Today was mostly a great day. I had a conference call at eleven a.m. and successfully set up a webcam for it so that I was able to VC into the office. I am usually adamant about not working while on vacation, but I needed to take care of the stuff being discussed on the call, and then I decided to clear out the remnants of my inbox and cross off the major things on my to-do list so that I can start 2009 with a relatively clean slate. That took a couple of hours in the afternoon, but now I'm totally free and don't intend to do any work at all for my employer for over two weeks. Yay.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon finishing up my Christmas cards; too bad it's so icy outside that it's difficult to drive, and our mailbox was so iced over last night that we couldn't open it. The ice isn't going to melt anytime soon -- it's supposed to get down to -4 on Sunday and -8 and Monday. If I don't freeze to death, the week promises to be fun; my father's siblings are coming down this weekend to celebrate Christmas early, and then we'll celebrate with my sister on Christmas Eve and just the four of us on Christmas Day. It will all be appropriately low-key and somber, given the grim economic outlook -- although my family doesn't really do low-key and somber well, as evidenced by how much we seem to like to talk about alcohol, sex, strange occurrences, etc. Or perhaps that's more of an indication about how every Wampler I've ever met seems genetically programmed to tell stories and try to one-up each other with little-known facts. Either way, it leads to a lot of entertainment, most of which is so strange and ridiculous that it's probably a good thing we live in the middle of nowhere.
My mother made a delicious supper (mushroom steak, baked potatoes, corn, and cottage cheese -- several food groups were missing, but the delicious one remained in higher concentrations), and then the four of us played a game of hearts. It was the first time I've won in at least a couple of years, and I did it by running the table twice. Naturally, I gloated just a little bit, but I expect to lose all future games of hearts, Rail Baron, canasta, etc. for the remainder of my time at home. Then we settled in to watch some fine CBS programming (1.5 episodes of "NUMB3RS", the news, some Letterman) before I decided to go to bed.
The only fly in the proverbial ointment was that I checked my work email tonight and found that, instead of giving us the Christmas bonus that they've given us for the past five Christmases that I've been employed there, they have instead chosen to give us all a new cellphone. Granted, my company launched a cellphone this year to quite a bit of fanfare, and I vaguely wanted one -- but I didn't want to switch to T-Mobile, and I just bought a freaking iPhone last week, locking myself into a freaking two-year contract. Now I have a $400 phone, which counts as part of my overall compensation for the year, and which my company has expressly forbidden me from reselling. Dammit. I know I sound incredibly spoiled, given the overall down nature of the economy and the pleasure that I should take in being employed -- but couldn't they assume that, as employees of a tech company in one of the most tech-savvy areas in the world, many of us would already have some sort of fancy, recently-purchased smartphone? Now I have two phones that don't work in Iowa, particularly since we don't have wireless in the house either, which turns both the iPhone and my company's phone into useless paperweights.
Okay, no more complaints, it's time for bed!
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