Weeknotes 313

Happy new year! 🥂

I had, for the most part, a calm and restful week. The car rental people incorrectly charged me £113 for returning the car late, despite their inability to accept the car at the agreed time at their new location, but I’m hopeful that’ll sort itself out now that I’ve told them. Otherwise: no stress.

The end-of-year period took on a different character without alcohol but I think I liked it. I certainly don’t miss the creeping dread of a December hangover that doesn’t fully clear until mid-January.

I got through many cans of Chug over Christmas and enjoyed them as much as the real thing. Unfortunately on New Year’s Eve I treated myself to a bottle of Nozeco which tasted like a washing-up glove so that might be enough to force me back onto the booze.

Only joking. Overall I didn’t find it difficult to avoid alcohol at all last year so by default I suppose I’m going to continue. The only downside is that it makes social situations even more difficult — who wants to hang out with a teetotal vegan? — but I don’t really have those any more, so the health benefits easily win out.

I do have at least one unopened bottle of (probably) nice whisky at home that I now don’t know what to do with.

Three times at the gym. I renewed my annual membership on the 1st of January, which is enough of a resolution for me. I also had a recreational 14 km ride across the river and back yesterday, and today I rode the 14 km round-trip to Camden. It’s ice cold out there but the roads are quiet and the sky’s clear and blue.

By concentrating hard I just about picked back up the multiple threads of Revelation Space after a week away. I think following space opera might be right at the ragged edge of my intellectual capacity.

Aside from the rubbery un-wine, my only New Year’s Eve celebration was to go to Mukbap for lunch. I ate tteokbokki, kimbap, kongjaban and kimchijeon, all absolutely delicious.

Today’s Camden trip was to meet Leo, Sophie and Chris for lunch at Mildreds, something we haven’t done since June 2024. I don’t typically love the food at Mildreds — it’s fine, just nothing special — but this time I got the corner piece of a white chocolate tiramisu which was actually really good.

COMEDY SEGUE: I weighed myself and discovered I’ve gained about 5 kg since the end of August which is very disappointing considering how much effort I’ve been putting into regular exercise.

This month I’m going to make a conscious effort to eat more sensibly and not let the stress-snacking instinct kick in like clockwork every day. Ideally I’ll also find ways to ameliorate the underlying stress but that’s likely to be a longer-term project.

I watched another episode of Fallout. It’s still not doing much.

I also watched Wake Up Dead Man and found it just about entertaining enough to finish. As a whole it felt laboured and insubstantial, and Benoit Blanc didn’t have much agency or involvement in the story, but some of the scenes were fun and it rattled cosily enough along as a harmless winterval diversion.

I belatedly caught up with The Celebrity Traitors despite having the result spoiled by all UK media. I found it pretty entertaining; it’s a different and fundamentally more polite dynamic when the contestants are public figures with reputations to maintain, but they still managed to tie themselves in knots by looking for patterns in random noise.

There were significantly fewer percentages than usual:

I reckon this was due less to any decline in the popularity of percentages and more to the unstoppable memetic power of the “big dog theory”:

Irrational thesis, great branding, large canine.

TWIXMAS TINKERING: I resolved my two-of-everything smart home problem by using the Eve app to add the prefix “OLD” to the names of the pre-Matter versions of duplicated devices so I could easily tell which was which, then went through all my scenes and automations in the Home app to add each device’s non-“OLD” counterpart with the same configuration. Once that was done I removed the non-Matter bridge and now I’m back to one of everything.

I’m really happy with the robot vacuum. Having freshly-mopped floors is great actually! Who knew?

Now that my wrist’s basically recovered and I’m no longer wearing a splint, I’ve moved my watch back to my left arm. This is obviously where it’s designed to be so it’s a relief to be able to use it normally again.

I was quite pleased with this idea for writing ISO 8601 dates in Ruby. I don’t think it’ll catch on.

“Not now, rock and dust samples brought back from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu!”

Back to work tomorrow. I can do this.