Boxing Day Blues

Ok, so these blues are lasting a bit longer than just Boxing Day* itself.

There have been several frustrations at work, not least of which is that I am still at work and pretty much the entire consultant corps is off, taking a true holiday...

I'm also struggling to fight off a cold.  I basically went straight to bed after work on Thurs., and I decided to skip the gym today, but I'll probably be back there on Sat.  I'm pretty sure that this is due to my relaxing at all, even the slightest bit, on Christmas and Boxing Day.  I always get sick when I take a vacation, which is one reason I have so much vacation time saved up (4+ weeks for 2018 and then I'll have another 3 weeks by the end of 2019).  At any rate, it isn't really just the exercise, but I have to get serious about cutting out the sweets, as my pants are getting tight.  It looks like I've had all the fun I'm going to have these holidays.

Speaking of no fun, I had the second round with the dentist today.  I'm not sure if the hygienist was upset about having to work or what, but this was definitely more painful than the first cleaning session.  I think I mentioned I have a couple of small cavities to be filled, which is unfortunate, but it could have been a lot worse given the long layoff between visits to the dentist.  I won't let it go that long again.

I'm just about to write my year end round up of fiction, and I have to say that the second half of 2018 was mostly damp squibs -- books that I thought I would like but really didn't enjoy that much.  I actually decided to hold off just a bit on Musil's The Man Without Qualities, since I'm pretty sure it will also fall into that category (a book I should like (or at least admire) but don't actually find that entertaining).  Even McCarthy's Birds of America, which I generally did like -- and finally finished on Boxing Day -- has a particularly unsatisfying ending.

Maybe the single most annoying/depressing thing (aside from my pants getting too tight) is that I have been looking at the bus/train schedule to Rochester, NY and 1) it costs much more than I expected and 2) the times are pretty terrible.  Megabus would have been the best deal (about $45 round trip) but the times I need are sold out, so I would end up leaving Toronto at midnight and showing up at 4 am, probably crashing at the bus station until the play started, and then leaving at 3 am the following morning.  That's just crazy.  Then I considered renting a car, but even that adds up (particularly with traditional car rentals where you pay for the gas), and of course I would be exhausted and couldn't get get any reading done.  I'm very close to just giving up, but I'll sleep on it and take another pass through the schedule tomorrow.  This was all in order to try to catch Dietz's Yankee Tavern, since it doesn't appear it will be playing in Toronto any time soon.

But it is the weekend, and I can probably find something fun to do.  Or I can choose to be productive instead and put the finishing touches on the Little Free Library.  That would probably cheer me up at least a bit.

* I will say that I prefer the Canadian approach to Boxing Day where core services, particularly transit, still run and the larger shopping centres and malls are open whereas things were shut tight in England.  In Cambridge, the bus drivers all got to spend time with their families, completely stranding people without a car.  Granted, I am sure that the tube and buses run in London on Boxing Day, so perhaps it is just the difference between living in a small city vs. a sprawling metropolis.  That said, there were many other things that drove me up the wall about living in the UK (and this was years before Brexit was even on the horizon), and I'm glad to be well out of there.