I didn't take enough vacation days, so I'm having to squeeze them in where I can. Which is to say that I have today and tomorrow off. Whee.
What I should be doing is absolutely nothing. What I'm actually doing is getting a lot of minor chores done that I've been avoiding forever. Scrubbing the kitchen. Scrubbing the toilets. Scrubbing the floors.
Pretty much just a lot of scrubbing going on today.
Which doesn't make for an exciting blog entry, but unless somebody is going to pay for a housecleaner to come take care of all this mess, it's all I've got.
Today is the day I usually go into the office to box up all my 2024 files and get everything ready for 2025. It's a great day to do that because nobody is there to intrude and I plow through. But today, much to my surprise, people are actually working! And so I'm putting off my office clean out until Sunday.
Instead I'm cleaning out my laptop. I'm one of those messy people who just drops everything on their desktop and (wrongly) assumes I'll get to it later. Most of them are for work, so that's fairly easy to file away properly. But my personal stuff is more weird and complex. It's recipes. It's memes. It's stuff for this blog. It's photos. It's links. It's ideas. It's absolutely anything you can think of. That's not so easy to file away.
But anyway, here's some stuff that I think I collected for Blogography...
Here's an interesting land feature I found while randomly scrolling through Google Maps. It's a shockingly round island (René-Levasseur Island) inside of a shockingly round lake (Lac Manicouagan) in Canada. It's interesting enough to have its own Wikipedia page here. Long story short, an asteroid slammed into Canada 214 million years ago. And it must have hit near-perpendicular to make such a round hole. It's nicknamed "The Eye of Quebec."
Copyright Google Maps
Copyright Google Maps
Here's a video that I didn't end up using for Caturday because the camera wasn't pointed downward enough (or because YouTube made it into a reel, which displays weird). Still funny. Jenny ran around the corner at breakfast time to run upstairs. Little did she know that Jake was on his way down. She didn't even slow down or hesitate, but instead leaped right over him...
I don't know if I already shared this, but it's a cartoon that I absolutely love...
I have no idea why I saved this. It's a video from my doorbell cam showing the moon traveling across the sky in the upper-left corner there...
This is a photo that I was going to write a blog post about, but could never find a way to make it interesting. Basically, I was opening the drawers of my IKEA shoe cupboard looking for my water shoes and noticed that a shoe was missing. This makes absolutely no sense. I know it was there at one point. But now it's just... gone?!? How? Where did it go? I wouldn't have taken out just one shoe. Did somebody take it? I actually
This is a snack called "Kazbars" that looked amazing, so I took a snapshot of it to remind me to buy it. I ended up finding it (yep, delicious!), but never trashed the photo for some reason...
This is my favorite meme of 2024. It gets passed between my friends and I whenever we have a big expense pop up. It's especially apt for me going into 2025...
Oh look... it's the secret recipe for McDonald's Special Sauce that I've been meaning to try!
I ran across this "recipe" a month ago for Movie Theater Popcorn that I've been meaning to try once I get the ingredients...
And this recipe for School Cafeteria Cheese Pizza sounds amazing. I just found it a week ago and already I'm sad I haven't tried it...
And that's a sampling of what I'm having to deal with. I've got loads more just waiting to be organized and filed away. Happy New Year!
Well, here it is. The entry where I recap all the things that happened in the year. Except... such a post only really made sense when I was actually doing lots of stuff (meaning prior to 2020). Not that nothing at all happened in 2024. Plenty of stuff happened. It's just that going through it all month-by-month doesn't really work when the notable stuff just isn't a massive list. And here we go...
The single biggest lesson I learned in 2024 is that Apple is a shitty fucking company who does not give a single fuck about your data. I started using their "iCloud Drive" which was more expensive than other options, but I wanted the benefit of integration with all my Apple stuff. And it was great. Until my data started zeroing out. I called support and we watched as file after file would be reduced to zero bytes in real-time. And they could offer no help except to suggest that I copy my files off iCloud Drive (no shit, I started doing that immediately). Of course I had backups, but recent files that hadn't backed up yet were gone. Very old files that never got backed up were gone. And after jumping through hoops Apple blamed me because "iCloud Drive is not a backup service." So if you're using Apple cloud storage, better get your files off of it before they're gone.
I paid loads of money to have my shower ripped out and rebuilt because a company I hired to diagnose a leak told me that was the problem. Except it wasn't the shower at all. It was the toilet. That's a lot of money down the drain. But at least the leaking nightmare is finally over.
I had kidney stones for the first time in many years (I used to get them regularly). But this time was different in that I suffered in absolute agony instead of going to the emergency room for drugs because I really couldn't afford to do that. Despite paying absurd amounts of money for "health insurance." I fucking despise that Americans pay a fucking shit-ton into "health insurance," whose only function is to pull money out of the system and make profits for health insurance company executives.
I ran across one of the funniest cat videos ever this past year, and here it is. The cat is speaking French, but there's subtitles...
Next up in cat news? Jake has a snaggletooth sometimes now...
After yet another eye surgery, I decided to get my eyeball lenses replaced and blogged all about it starting in Part One here (and here are Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, and a follow up post), and that's been very cool.
