Week Notes 22#52

Christmas Day with the Dodsons, New Year's Eve, and lots of eating leftovers

• Boxing day was "the day" for the Dodsons' Christmas celebrations, which we were hosting:
  • Was a pretty stressful morning cooking, with it being the first time we'd pushed the new cooker to its limits, and although it being much bigger than our old one, it didn't quite fit everything in. The first time I've cooked for 12 people, and even with Cook's handy guide to timings, using three different ovens led to different timings, and some things being cooked too much / too little
  • Started by getting to Co-Op for them opening at 0800 to get more tin foil for the turkey, as we didn't have enough to start the cooking process, meaning we were already running a little behind schedule for the planned lunch at 12
  • This was made more difficult by the fact that we found that the biggest baking tray we had did not fit 😱
  • With the potatoes looking like they weren't cooking very well, we had to pivot to cooking some ourselves, which was lucky that we'd got a load of potatoes for cooking our own roasties for a roast on Christmas Eve
  • Forgot a few portions of potatoes and veg in the freezer, which we didn't realise until we were serving up 😬
  • Got some good gifts from my secret Santa, and my recipient seemed happy too
  • Morph was a bit cheeky trying to eat Christmas cake / from Austin's highchair
  • Forgot to give Morph his Christmas tuna, which we bought purposefully 😅
  • Cookie was surprisingly good for the day, aside from a couple of times
  • All in all, it was a good time, though - everyone enjoyed the food, it was mostly still warm when we sat down to eat, it was nice to see everyone, and it's been nice having quite a lot of leftovers!
• New Year's Eve:
  • Had a nice chilled evening, watching Bullet Train with a fire, a takeaway from Spice
  • Spent a while trying to get Cookie to go for a pre-emptive wee and poo before the fireworks started, and took a frustratingly long time
  • Cookie's first New Year's Eve fireworks seemed to be OK, although she was a little nervous at the start
  • Morph was allowed in the living room just before midnight so he was able to stay safe with us too
• Sorted out my blogroll's webmentions being sent - as it turns out static pages don't appear in my Hugo sitemap - and I've added a fair few new folks to the list, but it's getting a little unmanageable and I need to get through the TODO list Jenga that is being able to manage it more effectively
• Also got Fedifinder updated to work with my mastodon account string, so now folks can discover me through that, as well as making it more discoverable on my site
• Smacked the Internet box on the side of the house while taking the bins out - barefoot - in a frantic rush before they got to our house, which fortunately was in time, as well as not having caused our Internet to be cut off 😅
• Made some more progress on my Chef blog post, and hoping to get it mostly done tomorrow, so I can be done before the new year begins!
• Considered rebuilding my Renovate + endoflife.date checking code this week as an Open Source thing, but haven't gotten around to it. Will look to see if it's worth Open Sourcing what I've done at work, or if rebuilding it from scratch as a fresh project, is better
• Cookie got the big bone a few times this week
• Started playing ranked on Apex Legends to give myself some time to play the Broken Moon map, because I'm really quite bored of Olympus/World's Edge
• Kinda wished I'd done a "2022 in Review" post, but didn't have the energy nor the time to dedicate to it, at least in the level of detail I used to do 😅
• My family were up for the day, which was nice to see them, having a light Christmas-y lunch and doing some presents
  • Was very exciting to see the Tesla, which looks well snazzy
  • Cookie was incredibly shocked by Cat wearing my Oodie, and couldn't quite work out what was going on 😹
• Cookie isn't a fan of Lidl's Deluxe Irish Cream - the smell on my breath / the glass makes her back away
• We'd pulled forwards Gousto (with a 5 meal box, for the first time) from this coming Tuesday/Wednesday to Thursday, so we could eat some meals over the weekend, rather than needing to source our own food, or so we thought 😅 Turns out we did not cancel the other box, so got another 4 meals delivered yesterday, meaning we've gone for several weeks of cooking for pretty much ever meal 😬 I know that's a normal thing that real human adults do, but not us 😹
• Got some "motion detected" notifications in the Garage, but couldn't see what it was so dismissed it. A couple of days later we went into the garage and spotted the cause - Morph. It turns out he'd spotted that his new dry food was in the original packaging on top of the drawers, and needed to knock it over and have a very thorough attempt to chew through the hardened plastic 😹 He didn't make any progress, but it looked pretty knackered! As a reward, I let him lick all the crumbs from the inside which looked very funny, where he was 80% inside the bag licking it all up
• Booked tickets to see Jimmy Carr later this year in Nottingham
• Been listening to Discover Weekly on Spotify today, as I've not had a chance to listen to the recommendations all week
• Been plucking Cookie's hair today as a means to at least get some of it while she's not that happy with being brushed
• Glad we've still got one more day off, as it feels like this break has been much quicker than it should've been

Watched:

• Bullet Train
• Jack Ryan
• Community
• Enola Holmes 2
• The Knight Before Christmas
• Blockbuster
• The Witcher: Blood Origin
• Knives Out
• Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
• Falling For Christmas
• New Year's Eve
• Spirited
• Surviving Christmas
• About Fate