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Gaza (with the IDF nearly expanding into Syria) reduced my Christmas spirit to 10⁻⁷ well before today. A second cold in the season (with distinct symptoms different from the first) kept me from the family dinner today.

But my wife was dismissed from a 13-year job as an chief administrator of a medium sized general contractor, having been the boss’ personal assistant above her office duties. He retired, and the new exec is cleaning house (and is making some bad management decisions). So ours is going to be an It’s a Wonderful Life Christmas until we know what our future looks like, and whether we get the good ending or the bad ending.

Update 2023-12-27 Today my wife was hired. It’s a significant pay cut, but it’s working for a nonprofit she believes in serving a good cause (which is way better than the cutthroat construction industry). I anticipate she’ll be happy there and all that’s left to work out is how we’re going to pay a few more bills. So, we’re headed for the good ending.

Covid

Flu ravaged my house this Christmas.

Bad case of novovirus and the cooker broke down Christmas Eve.

I wouldn’t say that anything ruined Christmas for me this year but there was some unfortunate circumstances with some of my gifts.

For example, I asked for an original Xbox controller with a USB adapter. I got them and they work perfectly fine in Linux but they don’t work at all in Windows, which potentially limits how much usage I can get out of them. Apparently, Windows 10 blocks the drivers required to use the adapter, which if I had known I probably would’ve just asked for a generic USB Xbox controller instead (if they exist).

Same thing that ruins Christmas every year.

drunks, drug addicts, and uninvited guests with massive entitlement issues.

The amount of people in the comments who caught covid almost made me think that i went back three years in the past

Being sick AF. People came into work sick because of our asinine sick policy, and now they’re better while I’ve been bed ridden for 3 days.

I paid for my entire family to go to see the Grand Canyon for Christmas. 11 of us in total, rented a big house and a van and we were going to drive all together for fifteen hours. Fly down early to spend time with my mom and she gave me Covid. She has been sick for a couple weeks and didn’t take a test.

She is a nurse.

My crippling depression and anxiety, same as every year. I drove hours to my father’s, only to turn round 10 minutes away.

I had a pretty good holiday, although, I found out that my little friend group at school are really conservative Christians and apparently they still support Trump.

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My kids are working on it. We bought a vr headset… One headset. They have to take turns. We aren’t rich and can’t afford one for each of them. They’re fighting each other and us over the turns. It’s clearly established whose turn it is and how long turns are. They are still bitching about it. It’s about to get returned.

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