Thursday, December 20, 2007

The Summer of Mark. By a bit of bad luck I'm going to have two weeks off over the holidays.

I say "bad luck" because I wanted to work so as not to go into the negative on vacation days when we go back to the States in a few months. But there's just no work in my office to justify it.

Marjorie has to work, though. So I've been coming up with a plan for how to spend my time. The plan includes:

  • Bringing my techie website back on line
  • Updating my CV
  • Finishing up some personal programming projects
  • Tracking down some books for a certain relative
  • Sorting out our various frequent flier miles
  • Starting some kind of exercise program
  • Keep studying my Spanish

    There's a distinct danger, though, that it might end up like:

  • Sleeping until noon, then surfing the internet all day in my underwear
  • Sunday, December 16, 2007

    Stumbling towards Christmas we are. Marjorie's parents just left, after a big long crazy visit involving planes, trains, more trains, helicopters, more helicopters, and automobiles. The only excursion I took with them for was the Puffing Billy one, which was a disappointment for all of us Americans who are used to at least some animatronics with their tourist traps. Anyway, my father-in-law Rob spent lots of time writing up a great account of their adventures, and hopefully I can convince him to start a blog instead of emailing it around.

    Christmas, though, will be a quiet one again for us this year, but that's okay. We do sometimes pine for the good proper cold-weather, never-ending consumerist nightmare that is Christmas in America but I think in the end it's just the family part that we miss.