Welcome back, physically and maybe mentally, from the Thanksgiving break. If you’re reading this in a snowed-in airport, good luck to you. Since the holiday was so late in November, we have only three and a half weeks before Christmas.

We’re sliding into the holidays now since next week is Thanksgiving, with Christmas just four weeks later. The week before Thanksgiving can be relaxed as things slow down or crammed full to get ahead for the coming days off work.

If your favorite football teams are tanking, it’s time to embrace basketball. Miami and Cincinnati’s football teams remain winless, but in the NBA, the Miami Heat has a 75% chance to make it to the playoffs.

As we segue from spring to summer, spring has turned out to be typical as the Golden State Warriors are favorites to win the NBA Championship, and storms and tornadoes pound middle America from the plain states and flood states downstream.

Now that we’re officially into spring and caught up to being “sprung forward” an hour, don’t you feel rejuvenated? Or are you still fighting the snow and ice across much of the north? And could someone put the rivers back where they belong?

Did the flood of news about 5G from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week make you hopeful or wary? Smart money suggests vendors tend to be, um, optimistic in rollout timelines.

Isn’t it strange how the anticipation often satisfies more than the result? Yes, the Oscars just happened. Enjoy the arguments across social media about how right or wrong the Academy voters were this year.

Have you rigged up dancing witches and staggering zombies to scare trick or treaters with IoT motion detectors for Halloween yet? How about a candy-cam over the bowl to catch your spouse dipping into the stash? No? Just wait a year or two, and these things will be on the market.

We’re halfway through September, and someone over-ordered the fall rains on the East Coast.

IoT news isn’t just an American pastime—the whole world is going IoCrazy. So we’ll catch up to a few stories we missed that happened “across the ponds” and some dollar-oriented news closer to home.

News from afar