What did you do this week (and weekend)?

I bought tickets to see Joey Valence & Brae this coming February in Atlanta! I'm especially pumped to see them as my locale was not previously listed as a stop on their tour. Time to save up PTO for the after-party!

I went back to work after six weeks! My active duty military coworkers were definitely happy to see me and my fellow furloughed civilian coworkers back in the office. And of course we civs were happy to see them. It was like a work party of sorts Thursday morning; I don't think anyone did any work the first 2-3hrs of the day. Just hung out and caught up.

Backpay and all that should start showing up next week, but it's super confusing, with guidance changing constantly over the last ~48hrs. I feel for our payroll folks. Collectively, they have to process my agency's ~7000 civilians' 6 weeks of paychecks -- which is like 3.5 paychecks technically -- in like 5 days. Oof. We'll see how that goes.

While I would've preferred the shutdown go longer, through at least Thanksgiving, I'll be honest: on Monday, when Congress started moving, I could feel the financial worry start to melt away, even though it wasn't yet a done deal. Even though I could've survived through January, at least (I know not everyone can do that; some feds definitely weren't hanging on already).

Anyway, in celebration of getting paid again, I decided to order some Chinese takeout for myself yesterday. I've barely eaten out while furloughed. I certainly didn't splurge. But yesterday? Hell yeah I did.

My spouse and I got vaccinations (what a fun date!). Now we both feel like we’ve been beaten by 6 angry men with sticks.

I've been working on a tool to manage Request For Comment (RFC) technical proposals and I add a new feature every few days (I only get to work on it nights and weekends). This week I added some small, low hanging fruit features that I probably should have done earlier, e.g. the ability to set a review deadline (the red reviewer in the sidebar on this screen: https://rfchub.app/rfchub/rfc1-org-batch-markdown-exporter-job ).

Yesterday my wife and I took our son to the final for the Northern Super League - women's soccer in Canada. We took the GO train downtown which was $10 for all you can ride for 24 hours, which makes taking the train for two adults officially about 66% of the cost of parking. When we got downtown, it started raining - thick cold wet drops that carried the chill of winter - but we found a place serving free coffee and an equestrian show whose lobby was free to stand in. The rain at that point of the day lasted about an hour, and then we were back to the pre-game fun outside the stadium, where we attempted to kick soccer balls into holes in boards, line up for free stuff like a pretty nice NSL toque, and get free samples of Coke products (yup, still coke).

For the game, we were in the seventh row in one of the supporter sections, right near one corner. It was a pretty great game, with Toronto controlling the offensive play most of the time. The Nikki Small -> Esther Okoronkwo teamup is always electric to watch, but they weren't able to convert a goal. Hunter who I think is the youngest NSL player at 17, was able to score a beauty around the 20 minute mark. At 35 minutes in the first half, the rain suddenly started, and we found that we were surprisingly covered by the roof so we prepped to watch the poor cold players continue, but at 38 minutes a flash and a load rumble of thunder immediately delayed the game.

Our son is a trooper, but he was pretty sad about the delay; when I asked him about it as we were standing in the concourse, he said that he had been looking forward to the final and didn't want to go home without seeing it end, and I remembered that he was supposed to go last week with his uncle to see a game and that game was delayed, but the delay was 24 hours, and he didn't end up going to the make-up game. He thought we were done for the day, and his fun finals day was going to get cancelled, and it would be rescheduled for midweek and he would miss it, just like what happened the previous week. Fortunately, it was just a 40 minute delay; we got back to our seats, the rain cleared up, and the sun even briefly shone on the stadium.

It didn't shine on AFC Toronto very much though, because in the second half Vancouver Rise scored 2 goals, and the final ended up 2-1 for Vancouver. It did feel that for a good part of the game the referee ignored some pretty blatant fouls from Vancouver - at one point I very loudly offered the ref my glasses, which got some laughs from people around me - but overall it was exciting to see the conclusion of the season, and it was a great game.

We also watched a bit of the Leafs / Blackhawks game after returning home, which Toronto lost. I recently talked about "being a Toronto fan" after the Blue Jays loss in the World Series, but it really does feel like Toronto has this thing where they fly really close to the sun and look like they're going to win, only to choke at the finish line. I'm not invested in a lot of other city's sports teams, so I don't know if that's the general case, but it feels really common here. I know in my brain that only one team can win, and that statistically it is not likely to be my team that wins it all, but I feel in my part-of-the-brain-that-we-call-the-heart like my team is often the one that blows leads to lose to another team's comeback.

Today I'm having a chill stay-at-home day with my son, while my wife is off in Toronto with our oldest seeing Kamala Harris speak, and my middle kid is at a birthday party at Great Wolf Lodge, and I'm thankful that the small skiff of snow we have is not enough to require shovelling, and that I can lounge inside for most, if not all, of the day.