murphy one is just okay - it felt more like a generic haunted house movie with some ride elements jammed in there at random. Muppets Haunted Mansion is a Muppet special, full of bad jokes and silly songs and random cameos, so if you like Muppet specials, you will like Muppets Haunted Mansion.

(Speaking of Muppets, we brought that up again on Friday: Disney owns the Muppets and yet they're doing all these live-action remakes. They should be remaking all their films with Muppets! Muppet Little Mermaid! Muppet Aladdin! Muppet Star Wars! Muppet Marvel Cinematic Universe!)

Last Monday we went to Fair Oaks Mall for dinner with Robbie, Eick, Michelle, and their respective families. Jason and I were already out running errands so we showed up at the mall early and had fun browsing some of the shops. They have a store that's just claw machines, which is something Jason both loves and is very good at. He won me five plushies with just $20 worth of tokens. They have a VR place where Robbie and his daughter did a space ride. We got to watch what they were seeing, only without the 3D experience, so that was cool. (I get so sick on those kinds of rides so this was a great way for me to experience it without experiencing it, if you know what I mean.) Dinner was at Ugly Dumpling, which specializes in soup dumplings. We got the sampler and everything except the spicy one was delicious. Their pork chop fried rice was also amazing.

The Monday before that (there's just something about Mondays), I spent the evening in Maryland. Six and I grabbed dinner at California Fish Company, which was not only tasty but relatively cheap - entree, side, and drink for $20. I was in the area so I could return the riser boxes to HOM, and of course I stayed for rehearsal while I was there. They were working on their contest ballad: That Old Gang of Mine. I'm pretty sure it's not possible to sing that song without being three sheets to the wind, sloshing martini in hand. It was so great seeing those folks again but it did not make me miss being in that chorus. Which is a good thing, since it is not practical for me to be in that chorus anymore.

In tummy news, the colon-emptying treatment helped a lot but didn't entirely fix me, so we moved on to the stomach-emptying treatment. I do not think it is helping at all but I'm willing to continue it until I see the doc on Wednesday.

In other health news, that nasty cold/flu that's been going around hit our house. Both boys missed school and even Jason (who almost never gets sick) took a couple days off last week. All three of them have a lingering cough but are otherwise on the mend. I seem to have dodged a bullet - a couple weeks ago I was feeling a little poorly so I stayed home on a random Thursday and took about five hours of naps and have been pretty much fine ever since.

Tonight we have an M-team meeting to work on a culture map for this THRIVE program SAI is doing. This sort of mission/vision crap is so painful. Honestly, being on the M-team has been a miserable experience from the get-go and I am counting down the minutes until the end of my term. Which is, alas, not until May 2027. Sigh.