December, 2020

OK, so this is not *my* tradition, but it’s quite common in England to serve pork pies for Christmas dinner. These came out great, if I do say so myself.

I may not be able to go out for Chinese food to celebrate Christmas Eve With the Jews this year, but at least I know how to make a Mai Tai.

Ferrous spotted a small bird who has chosen a place on our downspout to tuck in for the night.

It’s not going to win any awards, but here is my photo of the 2020 Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. You can see a bit of the colors of Jupiter and a hint of the rings of Saturn.

Photo geeks: this is 500mm f/8, 1/20 sec, ISO 400, on a tripod with delay timer, heavily cropped to about 1/10 frame width and upscaled 2x.

Our grocery deliverers brought us this cookie decorating kit. These are mine. I’m just glad to not have any of these sweaters in non-cookie form.

I bought myself an e-ink tablet for reading and note-taking. For the screensaver image I chose a line drawing from Claire.

There is a house being built near us. It’s an unusual design with separate living and home-office spaces, and so was clearly custom-designed by an architect. As construction gets closer to completed, I’m noticing some things that make me question that architect’s attention to detail. Here we see where the house’s main front porch meets a secondary massing to the right. And I have Questions about why there’s this weird indentation, why it doesn’t go all the way up, how the porch roof fails to interact properly with it, and what’s going to happen to the water that falls off the back of the porch roof.

For our holiday party this year, my office is holding a hosted virtual beer tasting — complete with 4 beers hand-delivered to each participant’s home.