hey cass! this is a great question and something i've been thinking about every once in an inconvenient while since revue was unceremoniously taken away from us.

the answer is "not really but i have my email list and would like to find a new home for it."

if any of you have recommendations that are not mailchimp or substack, i'd love to hear them! my list stood at ~1700 emails last i remember. i may even roll my own thing together since i have a sendgrid account for my mastodon instance.

vacation time is something i'm very bad at taking - both because working became a coping mechanism instead of drinking when covid hit and also because my jobs before tech (restaurant cook, college administrator) were very stingy if not downright hostile about taking time off. this is something i've been actively working on in therapy (and having a supportive team and leadership helps). i say all of this to lay it all on the table: i am not good at work/life balance but i'm actively working on getting better at it. so basically i'm only at the preliminary stages of having a stance on vacation time.

THAT BEING SAID

do what makes you feel good, not what you think your team will feel good about – if they're a good team, they'll care more about your rest vs. you making a project take a day or a few weeks longer. and if they're bad and colossal babies about it, consider it petty revenge.

i have a thing to say about all three, in order of bad to okay:

my little brother was a bartender at fridays - he could juggle bottles and do tricks, even went to vegas to compete on fridays' behalf. his location's owner got caught selling cheap liquor as high end stuff and they left my brother high and dry when covid hit. not a fan, although eating a "cup of dirt" there when my dad was a manager is a core memory.

there's at least one leed certified applebee's in manhattan - i want to say harlem but it's not showing up on the map so maybe it closed. anyway it has (had?) a living wall and toilets with turbines to generate power. it was kinda cool but to be honest i imagine it was very hard to make new yorkers give a shit about whether the source of their cheap marg's used coal or toilet flushes to power the ice machine. okay i looked it up to make sure this wasn't some wrinkle in my brain that edibles creased and i saw that they did have an east harlem location which was the first ever leed certified restaurant in manhattan.

there used to be a chili's in jersey city. on world emoji day in 2016 i was dumped and so my close friends took me there to get drunk and then we went to barcade to continue getting drunk. the thing about chili's is that it's there for me until it is not. unrelated: i haven't drank alcohol in 4 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, and 4 days!

happy belated world emoji day!

edit: the answer is chili's

pumagreg is great. he loves his new home even though he was unnecessarily dramatic the day we moved. he and andy like to lay on the floor together.