syranay

1. Tuxie was gone for three days but back this morning like nothing happened. He does this occasionally so I don't get worried, per se, but I am always glad to see him back and know he's safe. I wish he could tell us about his adventures when he's gone!

2. I have a tattoo!



I'll post another picture once it's healed. The yellow especially is very dark in the picture because it was the last color she did and it had a lot of blood welling up still. But it's exactly what I wanted and I'm very happy with it.

Overall the session took nearly three hours but the first was just discussing the design and prep, and the actual needling was about an hour and forty-five minutes. It's large, and since it's a wrap around, it's kind of fiddly, but since it's just color fill and not a lot of intricate line work or anything, it went pretty quickly overall.

It did hurt a fair bit, especially since there were some boney areas, but mostly I was just very tense from having to hold still. I felt like how I feel at the dentist, which always leaves me with a tension headache. I took some advil when I got home for the headache, but my leg itself didn't really hurt once she was done.

3. My usual Friday meetings were cancelled and the stuff I need to do tomorrow doesn't require accessing our system (which I hate doing from home because we're not able to use a VPN anymore and have to remote into a PC at the office, which is a pain), so I'm going to relax and work from home tomorrow.

4. I love getting pics of the cats looking up like this. It makes their cute faces even cuter!

We weren't planning a mid-week trip but Carla came down to Gardena with me today so we could go to lunch and she could do some shopping while I was at work, and she semi-jokingly suggested going to Disneyland for dinner afterwards, and when I checked there was full availability for both parks, so since we were already halfway there I figured why not?

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1. Well, the bathroom sink did not stay unplugged for long, and after trying Drano again a couple days ago, it pretty much stopped draining altogether, so we ended up having to get a plumber out after all. But we got someone to come today (it wasn't an emergency as we could just use the kitchen sink, so didn't want to call over the weekend) and he was able to fix it very quickly and it wasn't expensive. And Carla asked him if he could take a look at the knob that switches between the shower/tub faucet, which has not been working for like a couple years, and he fixed that without charging extra, so now we can switch to the tub faucet if we want to.

2. Although the rain is gone, it's so windy that we're still getting a ton of berries coming down from the tree out front, so I took the car in for a wash again and once again there was no line, so when the guy offered to let me go through twice, I took him up on it. The car looks much better!

3. We had a meeting at work today to get approval for some expenses on the project we're working on and I was expecting it to be difficult but it was super easy!

4. Ollie has also been enjoying Carla's new suitcase.

1. As usual, the dry, windy weather is bringing warmer temps, but thankfully it's not getting super hot. High 70s, which is not the weather I want in January, but seems like it'll just be a few days. And it's still very chilly at night.

2. We had a nice morning at Disneyland. They've got a bunch of new menu items that started earlier this week and everything we tried was delicious. And we brought home a chocolate caramel apple to have for dessert, which we haven't done in a while.

3. Tuxie's new favorite spot is under the grill.

1. It's the weekend! I am continuing to feel fairly optimistic about the upcoming February deadline at work, so hopefully that won't change. There's enough other stress going on outside of work.

2. Chloe doesn't really like any of the other cats but Molly, though her tolerance level for the others varies. She is the least tolerant of Jasper, though, so it was so nice to see her, Molly, and Jasper all on the bed together! And it happened two days in a row, too!

1. We recreated the delicious pineapple & ham tater tots from Knott's Berry Farm at home and they turned out really good! Not exactly like the ones we had at the park but considering it was a Christmas thing, we won't be getting it again for a while and it was super easy to make at home.

2. The Christmas tree is all down and boxed up, all decorations are boxed up, just a few more lego sets to take apart and then everything will be done. Sad to put everything away, but I am glad we can decorate again now that we have a cat-free space.

3. It is very chilly and windy today. I like having wintery weather that doesn't involve rain.

4. Chloe enjoyed the sunny window this morning. Cats are glad the rain's done, too!

1. Apparently today is Three Kings Day as someone brought in a king cake to work, but it was actually a really good king cake! I've only had King Cake once before and found both the style of cake and frosting to be not my jam, but this is a Mexican style king cake, which is not actually cake, but rather just very sweet bread, and instead of royal icing on top, it has bits of like quince paste or something. It is still ring shaped and has a plastic baby Jesus in it, though. It was from the in-store bakery of a Mexican supermarket chain and there's one not that far from work so if I remember about it next year I might actually consider buying a whole one myself.

2. Cutie guy.

1. Well, it's back to work tomorrow. I really enjoyed the two four-day weekends in a row. With my position now being part of HQ rather than store operations, this is the first time in the fifteen years I've been with the company that I've been able to take extra time off during December. Since it's the busiest time of the year, there's a blackout period for any time off except with a doctor's note, but that only applies to the store side and not HQ. Since I will still be in this position for at least next year, we are considering taking a trip to Japan in December as well as our upcoming trip in April (previously we were considering going in October to see Tokyo Disney's Halloween, but we can do that another time). Anyway, not thrilled to be back to work, but hopefully it will be a productive week.

2. Tonight should be the last of the rain. It's showing rain tomorrow, but when looking at the hourly breakdown, it's like 1-2am tonight, so should be dry by the morning and then no more rain except maybe a brief blip on Tuesday (there's a weird one hour spike of chance of rain around noon on Tuesday). I'm so ready for it to be over! The tree in front of our house, as well as most of the neighborhood, is a ficus, which is currently in peak berry season, so the rain is bringing down tons and tons of fat gooshy berries that now cover everything, including the car. I'm going to stop in the car wash on the way to work tomorrow to see if I can get it looking less disgusting.

