Look. I'm well aware
of Raffi's admonitions about screentime.
Sometimes you need to distract a kid long enough to get things done. We can't all be perfect parents, okay?
The little guy's relationship with YouTube has evolved quite a bit over his short existence to date. We started off in
the YouTube Kids ghetto, with your Sesame Streets and your Teletubbies and your Cocomelons and your holy trinity of Ms
Rachel, Blippi and Meekah. YouTube Kids, tho, is a terrible interface. And as he's started to develop interests beyond
nursery rhymes and alphabets that YouTube Kids was wholly uninterested in satisfying.
I've made a channel for him under my account, so he can have his own subscriptions and playlists and history. That is to
say, so that I can have that for him. I'm calling the shots here, although his interests and preferences are asserting
themselves more and more.
I can't even remember the last time I did bullets...
Reader, I apologize. I haven't really been keeping you up to date.
I'm not going to really get into a lot of detail today, tho.
But maybe some broad strokes.
2023 was basically a continuation of 2020.
2020 Wrapped:
Bought a house
Decided (with Ellen, of course) to (at least stop trying not) to have a kid
Other stuff you've probably heard of. It's not over.
About the house...
It turned out 2021 was a terrible year to get anyone to help you fix up a house.
2022 wasn't much better, but we were able to engage a buider and, by the end of the year, gut the place, cleaning
up the mould (most of which we knew about when we bought) and the mouse droppings (which we didn't).
So 2023 was spent getting a design to the point where we could submit a building permit and finding people and
materials to do the job of giving us a place we can actually live.
2024 will, with any luck at all, be the year my wife and son and I will live together in our own house.
We are, of course, blessed to have a place to live. And especially to own a house. And to be able to even attempt
all of this. It's not been easy.
But, you know, I sold my house in 2016. (That's a
blog post I wrote for friends and family at the time. I decided to unprotect it for context-related linking).
It'll have been an eight year journey to moving into this house.
About the kid...
He's an absolute, goddamn delight. And exhausting. But utterly delightful.
Not sure what more to say.
Work's fine.
Doctor Who is back.
I played a lot of Picross. And Spider Solitaire. And Sudoku apps.
And Pokemon Go.
You should really listen to my Christmas mixtape. It's good, I promise.
Here we are, in the bleak midwinter. What better time than now to put on some fun music while we crank up the IR heater
to take the chill off.
Cover image by DaPuglet (Tina)Santas Secret Weaponused under
it's Creative Commons license. CC-BY-SA.
The Christmas Mixtape is back for its seventh incarnation. It's up
on Youtube Music and
on Mixcloud. And Mixcloud gives me a handy little
widget so you don't even have to leave the page to listen:
I'm also going to dump Youtube music videos of the songs where I can find them. They're not necessarily the same
version, but given that I've listened to these dozens of times already, it's kinda cool to see visual interpretations...
