It is amazing how quickly the month of December always flies by. It is sure true that as you get older that time passes more and more quickly but December seems to always be a quick month in comparison to, say, January. As a child December always seems to drag on forever as you wait impatiently for Christmas but as an adult it is one fast month just packed full of things to do and people to see.
I was very tired this morning when Dominica and Oreo left to go to work. I had a hard time pulling myself out of bed. Today, like yesterday, is very warm. Two warm December days after almost a whole week of bitter cold. This is hard to get used to.
Today is the first day of the winter financial freeze. Most large financial institutions are encouraged by the federal government for market stability and accounting reasons to go to “lock down” during the busy Christmas season. This results in a really slow, relaxing month for those of us in the support organizations. Changes are brought down to almost nothing and the whole place slows to a really relaxed point. I am looking forward to seeing just how relaxed it all gets. We don’t start picking up again until the second or third week of January which makes the holidays much more easy. It is also extra awesome for me as I am covering the early morning shift for our group the first week of January which is still in the freeze.
Knowing that today was going to be slow I was prepared with about thirty computer and technology magazines that have been piling up in the apartment. I managed to work through almost all of them during the course of the day. I also managed to download and installed the first release candidate for PC-BSD 1.3 which is one of my favourite operating systems.
My actual university diploma arrived today! Of course, I might never get around to actually seeing it but knowing that it is there is nice.
Dominica decided that she was in the mood for some Thai for dinner tonight and so I decided that I would pick some up on my way home from the office even though the Thai restaurant in Warren is several miles in the wrong direction and will add a very long time to my drive home since it is through some of the world’s heaviest traffic areas.
It took an extra fourty minutes to run down to Warren, get Thai and get back to the office to start heading home. That took a good chunk out of the evening.
I got home and we ate dinner while watching Smoke Signals which is one of the most important American Indian movies (first movie to be written, directed and co-produced by Indians.) It was pretty good. After the movie, Dominica set to work wrapping up her Java class for the semester and I worked on getting the apartment cleaned a bit. There was a ton of stuff to be done around the apartment. Boxes of mail to be gone through, sorted, dealt with, thrown out. A few trips of garbage to be taken out. Lots of miscellaneous stuff. But it needed to be done.
Dominica managed to complete all of her Java homework and is now done with the class barring any last minute assignments that come up. She does have one ongoing discussion group but that is no sweat and she is able to do that part of her class from the office so she is basically done with Java for the semester. Now she has to focus on the A+ before the test is no longer available. She only has a few weeks so it is quite the panic but at least she doesn’t have anything else going on at the same time. She isn’t planning on taking another class from Empire State until the March semester (she is skipping January) so she has a little breathing room there.