Perhaps, you took one glance at tonight's post and realized its title is a nod to 12 Monkeys (1995). Well, good show, you would be spot on! This trailer might just capture how I view the present...

YouTube Link

..but, MORE IMPORTANTLY, this post's title, Twelve Mondays (2021), is about one singular thing:

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

OK-OK, I suppose THAT could be a bit of a letdown. I mean, it's no pink bunny suit. Or, greater letdown still, a one-year subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club!

YES, more movie references, but this time, CHRISTMAS! Oh, that "most wonderful time of the year!"

Why now? Begin with the end in mind! When those old favorites do come on, the year is winding down with not much hourglass sand left to go around...

We have 12 Mondays remaining in 2021. What shall I do with them?

Events tonight have led me to install Microsoft Windows...which turned to Google...which got me to re-adopt Spotify—I dunno, I got on a roll so I went with it! And this time around, my return to Big Tech wasn't a pro/con power move that wrestled away my will...

—hardly, this work of mine shelves my end-to-end encryption play! Google will now be dishing out suggestions to me after its sunglasses-in-the-shadows AI parses what I write! I am no longer free to talk all DAY about the societal impact of Reese's Pieces emergence after its E.T. cameo, while not getting a SINGLE whiff of peanut butter and chocolate near that one Facebook friend who embarked on a mid-life crisis trip to the M&M's World Las Vegas—you know the one—or next to that Google search on irreverent binging while watching The Walking Dead episode about Tyreese's Pieces!

OK, so I'm NOT on Facebook, but I liked that if I wanted the OPTION to do a sweet soliloquy sans AdSense, the choice was there for me to savor such scripted speech sugar!

Perhaps, I should not be overly crestfallen about my departure from encrypted email: it's not exactly novel, for PGP emails have been around since...well, gosh, it's older than You've Got Mail (1998), an ancient world that measured by baud rates!

Still, encrypted email is WAY cool!

But, on the plus side, now that I have salvaged my Gmail account from the bottom of the World Wide Web, I no longer fear that emails written to me will bounce back undelivered, leaving its sender with that, "Oh, I'm so all alone at a lunch table on the first day of classes, SOMEBODY-GIVE-ME-A-PLATE-OF-CHOCOLATE-CHIP-COOKIES" feeling!

So, what has driven this behavior of returning to Microsoft, Google and Spotify?

A T-shirt. OK, a WHOLE ARMLOAD of T-SHIRTS! More specifically, a Cricut Explore Air 2 (with its lack of a Linux binary) brings me back to Microsoft. And you thought I was gonna say an "official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time."

Recently, I've written briefly on creating my own race events with their own T-shirts. It came to me after being let down by a local race organizer; they said I wasn't cool enough for school—I dunno, I think it was something about a zombie apocalypse...who knows what people are jive talkin' these days?

And as these 12 Mondays close out the year, I recognize that time is running out on 2021's New Year Resolutions. I've got seven 5Ks to run!

How does the lineup look for the rest of year? It's gonna be a rock show! Locations TBA!

1	The Reformation Day & 500-Night Diet 5K Zombie Bash	Sun, Oct 31
2	The Erudite Beard of 200 Days and Man Bun Run	Mon, Nov 8
3	The One-Year Carnivore 5K Celebration	Tue, Nov 23
4	The 14th Annual Michael Scott's Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race For the Cure	Sat, Dec 4
5	The Witcher and Mandalorian Kessel Run	Sun, Dec 12
6	The Run, Run Rudolph Winter Solstice	Tue, Dec 21
7	The Nightcall 5K Resolution	Fri, Dec 31