Happy New Year, and Changes Afoot

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all (both?) my readers!

We're two weeks into 2024 and, I gotta tell you, it's been a mixed bag so far.  Apart from my usual bonecrushing, soul-destroying work stress, poor Astrid had bronchitis over her Christmas holidays... which kept her in bed for nearly a week (ever see a ten year old sleep til noon on Christmas day?).  Bronchitis and RSV have been running rampant through local schools this winter, and Astrid was not spared.  When her cough outlasted her medication, we took her to the doctor... where she was diagnosed with Asthma, just like her mom and maternal grandmother.

Rachel and I somehow managed to stay healthy throughout it all, even after movie nights at the school, Holiday concerts, and so on.  Small miracles, I guess...

Work's been rough.  My big project of 2023 has been implemented, and we're now dealing with several issues that have arisen since going live.  The majority of these are due to edge-case scenarios that would never have come up during testing, so edge-case that our software vendor has been scratching their heads over how to fix or mitigate.  Fun.  The rest were oversights, mostly piddly stuff I should have caught during testing.  Thankfully, these were easily fixed, but not without a lot of anxiety and hair-pulling.  Luckily, I still have a long, thick head of hair at age 50.

I briefly considered a career change: give up my career in IT to become a yak herder.  Don't laugh, it was a serious consideration!  I was already scoping out Mongolian language courses online, so why not go whole-hog (whole-yak?) and become a herder on the steppes?  Hell, I've always wanted to try Yurt Life, and the climate south of Ulaangom is just as miserable in winter as Winnipeg, albeit a little drier.  We're on the same parallel, after all!

As tempting as that sounds, ultimately I'm gonna stay the course at my current employer.  I don't want to throw away twenty-three years of employment over a few bad months. 

"CJ, why the sudden interest in learning Mongolian?" you may ask.   I hear you ask, and it's all due to roleplaying games.  Our main GURPS campaign is set in post-apocalyptic Mongolia (bouncing between Tarialan-Sum, Ulgii, and Umnugovi), and I've been trying to learn a few Mongolian words here & there for colour and pronunciation.  Just gotta wrap my head around Mongolian Cyrillic...

Speaking of GURPS, 2023 was a rather poor year for group gaming, with not a single session played.  Karl and I got together for a few sessions of classic Car Wars, but not much else.  As a result, my gaming blog has suffered accordingly.  Too bad, I really wanted to make it work.  I suppose I could document my solo gaming sessions in the meantime, once my character is out of the hospital.  Having your leg blown off in an ambush does tend to slow a lady down...

As for this blog, I'm making a few changes starting with the look and feel.  I'm trying out new themes on a weekly basis, until I find one I like.  After nearly twenty years on Blogger, it was time for an update.  I've also changed the title from Conceit and Sociopathy to Conceited Jerk Dot Com, at least until I can come up with something a little more clever.

Then... perhaps I might post a little more often.  Perhaps.  I like to tell myself that every now and then.  One of these years it might just happen.

Lastly, I killed off my Mastodon account for good.  Facebook's parent company Meta has started federating with the Fediverse, which meant it was time for CJ to leave.  I'd joined Mastodon/Pixelfed/Lemmy/etc to get away from Facebook, dammit, so I killed my account and haven't looked back.

I'm still on Diaspora (powerbook5300@diasp.org) and Movim (powerbook5300@movim.eu), however.  Look for me if you're there.