Good morning! Hello! How are you? Did you have a lovely holiday? Are you working this week? Enjoying some much needed downtime? Did you catch COVID? Did your holiday plans get screwed up? Seems like that happened a lot. I am very sorry about that. I hope you’re feeling okay.
Things are good over here. Sorry about abandoning you after an NFT post, that was not cool. I apologize. I understand, you’re probably having a hard time witht his whole third wave, and your sweet, sweet GMHHAY comfort let you down with some cryupto bullshit. That was not cool. I really am sorry.
Day five of a nice, long vacation. Haven’t done tons with my vacation, which is the point, I suppose. I mean, I have this very long list of things I am supposed to do at the end of the year. And I’m supposed to get the next edit on the GMHHAY book to Lisa by the end of the year. And I always try and watch a movie-a-day during the holiday vacation. And there’s a new expedition on No Man’s Sky I wanted to finish. I’ve made small dents in each of these, but haven’t really finished all of them.
Here are my year-end wrap-up tasks I’ve been doing for years:
Archive the year’s discogs orders, remove sold items from my inventory, save a copy of their cover art, organize that artist in iTunes and add the cover art to any items I ripped right before sale. This one is always kinda fun.
Update Goodreads with all books read for the year and the correct date
Check on all your domain names and make sure to renew any expring in the next year
Do the LJ end-of-year questions meme you have been doing for years
Add the monthly letters to Jane to the Jane book. As I write this down, I realize I forgot to do the Jane entry for November, and the December is due today. Whoops.
Add all gigs to the Google Sheet master list of every gig attended (lol that’ll be quick)
File everything in the “to file” bin in the library to proper folders.
Sort all items in “Camera Uploads” folder and “Sort” folder into their respective, proper folders.
Catalog charity donations for taxes (this one is automated now! With Quicken!)
Parse Captios in Evernote (the app that emails myself from my phone and keeps a copy in Evernote), either deleting or filing them. God, this one is tedious. But super illuminating, as I tend to use the app a lot while lying in bed, about to fall asleep, often drunk. Some of my best writing comes from Captio.
Backup the entire Plex to a hard drive for external, offline storage.
Update your Will questionnaire and “If I die” document for Emma.
Take a photo of any new knick knacks in the library, add the photos to the Dropbox archive folder for knick knacks, and go to Dropbox.com and annotate them.
Make a book of your 750 Words for the year, your “unexpurgated diaries” by copying all the entries into Pages, laying it out, and ordering two copies from lulu.com.
Post your media consumption list to Medium (will do it in this newsletter this year) along with best-of selections.
Move iMovie library to cold storage and make a new one (iMovie has the most ridiculous storage mechanism)
Add all the songs in the “Starred” Spotify playlist to a “Best of this year” playlist, and also to the “All the Good” playlist
Sync the “All the Good” Spotofy playlist to Apple Music so I can listen to it in the house
Uncheck all of these items for next year
So far, I’ve done… exactly one of these things. Actually, 0.9 of these things. I’ve sorted the photos in the Camera Uploads folder. Well, most of them. There were 9,600 photos in this folder when I started, there are 222 items. I will hopefully finish this up today. I sort them in reverse chronological order, sorting the most recent photos first, then working backward through the year. I am in February now. It goes fast, because my photo sorting technique is the greatest. I will hopefully get this done today, and then try and finish the GMHHAY book edit today. If I can get those two cleared off my plate, I’ll feel okay.
Anyway, Christmas was lovely. I debated whether or not to make the whole big Christmas meal. Emma and Janet are supportive of my decision. Really, I was kind of resentful of how much time out of my Thanksgiving vacation it took to make the meal, but I realized the difference is that Christmas is at the beginning of the holiday, so it wouldn’t feel that way. Plus, I like the ritual of the meal, and I like actually prepping it. Making roux is very soothing. I slightly over-cooked the stuffing, the top was too crusty. Even though I added foil to the top after it was done cooking. My mistake—one I didnt make at thanksgiving—was I did not let the oven cool from 350 to 200 when it transitioned to a warming recepticle. I got lazy at around 240 and closed the door on the warming food, including the stuffing. Whoops. I also under-salted the potatoes, but that’s a minor sin. Anyway, delicious!
