I’m tired. A friend of mine transferred colleges over the winter break, and after his other friend with a pickup truck got sick it fell to me to get him to his new town so he could move into his apartment in time for the Spring Semester. And DAMN did it rain on us! Sheets of water like rivers falling out of the sky! Cars on the highway not giving a damn! I felt even if I were to turn on my high beams on I would barely see the next car in front of me! The three hour round trip was a hell of a journey that I do not want to repeat, but I’m glad at least that my friend is safe in his new apartment.

Small post today. New Year’s is often the time for resolutions, demands from yourself to yourself that you will change yourself in the future. But it doesn’t have to be the only time, I’ve made resolutions to myself throughout this year and will likely do so into next year too. I haven’t kept to all of them but I’ve always tried my best. I want to be always improving, not just when it’s popular to do so.

My cousin only uses her phone to text, and only texts by using talk to type, she says things and the phone will write her message. During Christmas she was texting with friends while speaking with the family, but didn’t realize some of her more uncharitable remarks were being picked up and typed by her phone. I think she’ll have a lot of explaining to do to her friends.

My Christmas letter this year was a bit personal, but there is a small part of it that I do want to broadcast to the world

I went to a Christmas party with my extended family, and I got a look around at the folks my age, older, and younger, and I thought about what my life is and what I hope it will be. I don’t know if I’m on a path that will lead me where I want to go, and I’m not sure what I could do to change it. I still want to get my continue my work in science, I still think I’m a good enough writer to work in scientific or technical communication as well, and I think I’m a good enough analyst to even understand financials and the work “under the hood.” Yet I haven’t reached a level in my career that gives me the comfort and freedom I truly want. I know none of us gets all we want, we’re always left with these self-doubts and self-reflections, wondering if our choices will take us where we want to go, but these days I feel overwhelmed by my doubts and fears about my own future. A lot of young friends I know joke about existential fears they feel, that Climate Change or Nuclear War will kill us all within a few decades, but then those same friends go about their day without seeming to feel any ill effects from the dread. What’s the opposite of existential? I feel a very personal dread every day and I do think it’s keeping me from doing my best, the fear of failure may be causing me to fail, and I don’t like it but don’t know how to avoid it. Whatever comes, I want you all to know that I will keep trying, keep striving, keep working towards my goals and towards the work I hope will help everyone. I don’t know what the future will bring me, but I promise to always try.

I hope all my readers are having fun with their families, I know I am. I hope in the coming year I can continue to update this blog and bring whatever expertise I have to whatever subjects I can.

As with many people, I travel during Christmas to see my family. I’m currently staying at a family member’s house, typing out a blog post because I still want to write every day. They’re working on decorating and I don’t want to disturb them, but I don’t know the password to their wifi. I’m having to make do by using my phone as a personal hotspot, but the bandwidth is terrible and it takes like 20 seconds to load any webpage. This had made me think of a question: what technology would I miss the most if I lost it? Agriculture might be pretty high up there, but the internet would definitely take top spot. I could probably do without a car or climate controlled rooms for longer than I could do without the internet, it’s just made my life so much easier and more fun. I like to blog, I like to game online, but more deeply I like to keep in touch with all my friends who live far away and work with my collaborators who live in other countries. I like that when I travel I can easily book hotels and find restaurants all before I arrive in a city, and that when I’m home I can find which hotspots are too crowded to go to without wasting my time to first go to them. Even reading has gotten more fun with the internet, Agatha Christie had a habit of dropping random bits of French into her books just because, and if I read those books without the internet I’d have no way of knowing what a character had said, and wondering to myself if it had been an important clue. Now I can just type it into google translate and know “ah, that character was just mocking another one’s accent, cute.” Not to mention that I can start a book on a kindle, lose that kindle, and continue right where I left off on a second kindle. And also not to mention that my local library has an email digest of new books that are often very interesting, and which I’d have never known about if it weren’t so easy for them to tell me about them through email.

Yeah the internet is pretty great, I should ask for the wifi password.

I’ve lived in the same house for many years and I’ve almost always slept with the heating off at night. The winters around here aren’t brutal, but their cold enough to chill you to the bone without plenty of blankets. Recently the heating unit in the front of the house failed, and while it’s being fixed I’ve been using a space heater to stay comfortable. I told myself I’d only use it a little, but after having it on blast just a few feet away from me while I stay awake reading, it’s very hard not to leave it on to keep me warm while I go to sleep. Heck it’s very hard not to keep it on at all times day and night, with it blasting warm air I feel like a ball of warmth in the middle of a snowstorm. Psychologically, just knowing that right now with the push of a button I could be warm instead of cold makes it hard for me not to push the button and warm myself up. I hope the heating gets fixed soon or I could become addicted to this.

OK not really. But we all know that workers don’t always give their 100% for the company, we all know that some people who work from home (or even work in an office) will spend hours on their phone not being “productive.” But where’s the line? I ask this because when I log my time, I sometimes log time that wasn’t necessarily spent physically doing things for the company. Maybe I took a walk, maybe I was chatting with coworkers, maybe I even left and came back. But I had things to do late at night so I claimed I worked late into the night (which I did) even though maybe the entire night wasn’t “work” so much as “work, then play then work some more.” I don’t know, just wanted to think out loud.

This year was a weird Thanksgiving since we had a vegetarian guest with us, but my family made build-your-own pizzas (with plenty of vegetable options for our guest) plus vegetarian snacks like falafel and Indian mixed snacks. Then we had apple pie and brownies for dessert (pretty American). We don’t always or even usually have the traditional ham/turkey so this wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for us. I remember one time we made sushi for Thanksgiving (sushi rice is hard to cook if you’re on your own but a lot easier with help) and I think we may have had pizza for Thanksgiving before this.

The traditional ham/turkey Thanksgiving is definitely not bad, I’d really enjoy it for next year, but I also like the fact that we can sometimes just do whatever we want instead. I like a little variety, especially with friends coming over.