Damn, another week down. Today was crazy. In the morning, I finally caved and booked our flights to the east coast for Christmas. Well, I tweaked the dates a little to get our rates down: I just couldn’t bring myself to drop nearly $800 for flights to Maryland. Damn holiday price hikes!

Then I was back at the former workplace for a lunchtime bike ride with my cattle drive buddy J followed by a quick meal. After that, got groceries at Trader Joe’s, picked up a special gourmet cake for my friend’s dinner tonight, then I hit Best Buy and Verizon. After I got home, I had another “work” call with the parentals. John and I then went to my friend I’s house for dinner, and now we are home. And technically, it’s after midnight, so this blog post is late. So sue me.

The Best Buy and Verizon pitstops were so frustrating. Distance-wise, the stores weren’t far, but for some reason, traffic just made getting there take forever. Also, John had said I was eligible for a phone upgrade, so before I left the house, I did all this research and found a BB offering a decent trade-in price with phones in stock. I got in line to evaluate my trade-in value, finally decided to take the plunge, and then when the rep pulled up my record, I wasn’t even eligible. Argh!!

I still had to swing by the Verizon store. John recently got the iPad Air, so it was all complicated. I had to switch plans on my account and then add the device. For some reason, the store was super busy this afternoon. I had to wait nearly 30 minutes to get serviced, and then of course, I scored an appointment with the new guy. He didn’t know how to do anything. One hour later, I finally arrived home and then John and I got into a discussion about how he’d already taken off so many days for vacation. He said he couldn’t be taking many more. Wtf.

According to him, 10 days/year is standard company policy and supposedly all his coworkers only do one big trip a year. Really? Kinda hard for me to believe when his peeps are from all over the world plus they are blowing tons on home renovations and Teslas and shit. Anyway, I was annoyed, because yeah, John works his ass off and yeah, we did travel to Wyoming in June and Italy in July. Each was one week. And now for the holidays, we’ll be in Maryland for a week. So fucking what? Given how many hours he puts in, this doesn’t seem excessive to me at all. If anything, these should be min paid time off. Whatever. So yeah, I was irritated, and then we had to go to a dinner party. The dinner party was really fun by the way. Another couple there actually lives in our neighborhood a few streets over. Super coincidental, right? Plus, the dude works for Google. I’m on it (maybe for ranch contacts).

In related news, the ranch has been texting me and emailing me various things to do. Apparently, there’s some RFP they want to apply for that’s due before Thanksgiving. I’ll be taking a look at that tomorrow. I’m in learning mode, so this’ll be good. But tonight I want to get some real rest. Time for Meditation Oasis deep rest. I need to conk out until morning. Ever since I returned from LGB, my skin has appeared weathered. My skin was so fucking awesome in So Cal. I dunno what the hell is up back home. Everything IRL just takes on an old, beaten down feel (even if my mind is alive and thriving). Sigh. Can’t get all the ducks lined up in a row!