I meant to write a bunch of long-delayed blog entries while on vacation last week, but it somehow never happened, so there was a nearly three-week gap in posts here.<\/p>\n
Some general life updates:<\/p>\n
After a long run of stress and travel and illness, things are finally settling down. There was a couple of months of stress about Sara's terminal illness, and then she died, and then I spent two weeks in the UK (attending WorldCon and then touristing); and then when I got home, I spent six weeks coughing. Then there was a bunch of work stuff going on, then I spent a week in Chicago visiting Mary Anne et alia. So this past week was the first week in a long time when I've been home and healthy and not super-stressed. I even biked to work a couple days, for the first time in months. (I've walked to work a few times lately, but biking tends to exacerbate my coughs, so I was avoiding it until the cough was gone.)<\/p>\n
I had one glorious shining moment at work on the Friday afternoon before vacation when the number of urgent documentation reviews I needed to do dropped from three to zero, and when I noticed that my group, for the first time ever, has at least one writer assigned to every significant area that we work on. It's never enough<\/em> writers, but it's closer to enough than it's ever been. Oh, and I'm officially the team lead now. I could probably become a manager if I wanted to, but I've been assiduously avoiding that for about twenty years now.<\/p>\n This week, there've been a couple of frustrating developments at work that have made me less optimistic\/cheerful. But even so, I think overall the group is in a pretty good place.<\/p>\n And I'm more able to cope with life in general than I was for a while there. Sara's illness and death hit me hard, but I'm on a little more of an even keel now.<\/p>\n The week in Chicago was mostly really good. I'm sorry not to have seen most of y'all Chicagoans; I ended up mostly not leaving Mary Anne's place. I made a fair bit of novel progress, I got some time with Mary Anne and hung out with Kat a bit, I got some time with the kids. I also spent on the order of eight hours over the course of the week doing urgent day-job stuff (which wouldn't have been so urgent if I hadn't been at least a week behind on it), involving the new Terms of Service for our APIs; but that eventually worked out, and I took one less vacation day as a result.<\/p>\n I played the Robot Turtles intro-to-programming-concepts boardgame with the kids; more observations about that another time. Anand doesn't do boardgames, but the other three enjoyed it. I also played various Kindle and iPad games with them, and showed Kavi a couple of art apps that she seemed to really like (the Paper app and the GoldieBlox and the Movie Machine app), and helped take the kids trick-or-treating in the snow, and just generally hung out.<\/p>\n