Take 5, D.

Weekly Update 2025-11-30: Thanksgiving Edition

What happened during the week of November 23rd - November 30th:

🍱 This was a week of vacation recovery, prepping for the "YOU'RE STUCK HERE!" celebration of Thanksgiving, and celebrating L.'s birthday. Our slow execution of the recovery affected both celebrations, but not in an adverse way. We simply kept to ourselves, given the amount of effort put into rejoining "normal society" after a vacation and the meal prep for Thanksgiving. Speaking of which, our final dish turned out fine, though we ran out of time and space to properly prepare the sweet potatoes. We'll mash them for later. By the way, that big bread roll on the side? I baked that bread, using the King Arthur Flour recipe for Japanese Milk Bread Rolls.

Wine was from Arrington Vineyards, while the turkey and stuffing were both made in a crock-pot.

❄️ I had to work on Friday 11-28, while L. was off for both Thanksgiving and her birthday. We had turkey leftovers for dinner on Friday, then a dessert of baklava from a nearby Middle Eastern sweets shop. The next day, St. Louis received its first significant snowstorm of the winter, so travel was limited on both Saturday 11-29 and Sunday 11-30. The first snowfall here has a history of snarling up the infrastructure, no matter how long of a prep time beforehand or the amount of snow on the ground. With that in mind, we spent Saturday indoors, decorating for Christmas and also starting a discussion about how we’d like to use our flight credits from the canceled New Mexico trip. The hard freeze that came in on Saturday night made roads treacherous on Sunday, so we forwent church and coffee in the morning. We braved going out for groceries on Sunday afternoon, but that was the extent of it.

🤷🏻‍♂️ Beyond these events, there wasn't much else going on. A more substantial weekly update shall return in December (aka next weekend).

A Couple Two Tree Items To Note From Last Week:

External Actions

Internal Labor

Media

Obligations:

More Info About The Media Selections From This Week (and Last Week):

I put my readings and podcasts on pause during the vacation, so what's below is a highly-curated best-of from the last two weeks. We watched some videos while on vacation, but we purposefully kept that to a minimum.

While we were in Foley, AL, we watched the Maibaru Travel and RiffTrax videos back-to-back on our first night there. Nikko has been in the Japanese news lately as bear attacks in Japan have scared some folks away from an otherwise popular autumn viewing spot. Neither Maibaru nor Yuu sounded too alarmed about the bears, but you can clearly hear hikers with bells on their outwear moving about. I'm not too sure how effective those bells would be at scaring bears away, though. On the other hand, what is effective is watching the RiffTrax short in case you have trouble falling asleep. "Setting Up A Room" can either be seen as a Zen exercise in patience or 27(!) minutes of boredom set to film.

One of the few videos we watched at home worth mentioning was the Holiday Train run by the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railroad (CPKC) since 1999. You may not see Greenville's stop on the linked map, but the video clearly shows the train stopping by on November 22. Look for Moosehead Lake in Maine while on the map, then zoom in. You'll see where Greenville is in relation to the rest of the state--it's not that remote by Maine standards, but it's out there. Speaking of trains, the Trashfuture podcast features two self-proclaimed rail geeks, Gareth Dennis and Justin Roczniak, talk at length about the differences and striking similarities between UK and US rail. Justin has an explanation for how the nuclear arms race somehow ties into Amtrak seats that's worth seeking out.

The Midway Atoll camera, which we viewed both on the road and at home, shows off the massive colony of Laysan Albatrosses that nest there for breeding. There are other bird species present, but the main focus is on the only albatrosses that can be found in the United States (albeit in a territory really far away from the mainland). Wisdom, the 75-year-old female albatross, is present on the island but isn't distinctive unless you spot her leg band.

Sports and gambling go well together, unfortunately. I read the Sportico article about UMass football (tl, dr: it rhymes with "ass" for a reason) before reading the Slate piece about the relative decline in Vegas. My conspiratorial mind has linked the two stories as an explanation for why UMass football exists in the NCAA's highest division: it makes it more attractive for betting. Also going well together are the 404 Media article and W. David Marx's dispatch in The Atlantic, though they are more complementary pieces than anything else. The 404 Media article talks about folks in other countries exploiting American cultural and political flashpoints simply to make a buck, whereas The Atlantic's piece offers a potential solution to breaking the current morass of American culture without looking to make a profit off of it.

One cultural marker in the US and UK have been Dr. Martens boots, as they were and are signifiers for particular scenes on both sides of the ocean. The Quietus podcast explains the origins of the boots, the various models worn by the hosts, and what they think Dr. Martens can mean going forward both in terms of fashion and for future subcultures. Sadly, my favorite song about Dr. Martens boots was not mentioned or referred to during the podcast. Meanwhile, the two musical podcasts I featured this week were both perfect for background listening. Both of them calmed my mind from various distractions while I work or create.

Finally, in keeping with tradition, there’s the MST3K Turkey Day Marathon. The big deal with this year’s showing is that they reacquired rights to the two seasons from Netflix, so now episodes like Avalanche and Mac And Me are available for free streaming. “Pretty nice!”

#Documentation #Life #Metablogging #WeeklyNotes