OK, then. We dropped onto the runway about 20 minutes early last evening. Wife Dina and I returned from a trip to Boston, to watch son Gregory trot across the stage at Emerson College’s Wang Theater to pick up his diploma and graduate. It was quite a trip in many ways. This morning, I’m back at my desk, resuming work after week-long absence. So far, it’s mostly two things: catch-up and clean-up. Let me explain…

What’s Involved: Resuming Work After Week-long Absence

Here’s the drill:
1. run winget upgrade –all — include-unknown to catch all pending updates that winget can handle (7 items)
2. run PatchMyPC Home Updater to catch other stuff that WinGet doesn’t (Revo Uninstaller, in this particular case)
3. run PC Manager deep cleanup (3.2GB found/1.1 GB cleaned) and unCleaner (2.5 GB found, 2.1 GB cleaned)
4. Because today is Patch Tuesday for May 2026, I also applied all pending monthly updates (2 for Defender, 1 for .NET Framework, and the usual monthly MSRT).

All that stuff is pretty easy and straightforward. I did have to reboot, though, because updates via WinGet and PatchMyPC didn’t proceed properly. Something apparently gummed up my runtime. Fixed with the tried-and-true strategy of “Try a reboot, if Windows is balky.” Add a second restart after the Patch Tuesday updates completed, just for grins.

Now, the Real Work Begins…

Next I have to plow through about a thousand email messages that piled up while were off having fun and making family history. That will probably take me the rest of the day. Then I can start updating the rest of the fleet. Wish me luck!

To cap things off, here’s a photo of Gregory proudly presenting his diploma amidst absolute chaos on Boston Common (across the street from Emerson College) after the ceremony ended. Cheers to him, and all of us!