🍿 Ended up doing a double-feature tonight and watched the Christmas Setup, a lovely holiday movie. 🎄 It’s sappy but I do love seeing LGBTQ movies hitting the mainstream. 🏳️‍🌈
★★★☆☆

Plus, it has Fran!

🍿 We watched a Christmas Story tonight. 🎄 It isn’t my favorite movie but my Partner loves it, so every year we watch it.
★★☆☆☆

House chores are done for the day, now off to Costco. Fingers crossed I spend less than $100 today… 🤞🏻😆

Last weekend, my partner and I went to see some holiday lights at our local botanical garden. It was a wonderful time, they always so such a great job of decorating things and of course, me being me, I took well over two hundred photos (yes, I’m that guy). I wanted to post them all but that would be a little overkill, instead, here are 30-ish of the best ones.

Note: I wanted to post these photos the day after we went to the garden but I wasn’t really in-love with any of the gallery plugins available…so I ended up making my own.

When all was said and done, everyone had a great time. 🥰🎄📷

It’s hard to stay up all night, running around the house, keeping everyone up… 💤😼🐈

I guess I have become a crazy cat person, all I seem to do lately is take pictures of Alex. 😹📷

Finished reading: Battlefield Reclaimer by David North 📚
★★★☆☆

This book, a re-read for me, is the first book of the Guardian of Aster Fall series and in my opinion, sets up the universe for said series rather nicely. The character development is decent and the RPG improvement system is very cool.

I don’t think I played enough video games this year… 🤣😅🎮

🍿 One of my favorite holiday movies, While You Were Sleeping always brings happy tears. 🎄
★★★★☆

I was going to spend my lunch break working on creating a single-page app, to bulk-upload photos to Micro.blog but…I ended up throwing in the towel and just wrote a C# script instead. It still makes me happy Microsoft open sourced .Net and it runs natively on the Mac. 🤓😀 #HappyGeek

Someone is very upset they’re not allowed to eat this morning before going to the vet… 😹

Alex is making his displeasure known, to everyone in the house. 🐈 📷

My Partner and I went out to dinner with my little brother and his girlfriend tonight…and it was the best sushi of my life. 🍣📷

So full and so happy. 😄

Follow-Up: My @atpfm@mastodon.social pint glass finally came in the mail today, after years (it was my own fault, I always put off ordering their stuff until the last minute…and then things are out of stock… 🤣). 🎉🥳

Follow-Up (Part 2): I was trying to listen to some Holiday music this morning, only to realize none of my Sonos speakers worked with AirPlay. After digging online, it turns out the only way to get a Sonos speaker back into HomeKit after the home is deleted is to factory reset the Sonos. 😱😅

Follow-Up: I think my HomeKit set up is mostly back to normal. I was a little stupid and didn’t take backups / exports…so I lost some historical data (mostly temperature / humidity / air quality) but at least my Holiday automations are working again. 🎄😅

We went to see the lights at the local botanical gardens this weekend, it was a fantastic evening and the lights were gorgeous; will be posting photos in a day or three… 🎄📷

My HomeKit set up has been rock-solid for years but the minute I added a Matter plug (the “Meross Matter Smart Plug Mini”), everything breaks…and as it’s Apple land, where everything works perfectly until it doesn’t, fixing it is going to be…unpleasant. 😱😭

🍿 Decided on a second movie tonight: The Holiday Sitter. 🎄 It’s a silly Hallmark holiday movie but it’s rather adorable and kinda nice to see my people represented in the genre. 🏳️‍🌈 We’ll be adding this to our Holiday movie rotation.
★★★★☆

🍿 Full of mac ‘n cheese, in honor of Kevin’s meal during the movie. This is my Partner’s favorite movie, even after more than 30 years, it has reviewability. 🎄
★★★☆☆

Finished reading: Second Hand by Heidi Cullinan 📚
★★★☆☆

This was a re-read, from many years ago (it was one of the first e-books I bought, this story is light and fluffy with a predictable ending…and an adorable puppy. 🏳️‍🌈

I walked into the bedroom and he turned around to glare at me; evidently interrupting his bird watching wasn’t the best of ideas… 🤣 📷 🐈