Surprise visitor

Had a surprise visitor last night. My son-in-law does IT deployment for a very major nationwide (and beyond) company, and often has to travel. He had spent much of the week about three hours away from us to the east, but had a flight to catch about an hour or so to the west of us today. Because the IT deployment is a pretty chancy thing, and he often waits a long time for stuff to be available, and then can get work done quickly, he often spends more time on the road than he strictly speaking needs to. Yesterday as I was wrapping up work, he mentioned that he was done with everything he needed to do on site, and other than have a batch run, which he could do remotely, he was done with the deployment, so wondered if I wanted to catch dinner with him, since he had nothing else to do and doesn't mind driving. I actually invited him to stay at our house, which would cut a good 5-6 hours of driving total out, plus our guest bed is almost certainly more comfortable than a hotel bed, and we got to hang out last night, and get one of our personal favorites, Red Robin and their new A1 Steakhouse burger. Because he was able to expense dinner, he also sprung for an extra appetizer; the onion ring tower, even though it made dinner ... er... more than we're used to eating a little bit. I don't usually spring for appetizers, because I'm usually not hungry enough to eat them along with the regular meal anyway. And if I was still hungry, I'd just have gotten an extra helping of their bottomless fries anyway, which needless to say, I was not hungry enough to do. 

Anyway, it was fun to see him, and we had a good time. My son-in-law and I get along quite well because we have similar personalities in many ways and lots of common interests. Among them, are roleplaying games. And hiking/camping. (And the outdoors, especially in the American west in particular.) Classic geek-themed pop culture (although he's a Dr. Who fan—that's always been way too cringe for me.) Etc. Plus, he's a great guy generally, and the father of one (so far) of my grandchildren, so I can't complain. 

Not that I would, even if I could. It did obviously put my binge watching of Wednesday behind, but I've got all weekend to do that, which is much more time than I need, so I'm not feeling like I'm out anything. The break for an actually pleasant social interaction, unlike all of the crap going on at work lately, was welcome. Only one thing that it inadvertently caused me to miss; I was going to email the material I'm going to run in my one-shot on Thursday to myself to print off so I could have printed copies of it at the table, and I forgot to. I can still do it next week, but today was the perfect day to have done it; quieter and less busy, I suspect, and less busy at the printer too. But I suspect next week we'll continue to see slowdowns here in the office as people who haven't spent their time off for the year are forced to do so so as not to lose it at year end. Man, I cannot wait to get to that point at the end of next week myself. November and December have been miserable for work this year. Not that things'll be instantly better in the new year, but there are certain things that will necessarily make them better than they have been, at least. Next weekend, and I'm not sure if it'll be Saturday or Sunday yet, I'll make the drive back to my old house where the family will be waiting, and we'll have the two week Christmas break. Merry Christmas, in advance! I probably won't post during that entire time. I would like to have time to make a quick report of my one-shot before I go, though.

Work, meanwhile, continues to get worse just when I thought it's already at rock bottom. I can't believe what's going on. How incredibly miserable.