A week off, to catch up with chores

Normally I would travel on some kind of vacation in the summer, typically visiting family or friends, but caution over the pandemic prevents me from doing so this year. However, I have not taken much time off since my trip to the Philippines in early February so I figure that I am due for a break: I have thus taken the coming week off work. As often seems to happen, the first week I am back from vacation is when I am scheduled to be preparing and running the morning stand-up meetings.

With trying to get other things done I have not much worked out lately. Still, with not having to do my day job, I plan to get a shorter workout in every day now until next Monday when I am back in work. This should be possible despite the disruption in our garage where the cross-trainer is: our bathtub drain was leaking badly through the garage ceiling so we have been clearing the garage to make that ceiling easy to access for repair.

My plan after this holiday weekend is to spend the days either sorting through our possessions, I am sure we will be able to get rid of quite a few in another round of downsizing, or catching up with my backlog of system administration chores. As my family are involved in that sorting, I figure that I will often split my time according to when they are available. I should be able to get a fair bit done on both sorting and sysadmin over the course of the week and be able to relax in the evenings.

Attending online talks

Widespread lockdown seems to have increased the number of talks I can make it to. For instance, this week I listened to sessions on my employer's finances and an introduction to Emacs Lisp, next week I have an artificial intelligence symposium, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and the following week Charles Schwab offer their occasional Navigating Today's US Market webcast so there is quite a range of topics finding its way into my calendar. Forcing remote attendance is helpful: for example, so many of the British Computer Society events occur in or near London, which is useless for me; this year I can finally attend that annual AI symposium. Having the speaker system on my desk makes for comfortable listening.