Consortium of Seven: Year 4

      This is an odd holiday block of days for me, in part as half the household that was here for Thanksgiving last year now lives elsewhere, and I'm suddenly dropped back into a new version of a pattern from years ago, where I'll be going to someone else's house for Thanksgiving, but as I'll then be coming back home I still stuck with prepping for cooking here. One of the aims with Thanksgiving for me is being able to coast on ample leftovers, through Friday into Saturday, ideally not having to go anywhere between the time I get home Thursday night until the following Monday.       The blog-related takeaway is that time's going to be limited, and such discretionary time and energy as I might have as Thursday rolls on was very uncertain. So, I wanted to have something in place, set to auto-publish at the usual 7am on Friday, and so I set this up early. Always (always) room for improvement, it was good knowing there was something re...

        This is another padded weekend for me, with me taking Friday off (I have an almost absurd pile of PTO hours, and finally some opportunity to use some of them), which will then roll into an abbreviated week, with at the very least both Thanksgiving Thursday and Black Friday off.         The press of the holiday season -- and in general I'm becoming all the more welcoming of it each year, wanting to let it settle in early -- has this year brought us a more formal sequel to a film that's become a holiday classic, 1983's A Christmas Story . That much-revered (and much-played) film was based largely on some of Jean Shepherd's very loosely autobiographical anecdotes from his 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash . In recent years it's found itself played back to back for 24 hours straight on TBS or TNT -- and that might even be the case again somewhere this year. I didn't find it in the immediate listings, though ...