And now we have delicious leftovers for a few days, on top of bagels for breakfast and I am just in food heaven this last week before I go on a diet, start taking my miracle weight-loss drug, and never eat food again. Fingers crossed.
We did presents, which was mostly an exercise in all of us buying Jane things, who had way too many presents, and honestly we could have gotten her one thing, because each present, no matter how small, was something amazing and she would spend, like, ten minutes with it until we could get her to open the next one. At least they were all pretty cheap. I got her a headlamp that she has definitely taken a shining to so far, except she likes to wear it backwards, whith the light pointing behind her, and is absolutely not interested in my suggestions that she wear it with the light pointing forward. I also got her a little “kid’s saw” that can cut cardboard, so she can help us opening boxes and such. She seems to like it a lot. And I got her this cheap Casio keyboard, which she has been enjoying:
And honestly, we all did pretty good buying presents for one another. Janet and Emma got me two amazing bound booksets I’ve had my eye on, which is great, They’re gonna replace the Harry Potter books in the living room because JK Rowling is awful.
I’m sure Jane Austen and Isaac Asimov were awful too but they were awful before social media and they at least don’t keep saying increasingly awful things online when no one is asking them.
I also got a gizmo that lets me control my minisplit AC from my phone, which is a thing that has been mildly annoying, but continually annoying, and exactly the sort of thing you sort of want but can’t justify buying so are very happy to get as a gift because it cuts the Gordion knot of indecisions.
Been doing okay on the movies. I missed Christmas day, but three of the four days of this vacation, I’ve managed to watch a movie. So far, The Matrix, (I liked it more than most people) The French Dispatch (Lovely and fun and had one or two emotional beats that stuck with me but also… okaaaay) and Don’t Look Up (almost perfect). Gonna see Spiderman tomorrow, probably—got my eye on a particularly empty morning showing. Not gonna bother with Ghostbusters, House of Gucci or Nightmare Alley in the theater. Got my eye on the Jane Campion cowboy movie for today. But I dunno, maybe I’ll just focus on getting shit done. Who knows. Tough call. So much non-working to do!
I’ve been trying to finish the latest expedition in No Man’s Sky, to “get it out of the way” so I “didn’t have to worry about it” over the holidays, except it proved to be insanely grindey, and took up an entire day yesterday and I am so pissed. I got it done, but my god, what a slog. It made me want to never play again. I don’t know why I did that to myself. And I’m not even done! I still have, like, 30 mins more to go. Seriously. I spent the entire dayon it.
And! The weather is absurd out there. Lovely. It was 72°F yesterday. It will be in the mid 60’s today, back up to the 70’s. It was definitely not a day to spend inside playing a video game—especially when you have so much to do! Despite this, my hairy vetch has yet to sprout in the Birdie’s beds, so I guess I did something wrong. Maybe shouldn’t have added the layer of mulch. But I was worried the birds and squirrels would make off with all of the seeds. Maybe I should have read the instructions on the package, lol. But it’s seeds! How hard can it be? Hard, apparently!
My sister and mom are in Hawaii for the holidays. Talked to them on Christmas they seemed to be having a good time. I’m slightly jealous but I love our house, I love our home, don’t really want to be anywhere else right now, which is a good thing since, you know, global pandemic, etc.
I hope you’re having a lovely holiday. Will pop in once or twice this week, definitely get my big end-of-year media wrap-up to you in the next week or so!
Let’s do a mix! Moody and quiet mix, lotta new stuff. Lotta good stuff coming out at the end of the year, hard to keep up. The Aeon Station (one-half of the Wrens) album is out and it is so, so good. New Brandi Carlile is fantastic. I dig music.
I also got a lot of time spent with my Indie Rock Christmas playlist on Spotify, which is just the best. Except too much Mark Kozelek. Man, that guy wrote a lot of Christmas songs. But I spent all the time I was makign Christmas dinner — from, like, 8 AM to noon— listening to it. I felt the Christmas magic for a few minutes in there, not gonna lie.
And for the first time in years, I did not subject people to my Christmas hit, “Christmas is Murder.” Still the greatest Christmas song ever, if you ask me, but I guess if it was gonna be a hit, it would have been one by now, alas.