A cozy restaurant interior with wooden chairs and a table set with plates, cutlery, and a bread basket. The wall is adorned with numerous framed photos of people, suggesting a history of visitors or events.

Busy week, updates will probably feel incomplete. Dinners, parties, last minute shopping, Christmas break for everyone.

πŸ“· On Saturday I had a concert to shoot. The musicians are friends of the family (the ones that spent a week with us on the island), and the son of one of them is tinyMovieStar’s best friend from kindergarten. We all went.

🍰 Sunday: birthday parties. Plural, because that’s how we do it. My brother’s son-in-law, and then movieStar’s uncle. Loads of driving around.

πŸ₯Ά Monday was a rather shitty day, and it’s getting too cold for our taste too. We even had to turn the heating on, first time this year. It’s either that, or wearing layer upon layer. We won’t do that. Not at home.

😩 Tuesday came, I still had photos to edit, but couldn’t. I tried, but couldn’t. The light was SO shitty, photos are super hard to edit, I lack the energy at this point. I did get started, but it would take another day to finish it.

πŸ’» I did finish them, on Wednesday. They were so so in the end. Not entirely happy with the final result. Like the photos, hate the color grading. Turning them all into black and white would be the best solution.

We then had another birthday party, a cousin turned 5. They live outside the city. We have to deal with the traffic of people going home. It’s a pain. Party was cool, though. Loads of food, and good conversation. We spent a week with these cousins in the Azores earlier this year, and it was good to see them all again.

πŸ₯° Thursday was dad&daughter day. movieStar left before our baby woke up, and arrived after she was sleeping. She spent part of the day at kindergarten, but I walked her there, picked her up, had ice cream and tea, and made her dinner. We fell asleep after a couple of books, and a handful of stories. She’s very much into “how was your life in the ’80s”, and “tell me about my grandmother’s grandfathers” at this point in her life.

🎁 Friday came! Let’s end the shopping, please! I can’t stand anymore time spent at shops. Luckily we don’t have to drive anywhere, everything is walking distance from home. But, still, what a crazy couple of weeks! I bought the final gift for movieStar, and printed a few dozen photos. Done! Still a lot of wrapping to do, but we’re good.

tinyMovieStar decided to stay home, on the last day before the break. We messaged the teacher letting her know we’d be skipping school, and that’s when it hit the little one: she would not see her beloved teacher until the new year. Oops! I took her to school after lunch, and we stayed for a couple of hours. She’s at the perfect age to walk to school. Incredible conversations, and great company for ice cream. Funny as hell.

πŸŽ„ ElFofo is still doing the crazy stuff.

🧘 Zen Browser. It’s Catalina compatible. It’s Firefox based, and not Chrome as the one I’ve been using. It’s clean. It’s fresh. It’s… Sadly no iOS version, I’ll just try to use Firefox if I want any kind of syncing, but I don’t particularly like Firefox on iOS. It feels blocky. Arc Search is still my favorite there.

β˜•οΈ Ordered a couple of coffee cups from Perplexity. Free shipping, more than reasonable price.

⚑️ Changing power/gas provider. An adventure. Need to do it, or at least look into it, but can’t force myself into it. This will be addressed in a week or two.

🍿 The Grinch. Again. It’s the second time this year, and I believe we’ll watch it again. That Christmas.

πŸ“Ί Almost gave up on the Lioness. Persevered, and I made it to the end. Before starting, I was afraid Nicole Kidman would be the one responsible for giving up. Turns out I actually liked her performance. I’m prejudiced, I admit it. But it was Zoe SaldaΓ±a or, more precisely, SaldaΓ±a’s character, who almost did it. I have nothing against the actress, but her character got on my nerves in every single episode.

🎡 I’ve been watching a few Tiny Desk Concerts, and also a couple of sets from the Austin City Limits festival. Loving the stuff that comes out of these two venues.

πŸŽ™οΈ The Rest is Classified. A new-ish podcast about espionage and covert operations. Tried a couple of episodes, along with the usual suspects: Hemispheric Views, 3x2, Core Int, Hacked, Underworld, Smartless, … I listen to too many shows. On top of these, I’m still trying to finish an episode of Lex Fridman’s Podcast, and interview with Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas. It’s 3 hours and 11 minutes long, and both of them make me sleepy in under ten minutes. Aravind, in particular, has a very calm tone, and a rhythm that is sleep inducing.