The work at hand

Right then, the holidays are over, the vacations built around the holidays are over, it's Monday and I'm back to work along with everyone else. Things should be feeling as if the workaday rut has resisted any and all erosion and is in fact quite easy to settle back into.

(And, I mean, you guys, things got a little bit weird towards the end of last year, seriously. There was that whole ultimately fruitless attempt on my part to jump jobs, only to find that all the groundwork a buddy of mine had laid kept leading to people who just didn't have any open positions right now, sorry. And that in turn made me resolve to find a new job this year one way or the other, with or without my buddy, but I was purposefully putting it off until this year because I figured no one would be hiring right around the holidays. Meanwhile I was letting little things slip, like getting my hair cut, because clearly the optimal time to get a haircut would be right before a face-to-face job interview, right? I ended up getting a haircut the Saturday after Christmas. And I've started grooming my vandyke again, at that.)

In point of fact, I should be working on my annual review self-evaluation. Improbable as it seems, that time of year has rolled around yet again, and it's due by the end of the week. And I should be laying out a kind of roadmap for myself as far as how I'm going to keep busy going forward day to day and week to week and month to month (until either I do land that mythical new job, or I'm forced to make yet another yearly justification for my continued employment). Really I should be working on any number of things, both the work-related as mentioned hitherto and non-work-related-but-much-easier-in-my-cubicle-than-almost-anywhere-else, like for instance the ol' blog.

But as it happens I am entirely too distracted by the fact that temperatures are going to plummet overnight into the single digits (Fahrenheit!) and will still be in that range when I am supposed to leave the house and head to work tomorrow morning. Will the federal government allow for liberal leave, if not delay the opening of offices? Will the city schools cancel kindergarten on the little guy, who just went back to class today after two solid weeks of winter break vacation? Or will it turn out that while a light dusting of snow is considered threatening enough to public safety that all manner of emergency measures are implemented, an ambient air temperature (not even counting wind chill) cold enough to give you frostbite in 30 minutes or less is no cause for alarm and means business as usual? I do not know, and I can only wait and see, but while I do just that I am finding it hard to concentrate on much else.