Goals we set are goals we get… sometimes.

I’ve talked about goal setting before, I find it’s a more useful approach to accomplishing things across the year than resolutions. That said, sometimes life throws some twists in that interfere with those goals. As an example, I returned to karate near the end of 2023, so had a goal of attending a certain number of classes across the year. And then I had hand surgery in March, which knocked me off the mat for a couple months, followed by physical therapy for arthritis in my knees for a couple summer months, and a whirlwind of travel in the fall.

At least that’s explainable… I’m not sure how I only tracked 42 books on Goodreads. After hitting my goal of 52 books multiple years, I had increased it to 54 for 2024. Even if I missed tracking a couple, that seems low, especially with all of the Hugo nominees I read before voting in those awards before attending WorldCon in Glasgow.

Regardless, I accomplished some goals – fixing up my master bedroom closet (which had been on my list for years), paying down my home equity loan, and, of course, writing my weekly blog posts. Now I reset, determining what goals I want to work towards in 2025. I’ve found 10 to be a reasonable number, and have made sure they meet the SMART requirement – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based.

Having done that, I should decide what I want to work on… re-organizing my work desk or my reading goal, noting that I’m currently reading Wind and Truth, which is over 1300 pages. As one of my karate instructors says, start strong, finish stronger.

Art as a progression

There are people – presumably with skills – that make a living from their drawings, paintings, and other artistic presentations. Some are serious, some comic, some downright absurd (especially what people will pay for them). I am not one of those people.

I have a day job I enjoy, along with assorted creative hobbies, from crocheting to writing, that I occasionally present in a way that could supplement my income. Drawing and painting, however, are activities that I do simply for fun, or to extricate a stuck idea from my head.

The butterfly below, for example, is another iteration of Andrea Nelson’s activities that present a focus image divided into smaller sections for coloring. In this particular case, drawn and painted on Christmas Eve, I decided that the butterfly should be painted in red and green. For contrast, I selected blue and purple as the background colors.

A red and green butterfly with assorted squiggly lines drawn through and around it.
A red and green butterfly with assorted squiggly lines drawn through and around it, with a blue and purple background.
A red and green butterfly with assorted squiggly lines drawn through and around it, with a blue and purple background. Each section between squiggly lines has been outlined in the color it was filled with.

The process itself was fun, just sitting and painting for a while on a relaxing day off. The naming process can be fun too… I call this image The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Ate the Christmas Decorations.

For myself, art is not a progression of skill – though there is a bit of that happening. Rather, it’s been a progression of appreciation for the creative process, knowing that whatever the result looks like, I had fun making it.

A decorated tree!

Part of a holiday tree decorated with assorted ornaments, mostly crocheted. Also, there's a dinosaur attached to a stick on the tree, only because the stick is useful for opening and closing the curtain behind the tree.

We’re trying something new this year… putting ornaments on the tree! I don’t think we’ve had ornaments on a tree since we adopted Arwen back in 2017, since cats – especially kittens – and ornaments are a notoriously bad combination.

In 2020, Zuko moved in, postponing the possibility of ornaments longer. Even now, none of them are particularly breakable. We lucked out and rediscovered a bag filled with crocheted ornaments – candy canes, snowflakes, and tiny trees with wine corks – and have supplemented those with a couple 3D-printed decorations from a friend.

So far, only a couple of the cork-filled trees have gone wandering through the house. Next year, I may be tempted to dig out my animated character ornaments. They’re plastic, of course.

Adulting is weird

More specifically, the satisfaction from successfully adulting is weird. I suppose some parts seem more obvious than others, like finishing my holiday shopping early, and having holiday cards in the house already. (A few have made it to the mailbox.)

A new stove & oven, with five burner controls - the center one is griddle-shaped, with custom-sized griddle fitting neatly between the other four burns. The oven display includes an array of functions, including an air fryer setting.

But there’s the glee of having a new oven and stove, and it hits on several levels. The old oven had an intermittent heat sensor issue which occasionally made baking frustrating. It was the last major appliance in the kitchen from the previous owner, and we wanted to replace it before it forced us to (unlike the dishwasher and refrigerator). The new one is marketed as accessible; the major change from our previous one is that most of the pieces that can be removed are dishwasher safe. And, to my budget’s immense satisfaction, the range was purchased with a Costco gift card.

Now we’re hitting several celebratory firsts… each of those favorite dishes like the first pizza in the new oven, and the first pancakes on the built-in griddle. Yes, that center section of the stove is actually a griddle-shaped burner with a custom-sized griddle! See, that’s one of those weirdly satisfying bits from adulting, along with the warning beep a minute before the timer finishes.

That satisfaction comes from smaller things too, like the new-to-us set of craft drawers, or replacing the difficult to access garage light bulb. And it definitely comes from the new shower head that I installed in the master bathroom. Who knew there was so much water pressure? And the shower draws warm water faster… because there’s more water pressure!

WhiskyFest Chicago 2024

I have mentioned my appreciation for whisk(e)y before, in particular when discussing Advent Calendars last year. At the tail end of my five weeks of travel, I attended Whisky Advocate’s WhiskyFest in downtown Chicago, coincidentally at the same hotel that hosted Chicon a couple years ago, during which some friends and I held a whiskey tasting party. Each attendee at WhiskyFest was provided with a tasting glass, a pen, a bag, and a program book with the map and list of whiskies each booth was featuring.

