😷 Week Notes 047
🗓️ // Nov 16, 2025 - Nov 22, 2025
Fairly uneventful week on the home front except that everyone other than me has had terrible coughs. Not sure how I escaped as I've definitely had minor cold symptoms and stuffiness as well. Some of Mary's co-workers even joked about her being down to two packs of cigarettes a day now (she doesn't smoke). The rest of the kids haven't been much better, although I think they started to improve by the end of the week. I haven't heard as much overnight coughing at least.
⚽️ Spokane Velocity lost to One Knoxville 2-0 in the USL League One Final. I forgot the game was on Golazo on Paramount+ and completely missed the opening goal. Spokane played well in the rest of the first half but could not equalize. Then gave up a dodgy (no VAR) outside the box penalty early in the second half and got a no call on the other end. Back to back runners up finishes in your first two years of existence is still amazing.
🌤️ Weather has been November cool and pretty normal this week without much precipitation since last weekend. My understanding is that it's going to get colder with a chance of snow in time for the holiday week.
🏡 All the leaves have fallen off our trees now, but our neighbor's aspens are still sending leaves are way. If snow is on the way this weekend is probably the last time I can easily deal with leaf cleanup. Strategically placed pine needles and leaves have helped keep the dogs from getting too muddy lately.
🗽 NYC Mayor-elect Zohan Mamdani visiting the Oval Office and charming the heck out of Trump was absolutely wild to see. There was one still photo I saw that was straight out of the "get you a person that looks at you the way that..." internet meme.
Playing
⛏️ Lots of Minecraft this week both with the kids and solo. Just about finished up my mountain top lookout and then added a basement and mine shaft with steps that leads straight down and past our original base almost perfectly. I had been away from our original base working on the lookout so long I barely recognized where everything was at on our base!
🧙♂ The Avatar the Last Airbender set came out on Magic Arena this week so I've been having a ton of fun with that. Started out with a few Jump-In sets just to get a feel for the cards and bending mechanics and then did my first Premier Draft. 3-0 so far with a fairly decent Dimir deck.
Watching
📺 Pluribus continues to be awesome through four episodes. Particularly now that Carol is coming out of her grief enough to start figuring things out and trying stuff. We've seen from episode one that she's quite resourceful when motivated. I continue to be intrigued by the Paraguayan guy as well as we finally got to see his perspective on Carol's calls and what he's up to. Seems like a potential ally if he doesn't starve himself to death first.
📺 ⛏️ Watched a fair amount of Minecraft YouTube videos particularly from a guy that goes by Avomance. I really like his chill demeanor and overall approach to the game as he tries to build attractive things as he plays. His recent Minecraft Crafting Manual series has been a particularly helpful tutorial for me.
🍿 Home for the Holidays 👍 I caught the end of the 1995 (thirty years ago!) Holly Hunter led, Jodie Foster directed, Thanksgiving classic last night because Mary had it on last night. The family home absolutely nails the vibe and aesthetic of my paternal grandparents' house in Spokane before they moved into a retirement home in the lates 80s which I kind of love. I'd forgotten that 30-something RDJ was the little brother in Hunter's crazy family, having never sat down and fully watched the film in its entirety from beginning to end. I should probably do that at some point.
Listeningt
- 🎙⚽️ Mostly ignored all my Spurs podcasts during the international break but continue to enjoy my Football Manager related ones even though I haven't been playing FM26 much recently.
Projects
💻 The old ideaPad 430 that the kids got as a hand-me-down from my father-in-law has been terrible under Windows 10 for a long time despite having a new SSD. I finally got fed up and started making preparations to install Ubuntu-MATE. Backing up the user folder data took longer than I anticipated (and probably isn't even necessary), but I think I'm finally ready to wipe the drive and install Linux.
🎙🤖 I started going down an AI text to speech rabbit hole last weekend with Apple's Personal Voice capabilities and then trying Chatterbox TTS. I want to give Index 2 TTS a go this weekend as well, not because I want to rip off celebrity voices, but because I'm intrigued by the idea of having realistic, and also computery voices to playoff of in a solo fictional podcast setting.
🏡 Lots of winter preparations and general cleaning around the house and yard. Need to give the gutters some attention this weekend and figure out why the gutter heater cord started shorting out last winter and if I can fix it.