First week of the new year and already had to hit the ground running at work, spent a few hours today writing documentation for the next release just to feel like I’m caught up.
As usual spent Christmas with family in Summerland. The usual holiday relaxation – reading, getting fat on sister’s holiday food, trying to burn it off by hiking with the dogs. For a change this year, we learned to play mahjong. Not that dumb variant on solitaire popularised by a certain popular arcade game, we were playing the real thing – the four player game associated with seedy opium dens, and also that annoying plastic clacking noise which goes on for twelve hours every Sunday from your annoying Chinese neighbors. At some point I shall transcribe my mom’s version of the rules here for future reference. There seems to be a lot of ceremony devoted to randomising the input, and Mom gets clockwise and counter-clockwise easily confused when she teaches, which caused no end of frustration for the kids. It’s surprising that she does this because she has a knack for memorising tiles and figuring out what everyone else is holding, no doubt honed by years of playing bridge. Don’t play any games with her involving patterns of cards, tiles, or dice ‘cuz she’ll kick your ass. Instead you should play with Dorritta, who will try to convince you that 5-6-8 is a continuous sequence of integers and claim she’s not cheating.
It snowed on Christmas Day, but quickly melted. Perfect for travel. (Incidentally, it finally showed in my corner of Seattle last night, but 24 hours later it’s all gone. So much for cancelling work.) Drove back to Seattle after Boxing Day and flew down to spend New Year’s with Susan where we saw a somewhat disappointing Nutcracker at the SF ballet (sug to them: please don’t mess with the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies ever again), toasted the New Year with champagne, pizza, and smores, and painted her bedroom despite my claim that I hated painting. Domesticity will do that to you. Actually I rolled, she trimmed and it went painlessly and quickly.
So far I’m making some progress on a vague New Year’s resolution to improve my health. Based on a physical last year, I know I’m bordering on high blood pressure (I’m not THAT Type A, but it does run in the family), and my eating habits are spotty and my exercising has dropped off pretty significantly. Roz and David’s presents this year were a subtle hint that I really should go back to the climbing wall. This weekend I’ve made a large batch of wontons (from scratch! except I bought the skins, because noone makes those from scratch. I think), and today it was steamed fish and veggies for dinner. How’s that for eating healthy? Now I just need to get less stressed by work and hopefully that diastolic number will drop by 10.