3. Neither Carla nor I are good at folding fitted sheets, and we don't really have a good place to keep them except on the top shelf above the dryer, so previously they were just sort of balled up and thrown up there, which does lead to them sometimes falling down. I finally decided to look into some sort of organization and found that these sheet organizers seem to be very popular. There are all sorts of similar items, but I liked the look of these the most. I got the sheets all packed up and now they're labelled queen and full, so we can easily tell which is which (there are some that we have in the same color and some where I forget which color is whose, as it's not obviously a color I wouldn't have chosen).

4. I was poking around today to see about possible tattoo artists to contact, and while I didn't settle on anyone, I did come up with a firm idea for my first tattoo! And it's something easy to explain, so that will help lessen the anxiety around that part as well. Basically, I was thinking about what else I like that could be good for a tattoo other than cats and dragons, and where I would like it to be, and I think something on my lower leg would be best. It would be covered at work, but I wear shorts like 90% of the time outside of work, so it would be a good place to be on display. Rainbow stuff is a good option as well, so I had the idea of a rainbow band around my lower leg, like down near the ankle but not on the boney bit. I think I'd like it to be fairly wide, like if you remember those wristbands people used to wear for sports in the 70s and 80s, about that thickness. I think it would look pretty cool and I'm excited about it, so now I just need to find someone to do it!

5. Tuxie!

Recently Finished
Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For
This is an Audible original adaptation of the early comic strips. It has an all star cast including Jane Lynch and Roxanne Gay, and I felt like the audio play format worked really well for it. It's a lot of fun and at only three hours, it's a good listen when you want to finish up something quick. It's also free if you have an Audible subscription.

The Labyrinth House Murders
This had an interesting framing, but overall felt weaker than the other two books in the series that I've read so far.

Wake Me After the Apocalypse
YA post-apocalyptic story about a girl who is one of the few people chosen to go into cryosleep and be awakened in two hundred years when a massive asteroid is predicted to hit earth and wipe out all life. But when she wakes up, she finds that a cave-in in their underground bunker has damaged all the other tanks near hers and completely blocked off the rest, so she's all alone. This sounded cool! It reminded me a bit of 7 Seeds. But there were too many flashback chapters in the first half to boring stuff about her falling in love with a boy in her group. If I am reading a post-apocalypse story I want the focus to be post apocalypse. Once the flashback chapters disappeared and the focus stayed on the future, it was more interesting, but still a bit disappointing. And this is the beginning of a trilogy, but the second book focuses on a different character in a different bunker, and from a review I saw, 99% of the book is pre-apocalypse, making it even less interesting. Then the third book has the two protagonists meeting and dealing with people from a third bunker, but the reviews made it sound like it wouldn't really be up my alley, so I'm not going to continue the series.

Silent Sister
A teenager wakes up in the hospital with no memory of the past few days and is told that she was found injured by the side of the road and her sister is missing. The story is told in alternating past and present chapters telling the story of the days leading up to the incident in the missing sister's POV and in the remaining sister's POV, the quest to find out what happened to her and her sister. ( spoilers for something that should be no surprise to anyone who starts reading this book ) The story itself was fine, but the gimmick just felt annoying.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
This took me three and a half months to read but I finally finished it! It was very interesting, but also had a lot of in-depth detail about each head of the CIA that was a little on the boring side, which made it a slower read for me. But I went into this knowing virtually nothing about the CIA. It was never really touched on in school (most of my history classes ended after WWII) and in terms of popular culture I just had a vague "these guys are spies" association. As an adult, I osmosed that the CIA was responsible for a lot of shitty stuff around the world, but never really got into the details. So this was good for that! It turns out that the shittiness was not an exception, and that's pretty much all they did, but what most surprised me is that from the CIA's inception, these guys were pretty much Trump regime level incompetent. No one had any idea of what they were doing, and any successes they had were pretty much flukes. Anyway, I rated it a three due to the boringness of parts of it, but it really was a good overview and I'd recommend it for someone who's looking for something like that.

My Home Hero vol. 23-24

2025 Reading Roundup
For the third year in a row, I finished one book* per day, so I read a total of 365 books this year. That seems to be working well for me, so while I set my GR goal at 320 to give myself some leeway, I will be aiming for a book a day this year as well.

*I count manga, comics, audiobooks, and short stories along with full-length novels and non-fiction.

This year's tally of the categories I keep track of:

Comics: 58
Manga: 144
Adult fiction: 106
Young Adult: 9
Middle Grade: 31
Non-fiction: 17

Of those, 6 were short stories and 55 were audiobooks.

I read exactly the same number of non-fiction books as last year, but more adult fiction and middle grade and much less YA, as I am finding YA more and more annoying these days.

The combined total of manga and comics is less this year as well, and the audiobook count higher.

There were 10 rereads, all of which were comics or manga, and the reason for rereading was to refresh my memory in order to read a new volume in the series. (Two of them were for stuff I am scanlating, and I always count it as a reread when I finish translating a full volume.)

72 books were added to my to-read list before 2025, which is more than in past year (though not by a ton). The majority of manga and comics I don't add to my to-read list before reading, though, and same with the short stories, so as percentage of full length books, that's 46% coming from the to-read list, so that's pretty good!

I've been going through my to-read list recently and doing some pruning, since some stuff has been on there for almost ten years, and my tastes have changed, plus there are a lot of books that I added (especially YA stuff) because it was like "ooh, a [insert minority] character!" when that was more rare, and the plot or genre isn't really my thing, or I've already read several variations on the same theme by now and don't need another.

If you're curious to see the full list of what I read last year, this should take you to my 2025 tag on Goodreads.

Since I have another four day weekend, I asked Carla if she wanted to do something else one of the days, and she said she wanted to go to Universal again. The forecast has more rain for Saturday and Sunday, so we decided to go today since it was supposed to be clear all day (as of yesterday) and then no rain until around 3pm (as of this morning).

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