Endings and beginnings

 A friend of mine -- as well as someone who I have known from Church and SVDP for many years -- lost their mother over the weekend, and the funeral was today.  I took the day off (sort of) and attended.  Good crowd, nice Mass, wonderful homily, and then a fun (as much as possible) post-funeral luncheon.  Methinks that is all one can really ask for, at the end of the day... that you are remembered positively.

Of course, before I went to the funeral and did some work... and equally, of course, I had a big project due ASAP.  Fortunately, I had done most of the work previously, so I got that out before I had the mourning attire on.  Then, when I got home, I made sure to log on for a couple hours -- til J! -- and caught up on stuff I missed.  My work was received positively (I hope) and I even cleaned some minor stuff off the plate, setting me up to finish something else up tomorrow.  Phew!

I completed another page-turner today -- Desperate Ground -- about the retreat of the First Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir in the early days of the Korean War.  Quite good; incredible heroism (by the Marines), incredible stupidity by MacArthur and his staff, and... well, while a retreat is seldom a victory, the Chinese soon learned that the US forces were easily capable of inflicting heavy losses.  I still wonder if maybe, just maybe, we should have tried to push past the 38th parallel -- every foot of ground would have been beneficial to the South -- and used our superior firepower to maximize Chinese losses.  I suspect it would have not worked -- they did not seem to worry about that -- but I get the sense it wasn't seriously considered.  This puts me to 22 books for the year, and while this pace is not likely to be maintained... 23 will be started tonight.

The flip side of the reading binge is that many little projects that should be done I have not, so tonight I am trying to remedy that; one batch of SVDP stuff was just done, and I may work on some budget stuff tonight (eventually we will have a meeting, and people tend to want to know these things).  I told a friend -- in between work on the giant pile of laundry (darks are drying as we speak!) that adulting isn't necessarily hard, just tedious, and he concurred.  Alas.