🇻🇪 Week Notes 053
🗓️ // Dec 28, 2025 - Jan 3, 2026
Embarking on my second year of Week Notes today. Of course, the news of the day is that we've invaded Venezuela, extracted their leader, Nicolas Maduro, and will now oversee their country (and oil reserves) for the foreseeable future. I hate everything about this.
🎉 Had a nice New Years Eve. Mary made some outstanding homemade chicken wings and chicken strips, and the boys picked out some hot sauces to go with them as well. Predictably, Houston was unimpressed with the Reaper sauce he picked out.
📕 Decided that I would go ahead and start a fresh bullet journal with the new year only to discover the spare notebook that I intended to use was not on the bookshelf where I remembered putting it. So looks like I'll just complete the current one after all.
🥶 First half of this week was really cold. Dropping into the teens after being in the 40° F range fro much of the month was a real shock to the system.
🤧 Lots of colds and coughs in the house again this week. I've been a little stuffy but fine overall.
⚽️ Spurs drew 0-0 at Brentford in an absolutely turgid affair that Thomas Frank tried to spin as a positive, but Vicario getting a yellow for time-wasting with a half hour left in the game was everything wrong with the game plan in a nutshell. Then, a few days later we sold last season's top goal scorer Brennan Johnson to Crystal Palace for £35M. I simultaneously understand the logic, recognize finally selling at the right time, and hate this move.
Playing
🎮 MarioKart 8 on the Switch is pretty fun. Houston got it for the rest of the kids for Christmas and I've played occasionally even though I'm terrible.
🎲🧩 We tried a table top game called Cascadia that we received for Christmas a couple of days ago. It's a really cool competitive puzzle game where you assemble a collection biomes and strategically place animals in them. Unfortunately, playing with our family is also super aggravating because we have to do teams, and the younger kids get bored and restless in between turns. You can actually play it solo, though, which I'm intrigued to try.
🧙♂ Keeping on top of my daily quests and Mastery Pass on Magic Arena. Had about three unsuccessful Premier Drafts and feeling pretty unmotivated to continue drafting even though I really like the set.
⛏️ Continued to plug along on my main solo world. Lots of incremental improvements and general remodeling. Successfully constructed my first XP farm with a Spider spawner after some false starts. This also triggered a run of losing a lot of valuable diamond equipment and ore while caving, which was particularly frustrating after what had been a really lengthy run of not dying.
Watching
📺 Stranger Things S5E8 - The Right Side Up 👍👍 I came away feeling pretty satisfied by the series finale, particularly thanks to the lengthy epilogue that took place 18 months later.
📺 Fallout S2E1-2 👍👍 Enjoyed the first couple of episodes of the new season. Just as gory, gruesome, and hilarious as the first season. I'm intrigued to get more flashbacks and see where things end up.
Projects
This hasn't been a very productive week from a project standpoint, but I have been getting rested, recharged, and ready for the new year.
🏃 I was already planning to run Bloomsday with at least one of my daughters since it's the 50th anniversary this year, but after talking to Mary last night, it looks like she will run with the youngest two. So, time to start formalizing our training plan and ramp up towards May 3rd!