Last week was unusual because my job sent me to a conference in Orlando. I was presenting on a project I participated in while at my previous position. I was asked to go because the primary developer does not travel, and they needed someone who was familiar with the history of the project to be there to talk to it. Because it was just over in Orlando, The Wife decided to come along for a change of scenery.

Overall, the conference was good. I got the opportunity to meet people in person who I’d only met online. Including my new supervisor. It was also a good chance to catch up with a bunch of people who I’d worked with in the past, but who had gone on to other jobs across our area.

The bad? I missed the last day. Why? Flu shots are a requirement for my work, and the facility was nice enough to offer them at the conference. I took advantage of it because that means I don’t have to make a trip somewhere else, and it makes sure that it gets into my personnel file. Normally, I don’t have much a reaction to the flu shot beyond a sore shoulder. This time? I woke up at oh-dark-early feeling horrible. Not as bad as the 24 hours of hell with the COVID boosters, but pretty bad. Talked it over with The Wife. We could wait until daybreak to see how I feel, but I doubt even if I felt better that I would be up to the conference. So, we made the decision to trek back across the state at oh-dark-early. I shot off an email to the boss, we packed up, and headed home. We ran into more construction, but the lack of traffic evened it out. Particularly since we missed the Disney traffic and the I-4 buildup around Tampa. We did give MIL a scare coming in so early. The rest of Thursday I was kind of out of it. More due to odd hours than anything else.

Saturday was a day trip with The Wife, Mom, and The Brother. We went down to Arcadia. Mainly so The Wife and Mom could go through the various shops. The Brother came along to spend time with the family. Arcadia hasn’t fully recovered from Ian or the other tropicals that blew through there since. We spent a few hours there before heading back and picking up barbeque from a local place. All in all, it was a good day.

Sunday was a frustrating day. Work gave me a new dock that would allow for three monitors plus the laptop. So, I picked up an LG Dual-up monitor. It’s essentially a really big monitor that will mimic two monitors stacked on top of each other. Great. Neat. Except the ports on back of the monitor don’t exactly match up to the ports available on the new dock. There was an emergency run to Wally World to get an HDMI/Displayport cable. After some frustration with cables and settings, I finally got it to work. Mostly. For some reason, it wants to think that my bottom screen is to the right of the upper screen. No matter how I arranged it in settings, that was the only config that would work. Feck it. Let’s do some more testing by logging into work. Except, I couldn’t log into work. After multiple attempts, I call the help desk. Um, yeah, we can’t see you on the remote access list. WTF?

This resulted in me having to travel up to Tampa to log into work from there to request new access from behind the firewall. Which involved trying to find a place to work. That’s difficult because even with people on hybrid schedules, space is kinda scarce. Fortunately, I know folks who owed me favors. By mid-morning my accesses were restored, and my boss agreed to let me take a long lunch to go back home.

Now things are returning to their normal routines. For which I am very happy about.

Last year, The Wife and I were out of town for the holiday. This year, we set up a table at the end of the drive and set out candy and other treats. The big fad was teal buckets with things other than candy for kids with allergies or other issues. Sounded like a decent idea. And heck, a bunch of party favors were cheaper than candy. So, we had that and a traditional candy bucket. The Wife and MIL put together little candy bags to ration things.

The grandniece came over and visited the neighbors. She was dressed up as a mermaid Escorting her was The Wife’s mother and The Wife dressed up in a Mama Shark costume. Let me explain this costume. Imagine one of those blow-up lawn decorations turned into a costume. Yeah. The cats were slightly terrified when she tried it on. Still, they enjoyed making the lap around the houses. The Wife’s niece then took the costume for a later shindig. We sat outside handing out candy and toys. I was surprised at how popular little slinkies were.

Plus we got to see the next door neighbors’ new baby dressed up as Mario.