Digest 20250119

The last week has gone by in something of a blur! After my impression first couple of weeks of progress with my new “move my arse” fitness plan I went down with the bug my fiance had the previous week, which honestly is fucking typical for me! I did my Monday arm workout but then spent the evening feeling not quite right and was off sick by Tuesday afternoon. So no strength workouts, jogging and barely any steps for a few days. Instead lots of sitting on my arse instead of moving it, while playing Quilts and Cats of Calico and watching The Great!

That’s OK though! I’m not feeling bad about it, I’ll pick up where I left off in the new week. I took a hit to my average steps in my distance challenges but I’ll catch up again.

Walking Challenges

In my “Walk to Modor” challenge I have covered almost 51 miles out of the 1,000 miles (this is calculated based on steps). I am still at the encounter with the Black Rider, hanging on in there!

A few people have asked me about this challenge, and my fiance is happy for me to share how he has set all this up on Google Sheets so I will write up a post about that!

In my Star Trek TNG Data vs Lore challenge I’m at 14.49 km out of the 160.9 km (I’m doing this in km because that’s the reading my treadmill gives!). The crew have just arrived on the planet and are investigating where everything is dead!I had dropped my average on this but I’m back on track now.

I am hoping now I’ve gotten a little bit obsessed with playing Quilts and Cats of Calico on Steam that’s a way for me to do faster walking at my standing desk. I can get away with a 3.5 speed setting while playing that game, since all I need is my right hand for the mouse and that allows me to cover more distance/get more steps! I played and walked for an hour yesterday and managed 5,000 steps!

Quilts and Cats of Calico

If you haven’t heard of this game it is a videogame version of the board game Calico, one of my favourites to play on date night (I’m better at it!). It’s a tile-matching game where you make a nice quilt for some cats to sit on, it’s both relaxing and frustrating because it’s really hard to beat the challenges. The videogame version is very cute because animated cats walk all over the screen and onto your quilt, and you can pet them (here is a YouTube video trailer). It also has a cat creator in it so I made our kitties! Although, it would not let us name “Kitler” … that got flagged by their profanity detector so I had to take the ‘e’ out!

Ioniq

I mentioned last week that we’d been test-driving electric cars and that we’d loved the Hyundai Ioniq 5! We researched more and talked about it all last week (also considered that Kona it’s smaller and a bit cheaper, but it just didn’t excite us), and thought we’d probably get a preowned of the latest model (the one with the rearview wiper, because do live ina rainy country!). We decided to test drive it a second time just to be sure!

That test drive escalated into ordering a brand-new one! The sales guys in the dealership were motivated to match prices for preowned, so they could hit their targets to sell electric vehicles (we could see a whiteboard in their meeting room where our sales guy had not yet sold any new cars!) and they had one in the spec we wanted available in the UK so we went for it. We’ve just got to wait for it to make its way through customs and up the country to us, hopefully, in a few weeks!

I’ve never had a brand new car so this is new and a bit of a scary unknown for me! It’s like buying a newly built house (which I never would) where nobody has had a chance to pick up the snags and issues before I got it. I just have to hope this dealership will be good to deal with if we do have problems.

We’ve gone for a Premium trim Ioniq 5, but the one we test-drove yesterday was the Ultimate trim with all the fancy tech extras. It was fun to try out things like digital wing mirrors and a Heads Up Display, but we were interested in either of those ourselves (especially not for £10K more!). The HUD was kind of cool but I didn’t really like the digital wing mirrors. They do give a wider field of vision but you have to look at a screen inside the vehicle that’s kind-of-but-not-quite in the same spot you’re used to looking for mirrors outside the car. They seem very unnecessary and if anything happened to them a nightmare to get fixed – the guys said they’re £3K each!

(Gosh, when did I become a car blog, what is happening?)

I am still a bit worried about the size of it, but we’ve done it now.. and I’m trying to not let my anxiety override my excitement for the nice new car when it arrives!

Telly: Deep Space 9, The Great, The Traitors, Severence

If feels like TV is exciting at the moment … even if half the TV shows I’m watching are ,now old, these are new episodes to me!

The UK Traitors is still really fun to watch and inspires lots of fun chat with friends! I still love rewatching Deep Space 9, I’m now in the weird zone where Major Kira is carrying Chief O’Brien and Keiko’s baby and Jadzia Dax and Worf have just become an item. I just watched the GLORIOUS episode where Sisko, Odo and O’Brien go undercover as Klingons and we get the absolute treat of Colm Meaney in Klingon make-up!

I’m still enjoying The Great but when I looked it up it is already cancelled so I need to make sure to enjoy the three seasons that exist! It has inspired me to add an audiobook about the real Catherine The Great to my reading list!

I’ve also spent this week rewatching season 1 of Severence in preparation for Season 2, and listening to the podcast with Adam Scott and Ben Stiller. It is very interesting to rewatch the season knowing how it ends, and also it is just such a fucking cool show and it’s so perfectly paced and so perfect in tone! The finale episode of season one is maybe the most tense hour of scripted television I’ve seen!

What else?

• I finished and reviewed Lapvona! I loved it, I loved it so much. What a fantastic, fucking weird book.
• I have started a draft of my review and analysis of Rouge.. but it’ll take me a few weeks before it’s ready to publish.
• I think I’m giving up on To Sleep In A Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini, at this point the only reason I’ve still listening to the audiobook is because I love Jennifer Hale but even she cannot save this. It’s too fucking long, the characters are weak and I just realised I do not care which is the real death knell. I’ve listened to 10 hours and it feels like the plot barely moved.
• I booked a wedding photographer which feels wonderful to get off my mental list, and the guy seems lovely and I love his photos. Now just need my hair and make-up sorted out!
• I have successfully done my hair in a French plait a couple of times, which feels like a huge accomplishment at 37 years old! I don’t know if I like myself with a French plait, I might need my hair to be longer so I get a better “tail” but I don’t think it necessarily suits me. However, it is a comfortable way to do my hair to sleep at night which is what I’ve been doing to practice.
• Instagram updated and changed their layout from a square grid to a rectangular one and I hate it so much. It looks horrible. It’s upset me and I just post my photos to it for my family and friends, I feel really bad for all the artists on there who now have their work messed up by this change.
• I saw the current IndieWeb Carnival topic is Friction and read a few interesting posts about this. I think about friction in my day-to-day life, after all my main goal is always to MAKE IT EASY where I can! I haven’t thought about it much in relation to my experiences online. I really enjoyed Tracy Durnell’s post on this, she pulls together a lot of friction encountered with the IndieWeb community (of which I am just an occasional lurker).
• My fiance saw this post on Reddit and sent it to me the other day. I cannot stop looking at it and laughing until I get tears in my eyes. I keep trying to figure out all the elements that are wrong enough that these toddlers look like 40-year-old men. It’s good to know that even successful and incredibly talented artists are not amazing at drawing everything!

Now it’s time to make homemade pizza for dinner and watch Severance season 2 episode 1! I am so exited!!