I need to sort out my "Books Read" list.  Sucks that goodreads succumbed to The Nothing, and is now essentially useless.

I at least need to sort through the Perilous Pile of Publications.  I wanted to build an actual office, with a small attached library this holiday season, but I also didn't want to measure and figure out dimensions and such.  Ugh.

Let's update monthly from now on.

Wednesday: 2020.

That seems like a made-up fake year.

I'm glad that my book review published last night.  It's a thing that's far too late in coming, but I plan to keep up with: every book I read this year should be listed, along with a rating on the "Dog Rates" scale of 10-15 / 10.  They're all good books.  I'm thinking about adding movies and music, but I don't want to clutter things up too much.

 Also video games?

Finally found a prismatic shard and got my galaxy sword.

Visited Caroline's weird tea world.

It this part of the same thing?

 I don't remember.

Married Abigail.

It's possible I rate romance interests based on proximity.

Discovered that auto-grabbers auto-grab things in coops.

Which is ground breaking.  I've reorganized my farm based on this information, and it's super efficient now.

Anyway, a new year:

Started with New Year Tacos.

 Delicious.

New Year Raid.

Green.

New Years New Restaurant Dinner.

 Tasty.

New Year Escape Room Box.

Mysterious.

Tuesday: New Year's Eve

Lunch at Mighty Fine.

Then a lot of cooking and prep work and decorating.  LOTS of all of those.

Including blowing up 59 balloons.

 It's a lot of balloons.

But through the magic of coordinating colors of swaggable decorating cloth, they were able to be suspended to provide a festive NYE feel, with somewhat of a "old-style ship" feel.

I also decoratively stacked the wine glasses.

 It was loud due to kids, but all-in-all a nice end to a reasonably good year.

And there's a new splashscreen as well.

Monday: Escape!

Healthy lasagna with spinach and lemon ricotta.

Lemon ricotta is really good here, and probably in similar use-cases.

This sounds like a superhero.

Then escape room, where we solved all the puzzles with only one small hint in the bonus "extra-hard" bit.  Not bad, but we probably could have sorted it out if we had thought clearer about it.

I don't even know who this guy is.

Heatmor?  Whatever.

Then planning and shopping and cleaning for NYE.  One side benefit: getting bbq:

Yummy delicious bbq.  The brisket cooled a lot between the store and home, but that isn't really that big of a problem.

• I saw this chair yesterday, and kind of really want one, but with a back.  I 100% prefer to sit in my office chair crosslegged, and this would make that much easier and more comfortable.

Monday: New year's Eve

Let's hope it's better.

Sunday: New year's Eve

I'd like to do a year in review, but I sure too much and my tummy hurts.

Saturday: dumplings

Mostly just making them. We ended up with something like 80 at the end. That works out to about 11 per person tomorrow. Challenge accepted.

 I got the spicy chicken instead of the garlic noodles. Both are good.

I thought this weird shine to oil drink was off.

Sunday: "nobody knew that soup could be a finger food."

Alternate title: "new year's day."

Also, everyplace was closed today. We got up a bit too late to do brunch at Cafe Jolie. Then we decided to try Koja in Emeryville.

Cool art.

 But then we tried a pizza place in not going to look up.

It was OK. Good flavor, kind of crap service.

This was a good change as Koja wasn't open anyway. Neither was Cookiebar.

So I've cream elsewhere, with Magnemite.

I thought this looked funny.

New Pokemon.

I think I've won this game once. I again did not win.

Saturday: new year's eve.

Most of the day was consumed cooking and getting things ready for dinner.

After the fact cheese plate.

And we played Uno.

And with that, this garbage fire of a year is over. I do not have great hopes for next year.

Thursday: New Year's Eve.

Today was a whirlwind of shopping for groceries and converting those groceries into food.

Also, today was the day that they repainted the balcony.  I don't they're called lanais here.

 I also failed to take pictures of most of the food.  The only thing that I did remember to snap was the cheese plate:

Goat cheese, blue cheese, some third cheese that I don't remember.

And then more cooking continued, with the only major problem being a burn.  I guess the fact that we've gone something like seven years doing these NYE things with this being the first casualty is pretty good.

Here are the recipes that I didn't take pictures of.

• Corn pudding.  This ended up too eggy for me.
• Potatoes.
• Butternut squash soup.  After spending a lot of time yesterday working on this, I completely forgot about it and never had any.

Also there was pork in a delicious mushroom sauce and some green beans.

• Christmas baking.
• Dog, no.  Stop that, dog.
• Star Wars fan theories.  I can read and link to these now.
• BB-8.
• New level.
• And just a final reminder that tomorrow is the Day of Third Impact, so I hope everyone is ready for the conclusion of the Human Instrumentality Project.

And this link has been sitting lonely in my saved RSS feeds since last year.

• The artwork of La Vie Parisienne should really be collected and anthologized.

Thursday: new year's day

Today was the last totally unscheduled day of this trip. This meant doing things that just seemed right.

Like making fun of the laziest sermon topic ever.

Getting Mediterranean food for lunch.

Yes, that was something we've already done.  This was a different place, so it's OK.

This was followed by some random downtown walking, including the bookstore I didn't buy anything from.

 

Although I did have to read a book in a language I don't speak. Or read.

We then did pizza again for dinner after more walking. I didn't take a picture, but it was very similar to the last pizza. 

Once we got home, we watched Totoro, which was of, as no one else has ever seen it.

 

And then we fumbled through folding Totoro origami.

I did not make the Kinoko no Yama robot, as it's technically paper craft, which involves cutting and gluing.

Wednesday: new year's eve

Which means lots of food.

See?

 Honey sriracha chicken wings, gochujang garlic pork belly, lettuce and rice for that to be rolled up, jar of green beans, scallion pancakes, and gyoza.

On a plate.

 Then, after giving up on trying to find a live feed for the west coast for nye, a game of uno.

I did not win today, either.

Tuesday: New Year's Eve

Dog.

Lilikoi butter.

To fill macarons.

Pictionary.  "Hare" was the word, and this is the best cartoon bunny ever.

There was other food, but I apparently only took pictures of macarons.

• Squirrel.
• Squirrel.
• Dog.
• The Jazz Age.