The Changing of the Planner is complete; 2025 looms in all its charcoal gray glory. Looking forward to leaving 2024 behind.
Trying to decide if I want to take a chance on the game News Tower. My nostalgia for the news business has largely dissipated in the nearly 15 years since I left it, but I’m intrigued by the idea of a video game where I play the editor of a 1930s-era New York newspaper.
I got an Apple Watch for Christmas and am trying to breathe and hydrate when it tells me to every hour. It kind of helps, but then I worry about how my life is so far gone that it takes an electronic doodad to get me to inhale and drink water.
Took the day off w/post-Christmas slowness. I could spend this early weekend start cleaning out my office, but that means spending more time in my office than I’d like.
It was a good day for an impromptu Indian lunch with the husband and the best masala chai I’ve had in ages. It’s the small things.
A colleague just turned me on to “A.P. Bio.” I need the laughs. It had me at Paula Pell flashing a photo before a classroom of students and screaming, “This is my cervix! Who can tell me the five things wrong with it?”
Funny how I watch much more TV since cutting the cable cord years ago.
Working on this Boxing Day. I do have random Grateful Dead sets keeping me company, and at least I can wear the blanket hoodie and slippers that F picked out me for Christmas.
My brain feels as foggy and drizzly as the weather. But that’s honestly nothing new these days.
On my second viewing of “Fellowship of the Ring” with the family on this Christmas Day. Extended version this time.
I very much want to be a hobbit when I grow up.
So much lack of seasonal joy this year on social media. Not quite despair. Much grief, sadness, ennui. This is perhaps nothing new, really, but people seem much more open about it this year. And so many face the New Year with dread, myself among them.
All that said, I’m still wishing us all peace.
Just watched the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to the Grateful Dead wind down. Will never get used to Bob Weir looking like he should be on a box of frozen fish sticks.
Starting my second viewing of “Somebody Somewhere.” I know I keep going on about it, but I’ve really needed this show.
Grief, loneliness, feeling like an outsider, finding one’s tribe. There’s a lot there. And I love it all.
Almost all of my Christmas shopping has been online. Finally got out for a few analog retail errands and it was surprisingly not insane.
Grateful to not have to get out much until Christmas Eve Mass on Tuesday. Fingers crossed that I can log out a little early from work that day.
Happy seasonal Caturday.
Husband found the weighted blanket I feared had ended up into a Goodwill pile.
I am never leaving my recliner again.
Finally getting around to watching “Fellowship of the Ring.” A lot of the teenager’s D&D recaps are starting to make sense to me now.
Whoever came up with the phrase “no regrets” clearly never had a McRib sandwich.
I have finally consumed my first Starbucks cranberry bliss bar of the season. The holidays can officially begin.
I asked the teenager, who is not a fan of news these days for the sake of her mental health, whether she has been keeping up with news about Luigi Mangione and the CEO shooting.
“Not willingly,” she said.
“New Jersey Mystery Drone” is my new band name.
Almost done with my first left-handed Field Notes knockoff. Using these as mini-journals for lists, random thoughts, and venting. These are much less intimidating and more welcoming than fancier journals. After years of trying to keep a diary of one kind of another, I think I’m onto something.
Watching people melting down online over their parasocial relationship with an alleged assassin was not on my bingo card this morning.
It gets so exhausting to be chronically sad.
Watched “My Neighbor Totoro” for the sixth or seventh time (third or fourth in a theater). It’s not the very best of Studio Ghibli—that would be “Spirited Away” or “Tale of the Princess Kaguya,” probably—but “Totoro’s” classic sweetness never wears thin.
The homily at my parish is always a crapshoot. One Sunday it’s an excellent Advent exhortation by one supply priest to be prepared for Christ; the next Sunday it could be a warning from another supply priest that plants bought from a Masonic yard sale could bring Satan into your household.
Ever have a day where you feel so overwhelmed and out of control at the end of your work week that you desperately need Vietnamese comfort food and an avocado shake for dinner to calm you down?
Only me? Oh.
Watching old episodes of “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.” It was my comfort viewing when I was on maternity leave almost 17 years ago after my sister said she liked it because Bourdain’s snark reminded her of me.
It’s now comfort viewing because it reminds me of E. Not a bad way to grieve.