Saga, Volume 10

Took Lorelei to the comic book store yesterday. She got some Pokemon cards, I got Saga, volume 10. I’ve been waiting for it for a while, volume 9 released in 2018! And ended on a total gut punch too. Fortunately this one has a happier ending.

📸 Lying cat from the Saga comic book series.

Yeah, it’s another rough one. Still a great series. I want to believe there’s a happy (happy enough) ending for Hazel but that looks to be many volumes away still.

Ignore the last post, I fixed it

All the smart stuff in the house is back. I did two things:

• The older Apple TV in the basement was showing up as a home hub in Homekit. That might be fine but it’s the oldest device of the available home hubs so I turned off the option for it to be a hub.
• Restarted the router. Which with an eero means… pushing one button in the app.

So now my home automation can run, and at sunset today the Christmas tree will turn on and the nearby Homepod will start playing Christmas music. 🎄

I’d flip this table but it’s a smart one and it’s not responding

I wrote about this when iOS15 released, but by far the most frustrating thing about any new technology is that when it doesn’t work there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do to try to debug the issue.

I picked up a Eve smart plug for the Christmas tree. Added it to Home, flipped it off… couldn’t flip it back on. Unplugged it, plugged it back it, flipped it on, off… and that was it. Says it’s “not responding” in home. Then I notice one of the lights in that room (which has worked consistently until now), also “not responding”.

The answers online seem to always be “reset everything”, “power cycle everything”, “toggle every feature on your router”, or some other combination that would be easy if I had a trained monkey to push buttons in sequence.

Anyway, I haven’t figured it out yet, so tonight I’ll be unplugging the tree… from the smart plug.

You can’t catch me

I’m the gingerbread man.

📸 A decorated gingerbread cookie.

Did some holiday decorating and baking after going out to see Strange World, which I rate a solid “ok”. The central plot (which I won’t spoil) I enjoyed, and some of the visuals were well done, especially the comic book style introduction, but the meat of the story was pretty forgettable. Lorelei’s favorite part: “when the dog licked the thing”. I agree, the dog is funny.

Also I’ve seen the “movie theaters are dying” stories and, sure, COVID, but I didn’t think much of it until today when… we had the entire theatre to ourselves. Early afternoon, and the theater is in the middle of a mall (that also might be dying), but geez, that doesn’t seem sustainable.

I wish that turkey only cost a nickel

📸 Thanksgiving food

We did “early” Thanksgiving with my parents this weekend. We do it the weekend before because then it’s easier for my parents to visit us, and on the actual weekend of Thanksgiving we usually have four straight days to do “not much”.

Every year I struggle to find the recipes/timings/temperatures I used the year before, even though every year I write it down somewhere. So this year, it’s here. Maybe next year I’ll find it.

• Turkey. 9lb breast only, spatchcocked, 450° for 80 minutes. Should have covered the skin a little earlier (or dropped the rack down a level) but still good. I coat the skin in mayonnaise and bird herbs.
• Roasted red potatoes, coated with oil and said bird herbs.
• Buttermilk biscuits with poultry herbs. About 10 years ago now I made these and they rose perfectly and I’ve been trying to chase that magic combination since then.
• Green beans with almonds, sautéed with butter and honey with herbs from the biscuits.
• Homemade cranberry sauce, which is personally my favorite part of the meal.
• A salad (greens, grapes, blue cheese, walnuts, balsamic fig dressing).
• Pumpkin pie, although not nearly as nicely decorated as the one in that link. Still tasted good.

I miss the old metaphor for the web

That was an actual web, with webmasters, and crawlers, and spiders. It feels like the current web is a lot more spiders dangling from a very high ceiling on a single thread, just waiting for a strong wind to blow them off.