Today is the last day of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. I had a bunch of stuff on my “maybe to-do” list for this weekend, and one of those items was “write a blog post,” so I’m going to go ahead and do that now. I have a bunch of stuff on my mind, so this is likely to turn into one of those rambling multi-topic posts.
Thanksgiving day itself was uneventful. I don’t really have anybody to hang out with on major holidays anymore, and I’m honestly not even that interested in doing so. I get tired easily, and I get sick easily, so sometimes it’s better to just stay at home and rest.
I wasn’t really sick this weekend, but I did have a kind of low-level thing on Friday that kept me from getting too ambitious about anything.
On Saturday, I had a pretty eventful day. My brother and his wife were driving back to Georgia from Massachusetts, and stopped by here for brunch. So I got to spend around 90 minutes with them, eating a waffle and drinking a bunch of coffee. It turns out that my brother’s wife has some friends in the area who were getting together in Somerville, so that may have been their main reason for stopping here, but either way, I’m glad they could stop by and spend some time. (And I’m now realizing that, for me, a 90 minute brunch counts as “an eventful day”. I didn’t really do much else that day!)
Back on the subject of my “maybe to-do” list: I had a mental list of stuff, of varying levels of actual usefulness, that I could do this weekend. And I did a few of those things. And I did a lot of reading and TV watching. So I’m going to throw some notes about all of that in here.
Book Stuff
I did a good bit of book-related stuff this weekend.
- I bought a few random “Black Friday deal” ebooks, from Kobo. I’ve been going back and forth between Amazon/Kindle and Kobo recently, when buying ebooks. Sometimes, I find something on sale at Amazon, then I check to see if it’s the same price at Kobo, and if it is, I buy it there. I’m not boycotting Amazon, but I’m not super happy about them lately, and I think it makes sense to try not to rely on them for everything.
- I also bought a Humble Bundle of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret books this weekend. I’ve been curious about them for quite some time, and the recent Maigret TV series brought them to mind again.
- And buying that bundle, and a few Kobo books, got me thinking about adding some more of the random non-Amazon ebooks in my library to Goodreads. So I spend a bit of time doing that. I added all of the Discworld books that were part of the bundle I bought last year. And the books from the Ursula Le Guin bundle I bought last Thanksgiving weekend.
- I also spent some time updating my Calibre setup, including plug-ins, and pulled some more stuff into my Calibre library.
- And, in terms of actual, y’know, reading: I finished the first book in John Jackson Miller’s Star Trek: Prey trilogy, and started the second. It’s a fun series. I bought the Kindle books back in 2018. (I have so many unread ebooks!)
TV and Movies
I haven’t watched any movies this weekend, but I may finally watch the Fantastic Four movie on Disney+ before the weekend is over.
I started watching Stranger Things season five. There are four episodes up, and I’ve watched one episode per day, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, so I’ve got one more to go. It’s pretty good. I’ve enjoyed Stranger Things since the beginning. (It is, of course, explicitly designed for people in my demographic, so it’s not surprising that I’d love it. But I don’t resent that, and I do, in fact, enjoy it very much.) I hadn’t really kept up with the press around it, so I didn’t realize that the four episodes that went up this weekend aren’t the final four episodes. Per this article: “Stranger Things 5 will debut in three volumes this fall: four episodes are now streaming, three episodes on Christmas, and the finale episode on New Year’s Eve.” So I guess that gives me something fun to do on Christmas and New Year’s too!
Hardware
I did a bit of shopping this weekend for three Apple devices that I’m overdue to replace: my iPhone, iPad, and Watch. My iPhone 14 is three years old, and isn’t holding a charge as well as it used to. Other than that, it’s fine for me, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to replace it soon. My iPad was purchased in 2019, so that’s the oldest of the three devices, and maybe in most need of replacement. The battery isn’t great, and it’s only got 64 GB of storage, which isn’t quite enough for all of the comics I’d like to keep on it. The Watch is a Series 6 from 2020, and that too is having battery issues. As with the iPhone, it’s really fine aside from the battery issues, but I should probably replace it.
I found deals on both an iPad and Watch at Costco that looked pretty good, but I didn’t order them yet. I’m still not sure if I will or not, but there’s no reason not to.
The iPhone is a little more complicated, since I moved to Consumer Cellular. I can order an iPhone from CC, but they’re out of stock on the iPhone 17, and have been for a while. They have the iPhone 17 Pro, though, so I could get the Pro model this time around. But I don’t need it, so maybe not. Of course, I can buy an iPhone 17 direct from Apple, but CC isn’t one of their supported carriers, so I I would have to get an unlocked one and set it up myself. Which shouldn’t be difficult, but it’s another little barrier that makes me stop and pause. And the trade-in value is a factor too. Apple will give me $220 for my old phone, while CC will only give me around $180.
So I haven’t made a decision on any of my iDevices yet. I did make a snap decision on a device from Amazon yesterday, though, and got it today. I decided to replace my Echo Dot with an Echo Spot. I got the Echo Dot in 2020, to replace my old iHome alarm clock. It’s been a nice little unobtrusive clock, sitting on my nightstand, since then. I don’t really use the Alexa features. It’s just a relatively cheap puck that sits there and shows me what time it is. Once in a while, I say something that sounds like “Alexa” and it starts talking back to me, so that’s frustrating, but it doesn’t happen often.
I’m not sure if I’ll like the Spot more or less than the Dot. The screen is fancier, but I don’t know if it’s going to more readable or less readable, if I wake up at 4 AM and want to know what time it is. I should probably give up on these “smart” things and just get this Braun alarm clock from MOMA.
Final Thoughts
So I guess that’s all of my random ruminating for this weekend. For today, I’ll probably watch some football, read a bit more of the Star Trek novel, and watch the next Stranger Things episode. I already went for a 25-minute walk, so that’s a good start to the day.
The farmers market here in Somerville finished up last weekend, so I don’t have that to look forward to today. I guess I need to get into winter mode now. I started using my humidifier this weekend, so that’s a start.
I’d really glad I got a good four-day weekend of doing “not very much.” I’ve been wearing myself out with work recently, and really needed a break.