Now that's a warm-up...

A 1,000 word document is probably too long to be a warm-up exercise, but it's not too bad a piece of work for the first thing in the morning. There are two items left on the plate, which ought to take me about one and a half days between now and COB on Friday.

Natalie will be flying up on Saturday for an all-too-brief visit, and so: I must not accept any work for this weekend.

Then again, it's so hard to break ingrained behavior, a subject I've written about before. And yet as hard as changing oneself might be, it is possible.

Apropos of which, last night I caught the last 20 minutes or so of George C. Scott in A Christmas Carol, which besides being a seasonal tale is also one that holds out the inextinguishable hope that we can change for the better. I recall a post, one that has since scrolled off my friends list (and whose authorship escapes my memory), that noted how Scott's characterization of Scrooge shows someone who has genuinely experienced a sea change in attitude, as opposed to an earlier film version in which the "new" Scrooge seems driven by fear.

Alas, spirits in the night are a convenient vehicle in fiction. In real life, we have only fear - which is an uneven and short-term motivator - and the engine of our own mind.

I must not accept any work for this weekend.

Cheers...

Will Gore demand a recount?...

Vladimir Putin has been selected as Time's "Man of the Year."

On one level, that's pretty surreal. Almost as surreal as the idea of a crab whistling on a hill, somewhere, watching a pig fly.

Cheers...