Hooboy. And the news has been a firehose again. Israel/Hamas continues to be a fucking nightmare. We have a right wing Christofascist as Speaker of the House (that may have been week before last, it’s all running together.) Covid is still out there, despite all attempts to pretend it’s left. (Just ask my dental assistant.) Oh and Tommy Fucking Tuberville saying that being a Marine general was just like being a football coach.

Work is stressing me out a bit. Workload is fine, but we have a new SVP who is REALLY excited about AI and automation. (Easy when you’re making upwards of a half mil a year and no one is suggesting *your* job should be AI’d out of existence.) He’s said he wants more QC stuff to be automated to “free us up for other things” – what other things? Finding a job that isn’t in conflict with my non-compete agreement? We’re having a meeting about it next week, so hopefully that will clarify things a bit. I’m trying to be optimistic that it is more “automate what we can to make things easier” vs. “automate everything, even when it doesn’t make sense.” We already do regular automated testing in my team – and the stuff I deal with, 99% of the time it wasn’t caught by automation. Again, though, TRYING TO BE OPTIMISTIC.

But, despite all this, my head is at least kinda-sorta on straight and I’m trying to focus on the good stuff.

Halloween was great, we had at least 100 kids come around. I did the grab bags again and one little Spiderman was VERY confused. “But, where is the candy?” I explained it was in the little bags and he could pick any bag he wanted. He took one, ran down the driveway to the adult with the pumpkin tote, and next thing I know, he’s racing back to give me the empty bag, LOL. The last little ones of the night, I asked if there were any allergies, and the little girl said no, and then SO solemnly, “That’s good that you asked that. Everyone should do that.” Warmed my heart.

All told, we had maybe 6 kids with nut allergies, two with pollen allergies, and one that was allergic to “medicine”. Kiddo, you’re in luck, cause no one is giving free drugs to kids. But it was good to be able to give them a big bag o’ sugar that wouldn’t require an epi-pen.

Briefly considered skipping the farmers market this morning, cause it was 34 degrees, we already had dinner sorted, and we are definitely out of tomato season. But it is a very sunny day here, so the smart part of my brain said “You need to get your ass out of the house and into the sun, go buy some bread and cookies, dammit.” And now I have STUFFING BREAD. It is GOOD.

The cold weather has Lily doing her best impression of a Dickensian waif, and she is spending a LOT of time either next to the heat registers (of course, she has kitty mats in front of them) or between my feet in front of the little space heater. And she has been super snuggly at night.

And it’s cold enough for CHILI!!! And that is dinner for tonight…and tomorrow. And possibly Monday.

So, while it’s not all good, it’s not all bad either.

Hang in there.