Life Lately: Vacation Plans and "Big Cleans"

Photo from a recent visit with a good friend and her cats. Her other cat is much more shy and still spends much of the time hiding whenever I visit. This one is much more outgoing!

Things have been hectic at the office recently, which I think is actually the new normal, given the current status of some of my biggest projects. We may have several months of steady work to look forward to, but that's a good thing. And don't worry, it's not going to be anywhere near as intense as the busy periods I had earlier this year! We likely won't have court filings of quite that size and scale again for a few months, and thank goodness for that.

I have a good number of fun and relaxing things coming up, though: A law school friend is visiting from out of town this weekend, and then I'll be heading off for vacation in early May. For this year's big trip, my sister and I are chipping in together, in shares proportional to our income, to take our mom to Hawaii. (Alas, both my sister and I completed graduate school with student loans a bit in excess of our first year salaries. But we're both working hard on repayment, and still get to splurge once in a while, clearly!) None of us have ever been before, so we're very much looking forward to it. We'll be in Maui for around ten days, and will also get to celebrate Mother's Day there. Any travel recommendations for Maui would be greatly appreciated, of course. 

This past weekend, I spent Saturday cleaning the apartment to get ready for my friend to visit and stay over. K was working all weekend long, so I did 100% of the cleaning this time around. See, even if he's far more likely to initiate and do the lion's share of our occasional "big cleans," including a few weekends ago, I'm capable of doing my part too... when I absolutely have to.

And good golly, if I may fuss for a bit, my back and my joints ached something awful the rest of the day, mainly from scrubbing the bathtub and the tile floor in the bathroom. (For the floor, unlike in the kitchen, the Swiffer has always proven entirely unequal to the task of scrubbing hard enough to get it clean.) This may well be what drives me to the point of finally declaring that we must hire semi-regular cleaning help. Now that K and I are both consistently busier at the office, the decision calculus for that particular question has changed significantly since this time last year. And I absolutely plan for us to pay well and tip generously, given that I've been driven to this choice by a deep appreciation for the difficulty of the labor.

On Sunday, I was shocked to find myself completely without the motivation to write anything for the blog. That almost never happens, I spend some of just about every single weekend writing or revising something that will eventually be posted here. Alas, I think I'm just very ready for that vacation. Given how my schedule looks between now and my departure flight, it's probably safest to assume that I probably won't be able to write here in the meantime. See you again in mid-May!

Oh, and in other recent blog-related news, I only recently realized that Disqus's default settings for website moderators resulted in my not getting email notifications when comments here are automatically blocked as spam. And it's not even particularly easy to figure out where on Disqus's site to view and moderate such comments, it took quite a bit of clicking around. To add insult to injury, the algorithm they use to flag spam is prone to inaccuracy, with maybe only a 55% success rate at best (at least when it comes to comments here). Nearly half of the dozen or so things they flagged as spam since I started using Disqus were real, substantive comments, including from people I frequently have conversations with in the comments here. I've approved all the wrongfully flagged comments now, some of them from more than a year ago. I'm terribly embarrassed that I didn't notice this problem sooner.