Our time-shifted Christmas week was really peaceful. A couple more days before going back to work on Monday, and I’m trying to make the most of it.

Shipped

Took most of the week off for the holidays with both kids here. Still managed to nearly complete a new client project we’d budgeted the entire month of January for, in about ten hours of work. Our first status call isn’t until Tuesday and I’ve already got something over 90% of the way there. Sometimes things just come together in a near-perfect way, and I live for those moments.

On the other side, I spun down a SaaS product that never really came to fruition. There were many reasons why it didn’t succeed, but it was still sad to turn off those lights.

Read

Nothing this week, but something jumped right to the top of my to-read pile: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. Deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen and decide to make their own way doing what they know: hand-pulled noodles for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war. Robots, food, post-apocalyptic city life? Right up my alley. I might shelve Service Model temporarily so I can devour this one.

Played

My Gloomhaven group won’t be able to meet for a while, but the digital edition was on sale on Xbox for $20, complete edition. I put almost twenty hours into it this week and have only beaten two scenarios in all that time.

I know how to play the game really well, but the UI of the digital edition is beyond frustrating. So many things are undocumented, and I’m still figuring out how to do simple things like see the map while planning my round. My biggest gripe is that there’s no undo function, and it’s trivially easy to ruin a thought-out plan with one wrong button press. The closest they have is “restart round,” which can mean losing half an hour of progress.

Cooked

We had our Christmas meal this week. The kids chose ham, so I grabbed a big bone-in one on an after-Christmas sale (one of the benefits of Second Christmas) and used the included cherry vanilla cola glaze instead of my usual approach. Not terrible. We’re still eating it several days later, but it’s mostly gone. I also made baked potatoes, a big fruit salad, and a garlic-ginger stir-fried broccoli that turned out fantastic as a baked potato topper. Oh, and gluten-free cornbread.

The showstopper was the gluten-free yule log cake I largely winged and documented on the blog.

The following night I set up an omelette station for dinner, which reminded me of one of my many college jobs in the campus cafeteria, where I often got to run the omelette station.

Noticed

Cold and a little rainy, which made for good cozy time inside gaming and cooking.

Thinking About

I’m on staff for two conventions in the next six weeks. The first is a cakewalk: sole technical troubleshooter for presenters all weekend at a tiki culture convention. I can do that work in my sleep or, as is the case here, with a different rum-based drink in each hand.

The other one is a steampunk-adjacent convention where I serve as costuming track director, and I’m really feeling the crunch on that one.

The five fairy food videos I made for CONpossible have been going live every other day and have been well received. YouTube is inscrutable as ever, but they’ve netted me several thousand views and a bunch of new subscribers. The con’s social media team will be posting their versions in the coming weeks.

What’s Next

My youngest starts back to school Tuesday, beginning the second semester of sophomore year with a new slate of classes. She turns 16 in a month, so I need to start thinking about that. My eldest returns to college this weekend, so there’s lots of coordinating to manage over the next few days.