This past week has been a thrill-a-minute, and I am so ready for it to be done.

I last wrote while I was still on my work trip last week. Wednesday night I worked late at the office, since I was using a loaner laptop and wanted to return it to where I picked it up from. Eventually got back to the hotel at 12am. Did the math and figured I’d need to start getting up ’round 4am to make my 6:50am flight, which I’d pushed back from 10am in order to make it to our team’s end-of-year celebration lunch on Thursday.

So I wake up and the very first thing I notice is that I’m not dead-tired. The second thing I notice is sunlight peeking through the window. Jolted me right up. Found my phone, somehow ended up underneath me, though I have zero recollection of silencing the alarm. It was now 7am, my flight was probably pulling out onto the jetway right then and there.

After shouting and ranting to myself in the shower I peeled out and raced to the airport. The ticketing agent was great about putting me on the next flight – the very flight I’d originally booked, but paid a hefty fee to shift forward. Things more or less worked out, I raced straight from SeaTac airport to the restaurant, where my team was just finishing up dessert. They all took it in good humor.

The next couple days saw the fruition of the work I’d been sent to California to do, but not without some more late nights at the office. Compounding this was the ward Christmas dinner on Saturday night; by the time Sunday morning rolled around I was feeling quite under the weather. Ended up taking a sick day, only emerging from my apartment to go on a home teaching call.

But here’s some pics from the Christmas party:

Monday night I was weirdly done with work early enough that I could actually go and participate in FHE, which was ice skating in Bellevue. I admit that I’d been kind of spoiled with the Olympic-class facilities in Provo, but it was kind of fun getting out there.

Tuesday night was a rollercoaster. Things were really coming together at work on Monday, but Tuesday evening I encountered what had the potential to be a showstopper of an issue, which’d put a total halt on the good things we were hoping to do over the next month. I’d discovered the issue far too late to do anything about it before leaving on vacation.

Yesterday evening was the Ensign Symphony and Choir performance. I headed out for it at 6:30pm, and it was just great. Had a couple friends in it, and they all sounded marvelous.

Headed back to Kirkland, and decided to spend some time at the office drilling into the issue. Like I said, nothing I could do about it, but I had to know. By 1:00am I was fairly confident what the issue was, and determined that it wasn’t anything to do with the software under test, merely bad assumptions on my part about the tools I was using. By 1:30am I’d gotten complete confirmation that nothing was amiss with regards to the issue I’d thought I’d found. Phew.

This morning I decided to take it easy and chill in bed with Netflix for a while, before heading into work for a 1:30pm status meeting. Did some more testing that day, just to make sure everything was ship-shape with our software. At ~4:45pm someone on my team suggested board games, and I just so happened to have Betrayal at House on the Hill in my car in the garage. A few people on my team, someone I mentor on a different team, and my manager all joined in, and we had a blast. My manager ended up being the traitor, but I took over since he’d never played the game before. He really got into it though, which was awesome. Game lasted till 6:30pm, which we declared a tentative draw.

Drove from there to a friend’s house for dinner group, a weekly thing. After the meal I put on Stalking Santa. Only a few people stuck around for it, but I made at least one convert, which is much better than last time I showed it to a group.

And now here I sit at home, composing this on my new replacement laptop! Work came through and got me a refurbished non-touchbar model, complete with USB-A, HDMI, SD card, Thunderbolt, and MagSafe ports. Here’s hoping that by the time I’m next up for a refresh, Apple will have reverted away from their shallow keyboard, and the USB-C scene will be a bit more sane.