Happy Solstice, everyone! The shortest day of the year and the start of Winter, which is to say that now the days get longer again, and every day we're that much closer to the unlocking and to Spring.
And in the meantime we get to go out into the cold dry sunshine and shovel snow (and run the loud smoky but generally good-tempered snow-blower thing through the snow), and come back inside to warm up and drink hot cocoa and write in our weblog (look! we have a weblog!) before perhaps going into Second Life and maybe actually finishing at least the first working version of an object I'm making for a friend.
I love fiddling about in the snow on sunny days, out in the brisk air where you can see your breath, and the sunlight on the brown trees with white snowcaps on all the branches and the blue sky behind are just perfect (just like Spring's yellow sun, green leaves, and blue sky are perfect). It reminds me of toddling around in the Winter as a little person (we had real snows back then; up to your waist!), and of ski trips in college (so utterly cold, and I love skiing even though I'm really awful at it, the racks of skis outside the lodge, the lifts taking you up above the trees, the trail signs covered with blown snow), and of hikes up into the hills, by myself or in company, around drifts where you can see the tracks of the animals that have been there (I need to get out and up into the hills again more, the real non-virtual ones; but there is so much I want to do!).
Spending lots of time in Second Life doing the usual fun things, spending lots of time in World of Warcraft blowing off steam and doing little quests. Today I got hold of the friend that got me into WoW in the first place, for the first time in a long time, on a server that I have only one relatively low-level character on, and she ported me to Dalaran (which even Spennix hasn't seen yet), which was cool; Dalaran is a generally high-level area in the newest expansion pack, whence you can conveniently get to just about anywhere else in the game; but you can get there in the first place only by finishing a high-level quest, or by having a high-level mage port you there. So that was cool.
Some beneficent deity must have heard my complaints about all the PowerPoint I've been doing this year (maybe deities have become spoiled by the 'net also, and browse weblogs instead of bothering to monitor individual prayers): just before vacation a senior manager called me to her office and said there was this new team being put together for a project, which would apparently involve programming rather than PowerPoint, and would I be interested?
And I was and I am, and the two big PowerPoint projects seem to be pretty much done (although we do still have to make externally-consumable versions of both decks, but I hope that will not involve much work), and so now I'm all excited about starting a new thing, that will involve coding, and actual tangible progress toward a pretty-well-defined goal, and I can put aside the sort of various and random and ill-defined (if in some sense and to some eyes important) things I've been doing for the last year or two.
Is a very nice feeling.
What else what else?
A reader writes:
There was this game you were playing with forts that shot different color lasers. It was hard. Could you link to it again, I can't find it.
That would be Vector TD, as illustrated here. Caution: may prove habit-forming!
I'm on vacation until next year, which is very relaxing. I made pumpkin pie! And I found various things on the net, but I dunno you can find lots of things on the net too without my explicit help. Here is a bunch of vintage space age illustrations (great fun!), via boing boing and also botgirl who mentioned it somewhere but not I think in her actual weblog there (probably Plurk or something).
I've been paying almost no attention to Twitter, a bit more but lately still not all that much to Plurk (both of which I belong to under my SL Dale Innis name), and posting just now and then in the secret SL weblog. I've been doing more reading of other people's weblogs (Google reader is a blessing and a curse), and commenting, and getting into the occasional pointless flamewar.
So that's the report from here for now, I think. In general things are good, I'm resting and being lazy alot (although not necessarily getting enough sleep). I may be coming down with a small cold, but that's more or less expected around the Solstice.
Hope things are good with you, too. *8)
