Digest 20251214

Only 5 more days of work before my Christmas break. I cannot wait.

Last week was stressful at work, and I developed a thing where I’d wake up at 3 am and not be able to get back to sleep for 2 hours. I do not do well with lack of sleep, especially so close to my period. In the last week, the darkness has also really kicked in too, too. At 7 a.m., it’s still properly middle-of-the-night dark, which feels horrid and does not help with the tiredness or my mood level. It always takes me a bit of time to adjust to that.

I have mostly felt like shit, but (between the stress) my brain is all fired up to get into end-of-year reflections and thinking about 2026. I love setting new year goals, I like the mental reset they bring. I look forward to really getting into that time off.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the personal curriculum stuff, and I’m excited to get organised. This weekend I spent a couple of hours tidying up my office and rearranging things to make my desk space clearer, so I have space to keep more brain-friendly things like a physical notebook, sketch pad and puzzle book to reach for instead of my phone in those few spare minutes I sometimes find at work while I’m waiting for something to load, or just need to switch off to refocus on a problem.

We’ll see how that goes.

What will probably happen is a cat will lay in the space I’ve made and roll everything off the desk!

No to Bear Blog

Last time I updated, I was considering a move to Bear blog for next year when my current hosting subscription ends. I spent a bit of time playing with it, and there are a lot of things I really, really liked about it, but I realised I’d forgotten one fundamental fact:

I love databases.

Bear blog does not have a database.

I like the ease of searching my past posts. I like being able to easily update them all if I change how I want to structure my content. If I want to change a tag I use, or a category, that is super easy to do with WordPress because it is a content management system. And I do change my mind about those things because for me some of the fun in keeping this blog is thinking about the organisation of it. I am a Librarian at heart, and I need to organise information.

On Bear, you have to edit every post manually and individually. That would be painful to me.

So, as much as WordPress frustrates me at times, I don’t think there is a better option available.

And I would miss the comments and the community feel. I like using the discover features, and I like to discover more bloggers by clicking through to them from comments on other people’s blogs.

What I actually ended up doing last weekend was installing (yet another) plugin to help me organise my media files into folders because that has become a pain point!

Movement

With the sleep issues and the work stress, it’s been difficult to keep consistent. I’ve dropped right off jogging this week, and I’ve ended up having to do all my walking steps after work in the evening… but I’ve still managed to keep an 8,000-step average thanks to the treadmill. On the way to Modor I am 1,341 miles still and at The Falls of Rauros.

📺 Telly

• Black Panther, loved rewatching this one, although it does make me sad knowing we only got one full movie with Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa.
• The Avengers: Infinity War is still very exciting, gets better every time!!  My favourite bit is always when Captain America turns up to save Vision! I am now really pumped to rewatch Endgame.
• Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery was so much fun! I love Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, and he looked fucking fantastic in it! The hair! The suit! The whole cast is excellent.(may have developed a small crush on Josh O’Connor), and the mystery kept me working to figure out exactly how they’d done. (Netflix)
• Frankenstein (2025) was a real treat! It feels like a long time since I was a Proper Movie. It was gorgeous, artistic, and carefully crafted. It’s a classic, wonderful story and GDT adapted it beautifully. And, cannot believe that’s the guy from The Kissing Booth! This movie has given me an urge to re-read Frankenstein, it’s been a long time! (Netflix)
• Oh. What. Fun. is a Prime Christmas movie with Michelle Pfeiffer. I didn’t really enjoy it, it annoyed me the whole time. The “Mom” (because this is v suburban American) character was so frustrating. If she’d shown any interest in the lives of her kids I might have had some sympathy, but she essentially ignored them (did she even speak to the son who just got dumped?) and made everything about her. The movie did acknowledge that a tiny bit. I did really enjoy seeing Felicity Jones in it though!

What else?

• Not going to my work Christmas party this year, which I think is the right call because it’s the same venue as last year. I didn’t have a good time last year because it was far too loud, and then I had a multi-day anxiety hangover.
• Learned the hard way not to buy books for cash on Audible, even if it’s cheaper than the cost of a credit. Not unless it’s something I know I’ll love! Turns out you can only return books you bought with credits, so I wasted £4.99 on Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. I also learned I shouldn’t buy books on a whim based on Reddit thread recommendations, especially when I’m feeling premenstrual and vulnerable. Review to come on that one.
• I bought a new notebook to use next year. Excited to have a physical notebook again, last one was 2022 when I still kept a bullet journal and before I started using Obsidian. I also got some sticky tabs to start annotating my books.

• I also decided I want to seriously work on my drawing skills next year, and start from the basics. The ultimate goal is so I can draw my own embroidery patterns. I’ve got a lot of lines and circles to practice first… which also is a good use for all the computer ‘scrap’ paper I now I have hanging around from ruining it  pressing flowers.
• I finally mastered centre parting the back of my own hair with a neat straight (enough)  line for pigtail plaits. It took a few YouTube videos and practice, and it does need clean hair, but I did it! I can’t french plait two braids without it looking a mess, but I can do cute English braids.
• Our wedding photographer sent us a surprise ornament for the Christmas tree! Unexpected and very lovely of him. He was such a gem!

• Speaking of, I am about half way through sticking photos into our wedding album/scrapbook. It takes so long… I’m probably 4-5 hours in and that is only attaching the photos!
• I got the Lindt advent calendar this year (the £8ish one) and the number of tiny foil wrapped balls in it takes the piss. It started nicely with a reindeer and then little slaps of chocolate, and then balls for days. Tiny balls that are incredibly irritating to unwrap for such an unsatisfying amount of chocolate. I actually might just make my own for next year with proper chocs!
• I played the National Book Tokens Christmas hidden books game. It took me a about a week to get all 20, and quite a bit of searching book titles – hadn’t heard of a lot of them! It was fun!