A map of the Grand Ballroom at WhiskyFest, organized (mostly) by distillery.

On the map, you’ll notice three dozen booths; if you exclude the Whisky Advocate, tequila, and Bacardí (best known for their rum) booths, that’s still around 30 different distilleries to try, with at least 3 choices at most booths. A conservative estimate would be 90 different whiskies to try, and that’s not even counting the leftovers from the VIP hour that preceded general admission.

Wow, now that I’ve written out those numbers, I feel like an underachiever, having only tried 19 whiskies that night. To be clear, most of the servings are a sip or two, designed to provide a taste rather than intoxication. You’ll note that the map also shows several buffet tables, though it’s missing the food tables on the right side, as well as the plethora of chocolate desserts in the lobby. Attendees were encouraged to eat between tastings and provided with bottled water to stay hydrated.

My primary focus was the smaller distilleries, figuring they’re the ones I’m least likely to randomly encounter at a restaurant. And yes, I had checked my whiskey list before the event, making sure that every whiskey I tried was new to me (at least since I started tracking them). The two that stood out the most, in quite different ways, were the Mash & Mallow S’mores Whiskey – a fabulous liqueur – and the Praedictum 15 year Kentucky Straight Bourbon – a leftover from the VIP hour that retails around $600 a bottle.

Overall, it was a nice lead-in to this year’s Flaviar Whiskey Advent Calendar, which I’ll once again post to TikTok as I open them. Since I bought Costco’s Whiskies Tour of the World set as well, I’ll probably continue posting well into January to give each whiskey its chance to shine.

Five hotel rooms, a photo post

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been traveling a lot. All of the rooms have been nice and the beds comfortable (unlike one bed I slept on during a summer trip), but I do appreciate sleeping in my own bed, competing with my cats for space.

  • An array of plushies on a king-size bed in Madison.
    An array of plushies on a king-size bed in Madison.
  • A spacious room in downtown San Diego, featuring a large work desk, a king-size bed, and a small table with a chair by the window.
    A spacious room in downtown San Diego, featuring a large work desk, a king-size bed, and a small table with a chair by the window.
  • Not much room to spare in this downtown Chicago hotel room with a full-size bed.
    Not much room to spare in this downtown Chicago hotel room with a full-size bed.
  • A double at the hotel in Oakbrook with a plush on each bed.
    A double at the hotel in Oakbrook with a plush on each bed.
  • This corner room in Philadelphia had beautiful wall art on the wall behind the king-size bed.
    This corner room in Philadelphia had beautiful wall art on the wall behind the king-size bed.

Traveling again…

This week rounded off my hectic 5 hotels in 5 weeks travel schedule with a work trip to Philadelphia. Here’s the quick list of where I’ve been:

View of tall buildings from my hotel room in Philadelphia
Philadelphia from my hotel room
  • Madison, Wisconsin – for Gamehole Con
  • San Diego, California – a work trip
  • Chicago, Illinois – this was an overnight downtown for work
  • Oak Brook, Illinois – for WindyCon (we built a Box Fort)
  • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – a work trip

Not surprisingly, I am exhausted.

Thoughts on the 2024 US Presidential election and waiting for the results

It’s election morning here in the United States (though the post won’t go live for a couple days), and many people are understandably anxious about the possibility of a convicted felon winning again. (If you’re somehow unsure where I stand politically, read my previous post here.)

Heart-shaped sticker that reads "I Will Vote - 11.5.24 - Remember January 6"

I found myself explaining our election process to co-workers in Latin America yesterday. Not the messy, outdated Electoral College part, which would probably have made for a longer meeting. Rather I was detailing the different voting options and how that delays the official results. Ignoring the states that have switched entirely to mail-in voting, many states offer absentee ballots by mail – including here in Illinois – in addition to early voting. One of the reasons for that, as I explained, is because election day is not a federal holiday. Most of the people I was talking with live in countries where everything closes for election day, which encourages people to vote. But if you look at our federal holidays, many of them have become glorified shopping days, which means retail workers don’t have the day off. (For example, look back at how shopping crept into Thanksgiving Day celebrations before the pandemic.)

Before the pandemic, I typically voted early because the timing was better for my work and life schedules. Those ballots were typically electronic voting, offered at a smaller number of locations than election day, and can be tabulated with the other votes. To be clear, I’ve been voting early long enough that I have never been to my current voting site, having moved to this house shortly before the 2016 election.

Mail-in ballots are, of necessity, paper, and that’s where many of the delays in counting happen. The rules for requesting a paper ballot vary by state – some require that you be incapable of voting in person for medical or other reasons, while others (like Illinois) simply require that you request it. In fact, Illinois allows voters to sign up for recurring paper ballots, instead of having to request one each election. The request has to match your voter registration, of course, and the ballot includes an envelope that you sign – that signature gets compared to your voter registration. This simulates the process of walking into the voting location, showing your ID, and signing to request your ballot.

Each of those mailed in ballots has to be processed – that is, the information on the envelope confirmed – before the votes can be tabulated. When that processing can start varies by state, as does when the mail-in vote counting can start. In fact, it varies so much, Ballotpedia has an entire page on the subject. The important thing to note is that many states don’t allow absentee ballot counting to start until the polls close on election day, and several states allow ballots to count if they were postmarked by election day and received within the next couple weeks. This made a huge difference in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic when more of us voted by mail and states had to work through those ballots after election day.