2026 w45 cold noses

I haven't been doing weekly reviews at the laptop because I haven't had a routine of being at the laptop. I've been doing them on paper though. My categories when I do them on paper are:

1. wins and best bits
2. pissy about
3. what's not done and why
4. what's new and does it matter

because i am a model of professionalism in a homemade notebook.

wins & best bits

• From what I'm shown, the Americans kind of... finally voted like adults? I don't want to be premature here, it would be like saying 'Gosh, isn't it quiet!' on a hospital ward.
• Ordered two new Anker power banks, the USB kind you leave in your everyday bag. Ordered straight from Anker, using a 15% welcome code. our old power banks were more than six years old & storing well under half the charge they used to. best not to go into a winter of oil wars with deteriorated batteries.
• £100 judicious supermarket order got us about three months of shelf stable not-dying-in-the-resource-wars food. we only realised about a month ago what was wrong with our portioning. hurrah for scales!
• took Priscilla (lap dog) to a coffee morning where I knew there would be old people. she has always liked old people. you can't tell them that, of course, but it's true. she likes their bony cold hands and their reliable laps, especially the wheelchair users. meanwhile, I liked being made a coffee. Ophelia (barky dog) would not have enjoyed the coffee morning, so she had a muddy walk instead.
• like fifteen or twenty minutes of helpless laughter at the term 'PARP inhibitors'. They're a very important & very real thing & I should not be such a five-year-old but snrrrrrtt. I told you biochem wasn't my field.
• new leaf on the monstera, even though we're going into winter.

pissy about

• new glasses cost £70 because the workshop won't let me order them in 1.6x refractive index this time, only in 1.74x. Three years ago they made them in 1.6x & that's been fine, but i can't get through to a real technician, only script-reading receptionists.
• readwise.io/books having the profiles public by default - bros, if you're going to import things people have read in your other app in the background, default to private, what is wrong with you?
• electricity prices - we're on a time of use tariff but there's multiple wars on and the cheapest time slot in the day is 35p/kWh. fine, have your stupid oil war, but decouple my electricity prices from gas first. rude. (to be fair, there was also no wind this week. grid.iamkate.com )
• how proper news outlets will just chew-and-spit carefully timed assertions by corporations & governments on the day they've been told to. genuinely embarrassing. & worse, the news-adjacent outlets that chew-and-spit the initial reports to amplify the diversion. i find newsminimalist.com helps make this extremely visible.

what's not done & why

• the garden (raking, hedge cutting, anthill-flattening, weeding). becos it cold an soggy outside. myergh. don'wanna. etc.
• all that reading the current journals I was going to do with my university login. and it's so bizarre, that was 40% of the reason i started the course in the first place - so that i could just waft past the doi number gate keepers. 'i study here, actually' & yet i have not done that. why? because i think all the intel i need is outside the gate now? no. because i suspect the environmental sciences intel will be more depressing than what's outside the gate? maybe.
• I thought No Friend To This House was going to be a romp, but it turns out micro-chapters really really mess with my head. I do not enjoy this many viewpoint switches. She's clever & funny but please let me stay in one mind for three pages at a time?
• not even the glimmer of a hope of a vestige of a morning routine

what's new & does it matter

• lofi.town is exceedingly cute. browser or discord based, pixel bunnies in pixel hoodies trundling around a pixel map, fishing & friending & sitting on logs while gentle music plays. there's also a pomodoro timer because your little bunny can sit at a table with a book or laptop and 'focus'. i think there's an actual task management setup inside it, but you wouldn't. surely. but until they put ads in it, it's a nice source of mild study music.
• husband's travel coffee mug unsealed; it is now just a large mug. so i guess keep an eye out for a non-poisonous travel mug for him? or mention it to someone who might be gift shopping.
• i've been keeping the non-phone camera on the windowsill so I can grab it for bird photos or on walks. if I can form the habit of taking it out with me i may start using my own photos on here.
• i think one of the dining room plants has tiny flies in the pot. where does one hire a frog?

elsewhere as always: storygraph & tumblr. sit up properly. see you next week.