My daughter made me the most amazing birthday card! She made a broken laptop out of cardboard and I had to fix it by connecting cables and putting In the “backup email” to unlock her message! It was a puzzle on its own! So fabulous! 🧩🥳
We went back to Missing Pieces on Thursday and successfully completed the Final Frontier room after failing in November! 🧩
Our family plays Clue every year on New Year’s Eve while we await the new year, and this year I actually won! 🧐😊
Went to Bohemian Rhapsody tonight and thought it was great! 🎬 Turns our New Year’s Eve is a busy night at theaters!
Played the last of our new Christmas board games, Azul. Fun hidden strategies. Didn’t make sense at first a lot of fun after we figured it out.
Watched Isle of Dogs tonight. Very fun, original movie. 🎬
I’ve been throwing a bunch of content at Blot and have been very impressed. Speed is okay even with 10,000 posts. There is a lot more capability in Blot than I thought! 🧐
Maybe Blot?
There is a bit of a trend on micro.blog to use Blot for longer form blog hosting. I’ve not dug in too deeply largely because it seemed to put Dropbox in the middle of everything, and my initial impression was that it would be a bit too simplistic. Blot has added git support as an option outside of Dropbox, and I really like how they did it. Your Blot site is a Git repo by itself, so there is no dependency on GitHub. If you add an iOS app like Working Copy to the mix you can have robust editing on mobile as well. My other concern about being overly simple is just good user experience. There is a lot of power where you need it, but you don’t have to dig through it all to get the basics.
I’m going to give this a go as well. For some of my sites, particularly my photography one, I think this might be a very good fit.
Tyler and I are having a great time with FIFA 19 on the Switch! This is the first sports game that I’ve enjoyed more than a couple times. 🕹
Macro Blog?
I’ve had a hard time finding a blog platform that I really enjoy. I tired a long time ago of the WordPress ecosystem. It is a big and vibrant space, but it’s too clunky and now the new Gutenberg changes are causing a huge uproar. A couple of years ago I moved all my content into Markdown and setup Jekyll. I first used GitHub Pages to host it, but then moved it to Netlify so I could have solid SSL. I value the benefits of static sites. But, authoring content in them takes significantly more effort. I miss simply opening up my browser and typing! Having to do git commands and such is just enough friction to cause me to publish much less.
I’ve been very happy with the continued development of micro.blog though, and a bit inspired by Manton Reece’s site where he has brought all of his blog content into one place. Why not use micro.blog for longer content? 🤷
Book: When Breath Becomes Air
I’ve had “When Breath Becomes Air” sitting at our cabin for a while, but decided to pick it up and read it on winter break. The book is a memoir by Paul Kalanithi told in two parts. The first part is his path through medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon, being close to serious illnesses, and dealing with death as a Doctor. The second part is after his cancer diagnosis with stage IV lung cancer, which causes his death within 18 months.
There were two things that struck a chord in me while reading this.
I kept thinking back to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I’m sure it was in part because Kalanithi, like Gawande, is a Doctor. The first part of the book had many references to the Doctor’s perspective when diagnosing a patient with a terminal illness. This book did too. Being Mortal is a very different book, and one that I highly recommend reading, but this touched on similar topics with a more personal perspective.
The other thing about this book was more personal. It reminded me in so many ways of the path of my friend David Hussman, who passed away earlier this year. He had the same diagnosis, stage IV lung cancer. I’m pretty sure he even had the same EGFR mutation and received similar treatments. Similar to Kalanithi, he did remarkably well for a long while after getting treatment. Enough that you could kind of forget a bit. But the cancer is just held back a bit. I was wishing I would have read this book when I got it, as it would have given me some deeper perspective when talking with David.
We all watched Kiki’s Delivery Service yesterday. Another in our Studio Ghibli “festival”. Not as good as Totoro or Ponyo, but the kids enjoyed it a lot.
We all really enjoyed My Neighbor Totoro on Christmas. Great Studio Ghibli film. 🎬
We played Photosynthesis for the first time and had a great time. Recommended game with a lot of strategy, but still playable by younger kids. 👍🏻
Time for traditional Christmas Eve dinner off the grill! First, have to “bottom start” the Big Green Egg to unfreeze the lid! ❄️🔥 Always leave charcoal in your Egg in the winter!
Home Free Christmas at Treasure Island
Surprised the kids with a Home Free concert tonight, the last show on their Christmas Tour, at Treasure Island. 🎤🎼👨👩👧👦
Went to King’s Bar in Miesville. Burger Flight: Homerun (Ham, Swiss Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato, Mayo), Dugout (Peanut Butter, Lettuce, Mayo), Slider (Fried Egg, American Cheese, Bacon), and Bases Loaded (Bacon, Cheddar Cheese, Swiss Cheese, Pepper Jack, Jalapeños, Sour Cream, Salsa)
Tyler’s teaching me to play Pokémon and we figured poker chips work to track damage.
One of my favorite places to be.
