๐ ๐ป Week Notes 052
๐๏ธ // Dec 21, 2025 - Dec 27, 2025
It ended up being a busy, but very nice Christmas week here in Spokane. My only complaint is what an unseasonably warm and rainy week it has been. It's not so much that I'm pining for a white Christmas or cold weather, I just dread the damage it's doing to our backyard in combination with our two dogs.
๐ Started things for the week off on Sunday with a delicious roast ham dinner and gift exchange at my mom's house. My whole family including my oldest daughter, Eawyn, made it out.
๐ On Christmas Eve we had our traditional chowder dinner gathering with Mary's delicious homemade clam chowder, salmon chowder, and spicy tomato soup (for the picky eaters in our clan). I was a little bummed out that we had a smaller family turnout this year, but one of the pluses of living so close to Mary's parents is that they generally don't miss our gatherings.
๐At a certain point in the last several years we got fed up with how over-attended Christmas Eve mass is at our church (you have to get there an hour early just to claim a pew for your family) and started going to the Christmas Day mass instead. Much more pleasant and typical attendance experience, although we did have a random woman get up in front of the congregation, and start belting out the beginning of "Go Tell it on the Mountain," before mass started, because she was some combination of bored, inspired, or attention-seeking.
๐ We found out Christmas Day that Eawyn's boyfriend James had proposed to her the night before. Mary's reaction was straight up Jamie Lee Curtis reacting to her daughter's engagement in Christmas with the Kranks and I only wish I had it on video to make some kind of side by side video comparison!
๐ฅ๐ We always have Christmas Day brunch with bacon, eggs, scones, and lots of fresh berries at Mary's parents following mass and then open gifts from them. This year we had a minor scone emergency because Kathy couldn't find her recipe, didn't let Mary know, and just kind of went, "Oh well." The scones are the centerpiece of our Christmas Day breakfast tradition, and come from John's Scottish mother's family. It's a pretty simple recipe that Kathy and Mary have been making for decades so the whole scenario was pretty inconceivable. Mary stepped in, and they were able to piece together the recipe from memory, and still bake up a bunch of delicious scones pretty quickly.
Playing
โ๏ธ A fair amount of Minecraft this week post Christmas, but a lot of it was me testing out the new budget GPU (AMD RX 480) I got from my in-laws, and starting to experiment with shaders.
๐งโโ There was no Midweek Magic this week, so besides trying to get the Winter Holiday Achievements I skipped multiple days and mainly worked on my Daily Quests. The highlight was getting matched up against YouTube legend Sonio in the Play Queue with a gruul pile I threw together for one of the achievements and pulling out the win thanks to a perfect Worldsoul's Rage top deck.
Listening
๐ถ๐ Synthwave Christmas/Electronic Christmas playlist on Spotify. I found a really fun collection of synth heavy electronic Christmas tunes and added it to the rotation this week. Jolly Old Synth Nicholas by Diamond Field, Who Ha was the amusing standout of the many quality songs in the collection. The Winter Bonfire - Synthwave Edit by Fear of Tigers being my absolute favorite discovery.
๐ถ๐ Shoutout to a Charlie Brown Christmas as one of the go-to classic Christmas albums at our house during December.
๐ถ๐ A Christmas Together - John Denver and The Muppets - This is a deep cut from my childhood (we owned it on vinyl!) that randomly occurred to me this morning and of course Spotify had it. Definitely one for the family December rotation in the years to come.
Projects
๐งถ I put in a lot of hours at the beginning of the week, finishing up a pink version of the reversible Meadow Vine cable scarf I made for Mary last year. Towards the end, I realized it was a mirror version of the original pattern because I had unintentionally reversed the direction of all my cables!๐ It turned out great, though, and I am now a big fan of Red Heart's Ombre line of yarns because of the nifty color gradient and general feel.
๐ I've been working through our family collection of old Macs and updating them to Sequoia 15.7.3 because it fixes a pretty major zero day vulnerability (Apple's second of the last 3 or 4 months). Still a few to go, but making progress.
๐ฎ โ๏ธ The new GPU installed without much of a hitch, but the PC itself needs further upgrades. I have a 512GB SSD I'd like to install and with Windows 10 no longer getting free updates I'm ready to give Linux gaming a try on it. Just need to decide on a bistro.
โ๏ธStarting to think about setting up a dedicated Minecraft server for our family as well rather than just hosting local LAN games from my iMac. It's cool that we schedule a time to just all play together, but I can see the benefit of having an always available world as well.