Big Blog Changes (Weeknotes

Goings On

🎄 I’m not one to give Christmas much thought this early in the year, but I stumbled upon The McSweeney’s Advent Calendar and I just couldn’t pass it up. I pre-ordered, thinking it would arring sometime in late November. But no, here it is sitting on my mantel. My family gave me that wrinkled brow response when shared my excitement. “They’re books?” they asked, but we’ll see who laughs last once we start reading!

🌍 I built my own content delivery network on Amazon CloudFront. Was this necessary? No. Was it hard? Not really. Was it fun? Yes it was. Why? Because I am a nerd who likes to tinker with things. Now the process of migrating all my content over begins.

✴️ I rebranded my blog (again) to resurrect the name that I first started using back in the late 1990s. After a long absence, I also re-enabled dark mode! More changes are coming to this and my other blogs too.

🩸 I continued my streak of medical things this week by getting blood drawn for some routine screenings. I used to get them for free under my wife’s healthcare insurance, but not since she switched employers a few years ago. I like to try to stay on top of my numbers so I went online and ordered men’s health and prostate cancer screening tests. It’s not too expensive and the results were available within a day.

🎂 We celebrated our younger daughter’s 21st birthday this week and we started the festivities by whipping up some piña coladas in the Ninja Slushi. After that the whole family went out to do some shopping and get dinner. We tried a new (to us) restaurant that turned out to be pretty terrible, but we always have fun when we’re together and that’s what matters.

🏈 I didn’t quite stay awake long enough to watch the Ohio State Buckeyes lose at Oregon.

👻 My cactus avatar is dressed up as a ghost for Halloween.

Pics

⚾ I came across an old photo that I “clipped” from the Akron Beacon Journal’s website back in 1996. I was surprised enough to have come across the photo in the first place, but even more surprising was the fact that the image file contained all the original metadata—including the caption as it ran in the paper!

🐦‍⬛ We were paid a visit by a huge flock of birds right outside our front window. I wouldn’t have paid them much attention if not for the fact they were very loud!

Watching

🎬 We watched Beetlejuice again in anticipation of the sequel.

🎬 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is pretty darn good. The absence of Jeffrey Jones, Alec Baldwin, and Geena Davis are conspicuous but handled about as well as one could expect. The story line is somewhat overcomplicated but it mostly works. Except for “MacArthur Park.” That’s a shit song.

Reading

“I love your week notes and day notes and art and lists” and “I Love Getting Older” by Annie Mueller

Listening

“‎Beats to relax/study to” by Lofi Girl (Apple Music)

Cheers, friends!