{"id":6296,"date":"2024-12-30T12:17:24","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/?p=6296"},"modified":"2024-12-30T19:55:09","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T03:55:09","slug":"end-of-year-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/end-of-year-update\/","title":{"rendered":"End of Year Update"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Whoa.  Yeah that is by far the longest stretch of silence on this website in the last 20+ years.  Consider it my little Christmas gift to you.  But now, as the year ends, I&#8217;ll throw a quick batch of pictures out here and a short update on the CA Kenagys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Probably the biggest update, if the least interesting, is that I am no longer gainfully employed.  Wait, what?  Yeah, fact.  (If you are either one of my regular readers, you probably already know this, but I&#8217;ll throw it out there anyway, just in case.)  After four arduous years of being at my latest company (which I never asked to be part of in the first place,) I was unceremoniously kicked to the curb.  If I said I was upset about this, I would be less than truthful.  So, currently, we&#8217;re just kind of winging it.  I am applying for new positions, but it&#8217;s a rough world out there!  That seems to be double-true for someone who has not looked for a job in 35 years.  I&#8217;m a little&#8230; &#8220;out of the loop,&#8221; shall we say, on the whole job hunt process.  I guess I can always just monetize this website!  There&#8217;s another 35-cents a month in my pocket!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As far as &#8220;regular&#8221; events:  We took a quick trip to Vegas the second week of December.  On the upside, several of our friends were there, and it was great hanging out with everybody.  On the downside, I absolutely abhor Vegas.  I go there so rarely that, without fail, I always forget how much I dislike that place.  Horrible.  I cannot imagine ever going there again;  But I&#8217;m sure I said that the last few times also, and look what happened.  Maybe the highlight of the trip (for me,) was Donette&#8217;s &#8220;big hit&#8221; gambling.  She likes to belly up to the bar at casinos and pump $20 in the video poker machine.  If you put money in the machine, they give you a free beer.  Upon receipt of said beer, she promptly cashes out and walks away.  I suppose it is debatable if this is in the spirit of The System, but it surely doesn&#8217;t bother me.  Charging $13 for a crappy bottle of beer is certainly against all standards of common decency too.  Anyway, she was following this questionable strategy one afternoon, and gave the game a spin before taking her $20 back.  One pull and she won $200!  While not the big numbers some of our group scored on the trip, it was a fine win for somebody who wasn&#8217;t even really playing.  Bonus!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Other than that week-long trip, we have been celebrating the holidays. We had a fantastic Thanksgiving this year, the food was top-notch. I even feel like we put in a pretty solid effort at &#8220;Christmas Spirit.\u201d We put up decorations, went to a nice Christmas party&#8230; Downright festive! I have to admit though, being now faced with the prospect of taking all that junk back down, my elation has waned considerably. I am trying to decide if I even HAVE to take anything down. There is (at least) an 80% chance that it will be Christmas &#8217;25 before anybody visits us, so it might just be worth a try&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whoa. Yeah that is by far the longest stretch of silence on this website in the last 20+ years. Consider it my little Christmas gift to you. But now, as the year ends, I&#8217;ll throw a quick batch of pictures out here and a short update on the CA Kenagys. Probably the biggest update, if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6314,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6296\/revisions\/6314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}