This is a titch late, but I thought I’d give a dump of the photos and memories taken over the break.

First up, the yearly meal out with the fam, followed by a tour through Temple Square.

At some point we got a tour of Steve’s spiffy office. Mattie makes a great technician!

…and a table decorator!

Luminaries all ‘luminated up.

Gettin’ ready to head up and see what Santa left.

Scout was spoiled rotten this season, mostly by me.

Case in point.

One of our evenings was spent with some AnderCousins. The block-building gene is alive and well.

 

At dinner with Grandma, Scout pulled an ingenious heist, possibly his best yet. Finding the mess he made downstairs, we all pitched in to help clean it up, leaving no one to keep him off the dinner table upstairs. Sneaky boy.

A subset of the siblings headed up into the foothills to look out over the valley and see the fireworks go off at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

My final day home included tubing!

And a delicious meal afterwards.

Speaking of meals, this is the results of melting this really cool gift Steve, Hayden, and Mattie gave me – a hunk of bismuth. Ended up kind of melting the tin pan, now it’s all fused together. Oops 🙂

Work’s been pretty chill since I got back. There’ve been a few get-togethers; a couple game nights, a birth day party, and a trip to see Jumanji, which was highlarious.

Here we see the most fantastic candy shop ever. They’ve got it all, from walls of sour to walls of gummy, from classy to crazy, from nostalgic to nasty ($60 for a gallon of candy? Ew.)

I found myself needing to transport a large carpet from Costco to my place, and I wasn’t able to secure a truck to help out, so I had to enlist the help of my trusty set of jumper cables. I actually don’t think I’ve ever used them for real jumping, merely to keep parts of my car closed as I transport inconveniently large items. (My first time was way back in my second week out here.)

So, I made do.

Last night was a friend’s birthday party, held at a mall in Redmond which I’ve never been to. It was surprisingly reminiscent of City Creek mall, with the circular walkways and water fountain.

Went to a Thai place, neato woodwork.

…and neato chairs in front of some random place on the way back.

A subset came back to my place for some games. We were trying out the Daydream VR set, and got a laugh out of how it looks when it’s worn without the phone in place.

Tonight was a viewing of the thing by Elder Uchtdorf at my bishop’s place. Hijinx ensued afterwards.

So, that is pretty much that for the past while.

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.

I’ve spent the last several days down in Sunnyvale enjoying the wonderfully warm weather and bright sunshine. Californians might dither on the definition of those terms, but all I mean by it is, it’s not frigid and rainy when I step outside, and if I do it before 5pm there actually is sun out.

The nice thing about traveling on Sunday nights is, you tend to get bumped up. No room on the current flight? Take one in a few hours and some flight vouchers for your trouble. Want a full-size car rental? We’re out, but we have this high-end car just sitting here you can use, no extra charge.

So I’ve been driving around in a Chrysler 300, which is an absolute beast; gotta keep focusing on not going 90mph on the freeway.

Last night I was out to dinner and decided to do that thing that no one ever does but then swears it’s awesome and the best-kept secret ever, which is to go to a movie by oneself. I’d heard such awesome things about Coco, but hadn’t warmed up to the idea of sitting through it until I glanced at this thumbnail from the trailer, and fell in love with the coloring.

And indeed, the movie was delightful. Called a few of the story points, but enough was a surprise to keep it great. And I loved the way the writers used authentic Mexican culture to weave a story that was both compelling and educational.

Ho hum, walking out to my car, what a great movie that was. Double-tap the engine-start button ’cause the car’s cool like that, settle in and start the engine…

Hm, do I hear traffic out the back window? I swear I didn’t roll down any windows, lemme look back and check if I cracked it…

Can’t spot the top edge of the window, that’s odd. In fact, I can’t spot the window at all, did I roll it all the way down?

..Oh. There’s the window. All over the back seat of the car.

…

My bag.

And it was gone. The backpack that’d taken me from Budge Hall to Condo Row, my corporate laptop, and numerous credit cards and keys.

While none of my important work files were left on that machine, there were a number of sentimental documents that I’d pay quite a bit to get back. The irony is not lost on me, however, the guy advising everyone to put all their stuff up on Dropbox. You never think it’ll happen to you.

Y’know when someone gets their house broken into and they say they feel violated? That’s kind of like what I feel like, thinking of my poor desktop, all those files that didn’t deserve to get stolen and wiped.

But I’m trying to put it past me, and honestly it could be a ton worse. I came close to driving myself to the airport instead of having Mattie do it on Monday. If I’d driven myself I would’ve had my car and house keys in that backpack. My phone and wallet are fine, which significantly cut down on the number of cards I had to cancel. Damage insurance was included on the rental so I’m covered there.

I’ve been meaning to close my Bank of American Fork account anyways and do all financial stuff out of my new credit union, just haven’t gotten around to doing that. Since my backpack contained a checkbook for my account I was forced to close it, kick-starting the migration process.

But besides all that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well lemme tell you, I’m not a fan of the newer-model Macbooks, with their super-shallow keyboards, no MagSafe adapter, and no HDMI/USB-A ports. I was hoping to delay an equipment refresh as long as I could, but it looks like I’m gonna be forced into using one of them new-fangled doo-hickeys. Zeroth-world problem right there. (Although, while my Conformance Rationalization Mechanisms were kicking in, I may have finagled a way to get a refurbished older model shipped to the Kirkland office, so we’ll see on that point. (No offense intended to anyone who does own a touch-bar Macbook, of course.))