Second negative test Monday morning. A clean bill of health means the holidays are on! Hit the road for our annual drive to Minnesota and its usual garbage weather and semi truck roulette.

Lovely time with both our families. All parties were well-gifted, but it also felt like the first time we’ve successfully followed through on reining in the presents like we’ve all been threatening to do for years.

Highlight for me was replacing my parents’ nine- and eleven-year-old iPads with new iPad Airs. Sometimes it’s easier to just swap out all the Lightning cables for USB-C while folks are asleep. Everyone needs a technology fairy in their lives.

A very excellent road trip baby checked off two whole cities she’d never been to before:

1,094 miles later, we’re back in Chicago. Once again used the experience to vacillate wildly on whether or not we should go electric when it’s time for a new car. Briefly considered a plug-in hybrid, but for our particular lives, it seems like the worst of both worlds: dragging around an engine and tank of gas 363 days out of the year as we putter around town in full-electric mode, then hauling a dead battery 400 miles twice a year when it’s just being a regular car. Everyone I know who has an electric car has said that range anxiety pretty much isn’t a thing. Now that heat pumps^[1] are becoming more common to help with winter range loss, maybe we just take the plunge.

Celebrated the arrival of the weird liminal end-of-year zone with a trip out to Skokie to see Legally Blonde: The Musical and one last trip to The Meadowlark.

Whenever I’ve needed some long-running service like Plex or Channels or Homebridge running on my home network, I’ve tried to squeeze it in to the tangle of Raspberry Pis or the big Synology in my basement, but I finally put a proper computer down there. A little M4 Mac Mini running headless in my server rack that I can VNC into is so much easier to work with, and once you have an always-on computer, it’s not hard to find things to do with it.

I guess this is our last check-in of the year, so let’s do some 2024 housekeeping:

• Read 10 books (six for the first time, four re-reads). Rookie numbers. Please don’t ask how many books I’ve bought over the same time period.
• Watched 60 movies (19 new, 41 re-watches).
• Biked 730 miles. Fewer than the 1,000 miles I threatened back in May, but still 600 miles more than the year before. I bet I can break four digits this year.
• Discovered 1,391 new songs via my demented yearly “to be considered” playlist on Spotify:

Stumbled across this tidbit in the Times’ coverage of Jimmy Carter’s death:

A testament to Jimmy Carter’s incredible longevity: He outlived two of his obituary writers, at The New York Times and The Washington Post. Roy Reed, a Times correspondent who covered the South, died in 2017, at 87. Edward Walsh, a former Washington Post reporter who co-bylined The Post’s obit, died in 2014 at 71.

Journalism fun fact: this is incredibly common! Prewritten obituaries are often started decades in advance. The blanks get filled in when the time comes, but the credit for all the research, structure, and writing still belongs with the original author. It’s one of the most common reasons for a posthumous byline.