Our Monday morning design meeting eventually devolved, as it usually does. We can get off onto some of the weirdest tangents. Video games are often a Hot Topic, although the NYT Xword (which I do EVERY DAY!) is more my speed than, oh, I dunno, Halo or Portal or whatever that game was when we were at a restaurant and the Benevolent Despot was talking about how he was jumping over garbage cans and other such acrobatics. The patrons at the next table were kind of eyeballing TBD, obviously thinking something like, “That guy can jump over garbage cans?”

Then there was the day when someone… I won’t name any names here… came into the room at the start of the meeting and said, “I’m gonna tell you guys something and then I’m gonna go to the bathroom.” I’ll stop there but that meeting took a good 15 minutes to get rolling. Of course, we also had to deal with the usual round of technical issues, like getting my laptop talking to the TV, talking to the telecommuters on the phone, etc., etc. We are not Facebook or The Google so our conference rooms are still Snake Pits of cables and waaaars and we don’t pay a, well, I dunno what to call a person who gets paid to set up meetings. We all beat up on computers and we manage to muddle through that stuff eventually, not to mention we are humble enough to laugh at our own incompetence.

Today we devolved into a quasi-religious discussion about Christmas and Hanukkah and how people in America and Russia celebrate these holidays (or not). (We have a Russian-born American citizen on our team. He seems to be finally [after 10 years] to be treating me as an intelligent person, aka he actually makes jokes about me. This is a good thing.) I won’t go on and on about this discussion but I finally said something like, “Whatever religion you participate in [or not], the winter solstice is a dark season and we need light!”. There was general agreement with that. I have always believed that the winter solstice holidays evolved well before Jesus, because light is one of the things that keeps people going until That Orb swings back northward (or southward because we do not all live in the northern hemisphere).

We don’t have a fire in our fireplace tonight. It is actually a bit warm (40?) to have a fire. But we have a Christmas tree draped with colored lights and our usual strings of LEDs elsewhere. I generally like daylight in the day and low light at night but that would be a whole ‘nother Vanity Blog entry.

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