There are a number of different items to post about, and I could easily make a couple them the subjects of long, in-depth posts. However, a pressing need to maximize some surprise time all to myself this weekend means everything is just going to go into one super-sized info dump…

I’ve completed three books this year already, but that looks more impressive than it really is. Those three books were actually novellas, and the three of them combined likely contain less than ¼ of the text contained in one of Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. The current book: To Kill a Mockingbird, which somehow was never an assigned book in any of my high school or college courses…

Although I haven’t made any weekly accountability posts yet, I returned to my healthy eating and exercise regimen after the holidays ended. Given that’s been a couple weeks now, I’m not going into detail about why the attempt at maintaining my weight for the last three months of the year failed spectacularly. Suffice it to say that at the start of this month, my weight was over 15 pounds where it was at the start of October. The weekly accountability posts will resume on Thursday of next week…

My transitioning away from Facebook is well underway. Facebook did me a kindness by making the mobile version of their website an absolute nightmare to use on either Safari or Firefox for iOS. The sheer crappiness just encourages me to finish the switch to Twitter and this blog more quickly. I’m sure in Meta’s eyes, the nearly broken mobile web interface is a feature rather than a bug — they want me to use their app so they can gather information about me more easily and efficiently. However, I’m not playing that game anymore. I was willing to put up with/ignore an awful lot of Meta’s outright evil behavior and business practices until their absolutely ineptly programmed bots and AIs decided to punish me for the most asinine of reasons. Unfortunately, there are a number of people whom I wish to continue to interact online with who really only have an online presence on Facebook. So, there’s a good chance I don’t actually delete my account and continue to access it in a browser dedicated solely to using the site, just so that I can continue to interact with those friends and family…

One of the best developments of 2021 was the launching of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 streaming channel. On Thanksgiving, I was able to locate it on our living room television, and it’s now my go-to channel for mindless, comfort television watching. But, more than that, I’ve also managed to use it to watch a few episodes that I haven’t seen since I started tracking my MST3K viewing. This isn’t easy, as there’s no online schedule (at least, one I’m aware of) to inform you what’s airing and when. However, the channel consistently starts a different episode at the top of each odd-numbered hour. So, when there’s enough time, I can watch a full episode with the aid of subtitles — a feature not included on the DVDs from the show’s original run on Comedy Central and Syfy. Given my hearing issues, subtitles are gold…

Because of the Omicron variant, I’ve essentially been housebound since Sally and I returned from our trip to Staunton a few days before Christmas. I’m hopeful (maybe even a little optimistic) that this wave will have subsided by my 50th birthday in March. We’ve already made plans for being in Philadelphia for three days to celebrate it, with the highlight being a small birthday celebration at a favorite haunt in Old City, just a couple blocks away from our preferred hotel…

Finally, it’s time for me to take down the Lego Christmas display and put something new up. Given that it will likely take me a couple weekends to disassemble it and properly return all the components to where they belong, I have a little time to figure out what I’m going to build next. Frankly, I have so many ideas for future Halloween displays that I may just run with one of them simply so to make use of them in a more timely manner.