We are preparing for a solitary Christmas break. School's hit their winter break for the next couple weeks, so the adults have also taken time from work. Not that we're going anywhere.

We've previously discussed how to do Christmas stuff with the relatives, and it's all "stay together apart." We would normally go to the wife's mom's house, joined by her dad, sometimes by the older kids, do a meal, some gifts, banter, music...then go home. This year we're going to stay at our homes, doing whatever.

Well, kind of. The wife is scurrying around the kitchen preparing some goodies and meal stuffs. She's got gifts for each of them, too. We're going to make a day-long road trip to deliver the right stuff to each of her parents' home. Probably a "miss you, love you" wave from the kids as we get out long enough to stretch legs, and then carry on to the next one or back home.

The weather will be the challenge. The forecast has been as fickle as I have about my commitment to keep blogging. It's going to be cold, but maybe not cold enough to snow. If it snows, it might snow some, or it might snow a ton. There's going to be precipitation either way, so the roads will be wet, slick, slushy, or some combination.

Also, the distance. Each of their homes are an hour, give or take, away from our house and each other. So that's a three-hour tour to make the two stops and return. That didn't work well for Gilligan. We've done it lots, though, so we should be fine. We'll hit grandma's house, stop and drop, then turn around and head back to the straight road to grandpa's house. We'll likewise stop, drop, and roll back home. There's no avoiding some twisty roads in the last dozen miles to and from grandpa's house.

Whether we all go, or a subset has yet to be seen. That's a long time stuck in a car seat for a visit without even a hug.

For the rest of the holiday break, I've got some ideas to keep me busy.

When I ordered my big server, I thought to use a pair of little drives and a pair of big drives, and then learned the BIOS can't do the big drives without an update I can't get. I recently ordered another pair of little drives, so I might install them and finally move some of the services that linger on the old little server, since they need disk space. It's only 300GB more, but that should do for the mail and log collections that remain.

I ordered a new Mac Mini (the 2020 M1), to update the one getting pushed to limits by the kids in virtual school. It lost the port necessary to attach my display, so ordered an adapter. It should be here tomorrow, carriers and weather holding up, or maybe on the weekend. I need to do some equipment swapping then. I played with it briefly when I unboxed it. It did take longer to plug everything in than to get through the initial set-up. I surfed some web and made a blog post on it, and set it aside because of the display problem. I did look at a new monitor for it, but the kids don't need 4K or more, and then what would I do with the Thunderbolt display, since I rarely use the MacBook Pro it was paired with...so many monitors now...

I might try to consider how to fit the old Mini on my desk, or tuck it in the basement with the servers. One of the reasons I didn't do some container things I wanted to is that I've only got one server for it, so no Kubernetes or other orchestration really works (it does, but you hamstring everything...). This thing is under-powered, but has 16GB of RAM, and would allow me to have a pair of nodes, so I could have it run as the controller, and the other as the compute node...I've meant to to try to get my previous server, now a zippy Ryzen quad-core also with just 16GB of RAM since I rebuilt it earlier in the year, into that role. It's the one from which I've not moved the mail and last web services it runs to containers. The way that Dovecot, Postfix, SpamAssassin, the web mail client, and users interact have me a little stumped on how to separate, or make a container with all the garbage in it (not the container way). Maybe I'll figure that out on break.

My desk has been one giant procrastination clutter build-up since before the virus hit. It used to be a pristine clear surface when I used it regularly in consulting. Then when I started working more steady gigs, little "get to it later" additions started piling on. I might take a day (and a garbage bag or shredder) to finally get to this. As I glance around, I see the Mycroft that I got on one of my early Kickstarter-like adventures. It came with an incomplete system, which has since been made more complete, and just needs to be updated. There are a couple little projects like that.

Too much for a week-long break with some holidays bolted in, trying to keep the kids happy when we can't go anywhere, without resorting to full-time TV and video games. So much of it will likely stay in a "get to it later" pile. I'll probably clean the desk, though. That seems straight-forward, if I can do it without getting distracted by what's in the piles.

Everyone's healthy.