After being employed for 5 years, my company gives everyone 10 days of refresh leave. I received mine almost 2 years ago, but for multiple reasons, I had not actually used mine yet but it was set to expire at the end of this year. I am not alone, as many other coworkers had time that was about to expire, so for the past few months and through the end of the year, nearly every week there is someone going on their refresh leave.

After having two three-day weekends, this week felt kinda long, though it was overall a fairly average week.

Monday was 敬老の日 in Japan which made last weekend a three-day holiday, but a typhoon meant I mostly stayed inside. I ended up working on some DNS tools so that I could apply some git ops to some of my local infrastructure. Most of it is rather unique to my own setup so I’m not sure if there’s much worth publishing there but I may write about it sometime.

Friday was 秋分の日 in Japan making this weekend a three-day weekend as well. I didn’t get as much accomplished as last weekend but was still nice to have a bit of extra time.

This weekend is a three-day holiday but there’s a typhoon crossing over today and tomorrow so I’m mostly staying in my apartment. The past week felt like it was full of meetings. One meeting did not go as well as I hoped but two others went much better than I expected.

On Wednesday, my iPad suddenly refusing to charge, which resulted a quick trip to the Apple store to get it checked out. After leaving it off for a while, it suddenly turned back on and started charging again which was a surprise but I had already made an appointment so I went ahead and had it checked out. For better or worse the diagnostics check could find nothing wrong with it, and sending it off to be repaired would be expensive and I would be without my iPad for around 2 weeks so for now I’ll just wait to see what happens.

I had not planned on spending most of my afternoon prototyping a vscode-worklog extension, but once I started writing, I kept tweaking one more thing until most of my afternoon had disappeared. The code is still super messy and there are bugs I found while writing this post, but at least the basic prototype seems reasonable.

I also spent some of this morning working on upgrading some of my test virtual machines. I probably have a lot of old settings files to cleanup so that may be a longer term cleanup. I had wanted to upgrade to a newer distro so that I have access to a newer system python.

Been making progress upgrading my island sanctuary and my group seems to be ready to finish raft next week.

Review period at work is over for now, but some small outages resulted in me being unable to progress on other larger tasks.

This week, Final Fantasy XIV Buried Memory was released so I’ve been playing that a lot in the evenings. After finishing the main story missions, I’ve been enjoying playing with the new Island Sanctuary area.

I did not realize until Wednesday, that there was a holiday on Thursday (山の日 ) so then I quickly took Friday off as well to make it a LONG weekend.

Not taking things Personally

https://medium.dave-bailey.com/the-art-of-not-taking-things-personally-b7a8395ce172

When we encounter emotions and behaviours that don’t make sense to us, it’s often because we don’t have all the information. And in the absence of information, we tend to assume the worst.

The past few days, I’ve had to deal with a somewhat sudden issue that has me a bit miffed. It’s quite surprising timing to have this come up in my feed. I think I also need to be more mindful of my own stress bucket at times. My local cat cafe is sometime a good way to help melt some stress away. Now that the weather is finally starting to cool down a bit, evening walks are another of my favorite ways to reduce stress.

Review season at work tends to drain me mentally and my usual motivation suffers