2025 w52/december review

I was an absolute genius to set 'take no damage' & 'read while cosy' as my goals last time i posted because it means I have formally ACED December.

So right quick before I move the December pages into my archive binder, what did I do?

• kept up to date with laundry, floors, pantry & fridge management
• got back on the vitamin d supplements (although actually it's been quite sunny, a very mild winter, it was only below freezing a couple of nights)
• hauled the Christmas decorations out of their tub, culled some to a family member who decorates, culled some to a charity shop, put the remainder straight back in the tub. Perhaps next year I will feel like decorating. I don't dislike Christmas, but I would rather summon the festive spirit with music & smells than with hanging brightly coloured things where the dogs can't reach them.

• told a dog-walking acquaintance that I'll be glad to see the back of this year, and got quite a startled look in return
• went for an Afternoon Tea - you know, they have the little sandwiches on plate towers, & scones & cream, etc - with some elderly friends. genius choice on their part - it really isn't cold enough to meet up for the full plated roast meal with a beamed ceiling & a fireplace, like we did last year.
  • what's the word for the plate tower, hold on a moment, i'll go look
  • oh what, it's just called 'tiered plate stand'? that's boring, i thought there would be some brilliant old word like 'cruet' or 'salver'.

• finally got around to making a linux mint bootable usb stick & putting it on the previous laptop - which was only retired because it didn't have room for Windows 11's fat arse, not because anything was wrong with it. so that's what i'm typing on now.
  • & that forced me to think about what i actually do on a laptop, what's my minimum viable software bundle, and it's brave & discord & obsidian & calibre, which I find quite interesting. they all work effortlessly in linux mint, of course.
  • i had to go back into Chrome on the Windows laptop to fetch a couple of passwords & found that I had 230 logins saved. so that became a day project - delete some accounts, request deletion of some other accounts, & for the sites I will really use I went in & replaced the human-unreadable generated passwords with real word sequences, so I could write them down on a sheet.

Password Strength

xkcdAbout

• i only laugh at password-book people when they leave it beside the computer and it says ☞ PASSWORD BOOK ☜ on the cover and they invite people into the room where it is.
• did you know it was Linus Torvalds' birthday the other day?
• Month spending came in at £315, which I think is pretty good. Bills, groceries, another five rolls of insulated wallpaper to finish redoing the little room that gets cold. The Big Spoon did two grocery orders & pays the broadband but his was still lower, because the girls' health insurances are on my account.
• can you believe I still haven't bought AA batteries for the clocks.
  • I did look in the 'batteries bulbs and candles' section of my doomsday prepper hoard but I didn't have any AAs, & then I glanced at them in a shop when I was on my way back from the afternoon tea but they wanted something like £9 for 4 so I kept walking.
  • I have added them to the next grocery order. they may turn up, they may not.
• I have stayed at 1mg/ml nicotine, more or less. I do eyeball the refill proportions so some bottles may be a little over. But it's stable - I feel stable - I only ever want a cigarette when I see an attractive person with a cigarette in a film & even non-smokers feel that.
  • I do not intend to taper again or stop during winter, that's not a priority.
• I have not been keeping the storygraph updated so there'll be a void that throws my stats off, but I've been doing one-liner book reviews in my normal journal. It's mainly been Victorian Methodist Christmas morality novels about saving poor dirty children one at a time on their merits rather than effecting institutional change, and you can imagine how much those delight me.

Now, because the Thursday of this week is in 2026, this is week 01 of 2026 even though we are still in December, because of ISO 8601, you see. Think of it as the weight of the week tipping over the edge of the year, & it'll make complete sense.

I might also do a resolutions / vision post. I haven't decided. I might start typing one & then go 'no, this is pompous' & leave it in obsidian for my own entertainment.

intents for w01

• take no damage
• read in a blanket nest with the dogs
• stay on the vitamins
• bit of sewing, ideally in natural sunlight
• make notes on the ghastly course, possibly with swearing
• clean the stair carpet & railings