Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

Did get to bed early last night, and up early this morning. Biked, even (in the trainer). Knee is tolerating both. However, I had dinner with a former coworker to catch up in person, and didn’t get home until 9ish, so I’ll not be in bed early (for me). ‘Twas worth the delay this evening, but I think I’ll be dragging more tomorrow.

The five bullet nonsense is back, and is now weekly, because my agency is wussing out and not telling us not to respond. I’m getting my eye exercises in just thinking about them. You know, because I keep rolling them so much.

And this is the last month in our performance review year (april to march). I did pick up a little book about giving feedback that was recommended at the first half of training, which arrived today. Hoping that helps with writing up my own stuff, and giving management some assistance with the folks I’m unofficially helping with.

I’m on my feet a lot more now that everyone is back in the office full time. I’m doing some very informal coordinating of some of our joint work, so I’m up and about a lot. I took the standing desk down once for a meeting that ended up over in a conference room instead of my office; otherwise it stayed up all day because I was bouncing in and out of the office all day.

For all that I am an attorney, I don’t have a lot to do with actual court cases. My role is typically to advise and let the program people run and do what they’re going to do (or help clean up after the fact). So having to even tangentially keep track of all of the cases in various courts and all of the sundry temporary restraining orders has been a hoot.

After this week I’m going to need to adjust my sleep & waking schedules to adjust to this new work schedule. I’m making it in, but without any time to exercise. And I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t exercise first thing it’s not going to happen. That’ll be next week’s adjustment, I think; this week has had enough to adjust to with the normal stuff, let along all of 47’s chaos.

First purposeful walk on the treadmill after the cold. Bugged the hell out of my knee afterward, but some time spent beating up my shins and quads with a foam roller helped tremendously with that. As did ibuprofen. Here’s hoping there’s not a repeat cold any time soon; I’m tired of not breathing clearly.

The husband and I had lunch with friends to plan a trip to Boston this fall. Then I made some good progress on the next book for my leadership class while the husband was out a movie with another friend. He’s more the social butterfly these days, which is a good thing. Monitored some work stuff that’s pending for implementation tomorrow. I don’t know that 47’s team will appreciate how much people do at odd times because we have the equipment at home because of teleworking, and how much that capability will dry up because many people won’t bother taking laptops home just to haul them back to the office the next day. Oh well.

Commuted to work, Metro was behaving. Got to pull out one of my favorite wah-wah court quotes (“However, nowhere does our Constitution extol the virtue of efficiency and nowhere does it command that all our laws be fiscally wise.” Guadamuz v. Ash, 368 F. Supp. 1233, 1243 (D.D.C., 1973)). Was in the context of telling someone that it didn’t matter that it would be cheaper if we paid for individual memberships for people to attend a conference, and that while buying the memberships plus the member registration rate was cheaper than paying the non-member rate, Congress said in law that we couldn’t pay for memberships for individual feds, so they’d just have to suck it up and pay more money. Yes, sometimes the law is like that (and frankly in most instances the law makes sense because you don’t want to use taxpayer funds to pay every employees’ voluntary society membership dues, it’s just that in this particular instance it happens to cost the taxpayer more). My job is weird.

Past that I walked on the treadmill this morning. I think my knee may be hyper-extending and thus causing more issues, so I’m going to dig out some of the lighter knee braces in my collection and see if one of them helps. The walk was fine, and I stretched a lot right after, so it was okay for most of the day. There’s still a lot of ice out there so I was very careful where I put my feet, especially in the Metro parking lot, where ice melt had refrozen as black ice.

Did a three mile walk this morning on the treadmill. The knee did well, which was nice to experience.

Finished sorting the donations with the husband’s help. Now I need to document them so we can get rid of them on Wednesday when we’re out and about.

Headed to the office on Tuesday, then we’re escaping down Thursday to avoid most of the inauguration brouhaha, though we are driving back on Monday. I learned that being out of the city and watching it all from afar is more my cup of tea than being in the middle of the craziness that can strike. While I don’t want to drive in it, here’s hoping for a very wet and cold next Monday.

The husband was out late, and it’s still gross outside from the snow, so I was up late last night to grab him from the Metro. But that’s okay, because it meant I slept in this morning, so he had to walk himself to the Metro first thing to get to work. Karma.