And, oh yeah, if you've ever wanted a lot of Drunk Dave stories in one place, here you go!
If you're a Disney Parks fan, I wrote a shitload of posts once I got back from Walt Disney World...
The Aurora Borealis visited a couple times...
I finally played around with that AI garbage that all the kids are talking about...
And I'm going to wrap this up in a surprising way by re-mentioning that I discovered the movie Half Brothers in 2024, which really struck a cord with me for some reason. I'm kinda obsessed with the movie, and it's become the film that I put on whenever I need background noise. It's just so well done, in particular the exceptional performance by Gerardo Méndez. This is a comedy, but he has to communicate far past this because there's a lot of heartbreaking stuff going on.
And that's a wrap on 2024. Hope everybody has a safe and happy New Year.
Yesterday the mountain passes were off-and-on closed due to weather or stalled due to accidents or requiring chains. Needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to the drive home this morning. I mean, chaining-up is no big deal. I've done that loads of time. And temporary closures are annoying, but part of the game (just make sure you've got a full tank of gas). The problem is, of course, morons driving like assholes and causing accidents. I've seen the consequences far too many times, mostly due to people in 4-wheel-drive rigs thinking they're invulnerable to ice and slush.
It's only my dumb luck that I haven't been sucked into their stupid all these years.
But when I woke up, all passes home were open. And my preferred mountain pass, which was chains-required all day yesterday, was in great shape. So the drive home was easy and, dare I say it, enjoyable...
In the end I felt fortunate that I was able to escape for a few days on my Christmas holiday.
Hopefully yours was equally good.
Christmas morning was a morning unlike any other when I was a kid. So. Many. Toys. I suppose it's that way for a lot of people, because the saying "It's just like Christmas morning!" had to come from somewhere.
This morning before crawling out of bed I looked through an old digital photo album labeled "Christmas" to bathe in the warm waters of nostalgia for a few minutes. One of the photos was of me playing with my brand new Spirograph as a kid...
And that got me wondering... in this digital age, does Spirograph even exist any more?
Indeed it does...
But of course Spirograph has been taken digital in a dozen different directions too. Including this awesome HTML version you can play with right here...
And here's one which tries to replicate the physical process...
So there you go! Entertainment for days on your Christmas morning. You're welcome!
Wintertime driving over the mountains in my neck of the woods can be a scary prospect.
Because even though WhizDOT (aka WSDOT, the Washington State Department of Transportation) and their awesome crew of dedicated workers does an exceptional job keeping the roads cleared, heavy snows can overwhelm the system. Whiteout snow conditions married with ice, deep slush, and morons who drive like assholes is a recipe for disaster, and I've experienced more than my fair share of terrifying experiences over the years.
And yet... if you gotta go, you gotta go, and that's just the way it is.
Plus, it's pretty...
Fortunately my trip today wasn't bad at all. A little slush here and there, but otherwise bare and wet.
Alas, the forecast for my return trip is not looking quote so pretty. But we'll see.
Well poop.
I'm used to it by now.
Well, today didn't go as planned. At all.
There's a lot that I could say about current events.
But I think that this TikTok from Pastor Paul Drees is the closest to how I am feeling about things, so it's probably best that I just go with it instead of trying to dance around what I'd like to say... what I should probably say... or something I might immediately regret if I say...
@pastorpauldrees hey don't hurt other people. Also I understand the irony of posting this video while I'm recoving from an illness. #progressivechristianity #pastorpauldrees #lutheran #elca #progressiveclergy ♬ original sound - Pastor Paul Drees
"Health care" in these United States is utterly fucking horrendous.
You've got an entire industry whose entire point is to take money out of the system. It serves absolutely no other purpose.
If all the money that the American people paid into "health" insurance only for insurance companies to FUCK THEM OVER was instead put into actual health care, we'd be paying less for far, far more.
I had to go nearly three fucking weeks without medication prescribed by my doctor because my "health" insurance company wouldn't fill it without "prior approval." And it's like... my doctor says that I require it. That's all the fucking approval you fucking need. But no. They had to deny the prescription. Then my doctor had to send in paperwork asking for approval. Then the insurance company had to process shit while I waited. Then I'm guessing the CEO of the insurance company had to fly to St. Barts on their private jet for a week to consider if, in fact, they would allow me to have what my doctor says I need. THEN they decided to allow the prescription to be filled.
Two days after my medication was finally in my hands, I got a letter telling me how "pleased" my "health" insurance company was to approve my prescription request.
For the love of God I don't understand how Americans have been continuously conned into thinking that this is the way health care should work. Forget one greedy fuck at a fucking insurance company... the entire country should be in goddamn flames over this bullshit.
And perhaps one day it will be.
Blessed as I am, it's easy to find things to be thankful for.
But there's a lot of baggage that comes with this American Day of Thanks. Personally for sure, but also as a country. That's something that all too often gets overlooked and it really shouldn't.
This remains my favorite take on it all...
The two Addams Family movies are genius. I don't know why we never got a third with that incredible cast.
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