Hot and Cold

The VRE train was exceedingly cold this morning, presumably because all of last week the temperatures kept getting up near or above 100 degrees and full-blast has become the default setting for the cars’ air conditioning. But today, rainy and high 70s during morning rush hour, that was a bit of overkill, and extra noticeable at that because the commute lasted longer than usual due to track maintenance slowing down the line speed. Not a fantastic way to kick off the week, but then again neither is coming into an office building that had its A/C turned off over the record-breaking heatwave-straddled weekend and is fairly muggy before the ventilation system has had a chance to work its magic Monday morning. Somehow, though, I will survive.

And I think (don’t want to make any untenable promises, but think) that the old blog will survive, too, at least a little bit longer. Kind of went AWOL there for a couple of weeks, which I could blame on various stances, circum- and happen- and the like. Partly it’s the technological incompatibility of the ever-evolving Blogger service and my more-antiquated-every-day GFE at work. That shouldn’t make a big difference, since the vast majority of time needed for blogging is the time it takes to write a post, and nothing’s stopping me from doing that in my downtime at the office like I used to, and the time required to post what I’ve written is miniscule, and that’s the only part of the process I no longer have access to from my cubicle. And yet, once again, I am a creature of habit and I had a good habit going with blogging from work every day, where the approaching end of said workday motivated me to get a post written and uploaded. Once those two things got uncoupled, everything fell apart. I knew even if I wrote at work I’d still have to post it from home, which meant maybe I could put off writing some (read: all) of the post until I got home as well, except of course that was highly improbable in terms of time management. And once I fell a day or two behind, recovering got harder and harder.

To say nothing of the above-invoked heatwave madness of recent weeks, or the not-invoked-before derecho that thankfully did not interrupt the flow of electricity at my house but did bring a massive tree down in our backyard (as well as bringing us some overnight guests who were blacked out at home and in desperate need of an air-conditioned place to crash). Also, in the past two weeks my wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary (six years, woohoo!), daytripped down to my wife’s folks’ for Fourth of July, and weekend-roadtripped up to my dad’s for a partial family reunion including getting my 87 year old grandma to finally meet her fifteen month old great-granddaughter. Things have been busy.

And that’s not even getting into the revolutionary career developments my wife has been negotiating (in every sense of the word) which began before the blog went on hiatus and which I didn’t want to weigh in on until they were more settled, and furthermore wasn’t sure how much I should weigh in on since it’s really more her story than my story (but I do want to share the broad strokes and have already decided to devote tomorrow’s post to the subject, so stay tuned).

All to say – I’m back, didja miss me? And, of course, more to follow.