Still walked on the treadmill, still made my morning meetings (that I’d forgotten until the work computer dinged at me), still got a lot of work done. Today was more of a ‘leading people’ day than substantive legal work, which is okay by me.

Then it was picking up the husband from the Metro, grabbing the weekly haul of comics, and enjoying pasta at the Italian place next door to the comic shop. I’ll pay for the pasta tomorrow, but it was tasty. Apropos of that I ordered a new enzyme supplement that’s supposed to help with digesting FODMAPs, and is aimed squarely at the ones that I react to, so here’s hoping that’s useful once it arrives.

I decided for a variety of reasons to switch from my Apple watch as my daily watch to a Garmin watch instead. I’ve long used Garmin for sports-specific efforts, or step tracking, but not as a daily watch. One of the things the Garmin does in the morning when I first wake up is give me a readout on level of effort, recovery, etc., and it includes a suggested workout for the day. This morning it told me it was happy with my level of sleep (news to me, since I was up and down with a certain female cat who couldn’t decide where on me she wanted to sleep), and recommended a 45 minute base building run. I audibly snort-laughed when I read it. Thankfully the husband was already awake. I turned that into a 45 minute walk on the treadmill, instead, which felt good. Also had my first successful test of listening to an audio book while walking; the previous attempt I was later told by the husband was a dreadful audio book so he wasn’t surprised it didn’t work. I have never been completely sold on them, but decided to give it a go when a news email from someone I followed mentioned the book series (The Codex Alera by Jim Butcher), which I have read several times now, and that they had enjoyed the audio books on long drives. One chapter down.

Windy start to the new year. Walked outside after lunch (Denny’s, which was chaos; I tipped our poor waitress very well). Walk went well, had one spot where a gust threatened my balance, but kept my feet okay and kept going. Slightly longer walk today since it was the last “warm” day for the near future (47F/8C) as a cold front brings possible snow this upcoming weekend.

In a very rare showing we were at the comic shop before they opened at 11, and were not the first to get there. I grabbed a dessert drink from the Starbucks down the shopping row while we waited (sugar cookie latte, with sprinkles).

Now the husband is making homemade hotdog buns in a new pan I got him for Xmas. Yes, it’s easier to buy them at the store, but this seemed like something fun for him to try. From the cursing I’m hearing from the general direction of the kitchen it might not be as fun as intended, but I’m guessing they’ll still come out tastier than store brand, just from the ingredient list.

We will not be doing a late night tonight. The husband and I both expressed that we’d prefer to sleep at the normal time, so after finishing this past season of Only Murders in the Building (so good!) we both retired to our offices to wind down on daily tasks. I got my bullet journals for work and home set up for the new month (kept separate for work records reasons), and did a little reminiscing and planning in both. There are fireworks going off somewhere in the distance, little pops as the show goes on.

We also had a summer-like thunderstorm right around dinner time that set off a tornado warning south of us, and had hail to the east of us in Annapolis. The thunder and heavy rain was more than enough; glad we missed the more exciting stuff.

Got outside to walk today instead of the treadmill. Post-lunch walk with a stop into the local organic grocer at the end to pick up some sundries. Felt good to get out – high 50s, and the sun was nice. We’re about to get pummeled with cold by the end of this week, so I’m enjoying the pleasant outdoors time while I can.

So farewell to 2024, and here’s hoping 2025 is good for all of us.

Got a ton of books for Xmas, so trying to sort & prioritize those. Also have a massive backlog of comic books, dating back to the training at the beginning of this month (I would estimate a couple dozen in queue).

Walked on the treadmill this morning. Waiting for a big Amazon order to show up “by 10pm”. The husband is downstairs trying out one of his Xmas gifts from me, an adult, exercise version of the 90s “skip it” toy. It sounds like he’s having fun, and is out of breath from it.

I’ll hop onto the work computer tomorrow to monitor stuff and clear out my inbox (so many reminders and news items await), but leave the out-of-office on so people don’t bother me. Glad I figured out how the ‘delay sending’ thing works in Outlook so I can have stuff go through on Thursday if I write anything up tomorrow.

I’m definitely my mother’s child – found a third batch of misplaced stocking stuffers this morning (she regularly forgets where she stashed Xmas gifts, and would find them weeks or months later). Really need to do a better job finding a consistent place to put those. These will get handed off when we see them next month for a family event.