Aaron's Status

6:58 am

There’s approximately one week left until the holidays really pop off. One full work week, then I’m “working” on Monday but $kid will be off school and $wife will be off work and it’ll be a bit of a circus.

Christmas Eve day we’re probably going to go climbing for a while in a big group, which is always fun (footnote that I need to be careful not to destroy my back before then), and I’m off work until the new year at that point.

I have several things to wrap, although they’re all pretty straightforward and shouldn’t take a lot of time at all. As I’m thinking about it now, I may want to do a pen plotter nameplate or card type of thing, to spice it up. I’m feeling more creative about this lately.

It could be fun to do something with a bit of a mistletoe/holly type border that I can plot with a thick color marker, and then maybe I’ll hand write names in there or something. I should think on that.

I still need to do that last PTPX postcard and mail them out. I did quickly research the postage and re-discovered that I just need an “international forever stamp” for postcards going abroad, and then I should probably have enough domestic forever stamps for the rest of them here already.

I did pop out to REI yesterday and bought a six pack of Black Diamond Hotforge quickdraws (that’s the kind with two solid gates, one curved). You really only have a choice between Black Diamond and Petzl (as is the case with a whole lot of climbing gear), but there’s a lot of choice among solid and wire gates, curved or straight, the length of the “dog bone,” colors, and so on.

REI’s selection is limited but I like these very “bog standard” Hotforge ones with what feels like a “typical” length and quite staid black/graphite colors. That suits me just fine. I found a decent way to practice the clipping motion and tried stuff for a while yesterday and I think I feel best about the “Adam Ondra style” whole-hand clipping technique.

Of course, all of this is fairly hypothetical until you get on a real wall.

We have a planning/retro meeting today at $job but otherwise my calendar is wide open, so I’m hopeful to get at least one change out, and clean up the other one. I also need to research mocking frameworks a little, and poke around at how we can inject a mock for the Elasticsearch wrapper library that I wrote. That all sounds like pretty fun stuff, though.

Tomorrow we have my buddy’s annual Christmas party, which I’ve attended for probably like ten years or something (I have no idea) and otherwise everything else is about normal.