One

Somehow I managed to schedule myself a week where I had to record two workshops and a podcast in the span of four days. This was fully accidental. But I think I managed to do okay.

Migrating WordPress Sites to PHP 8 – I did this one with my colleagues from iThemes.

I Just Got This WordPress and Don’t Know How To Use It – The best way to learn to use WordPress is to just use WordPress, but that can be scary if your first WordPress experience is someone handing you the keys to a website you now have to manage.

The podcast will be out in a couple of weeks. No doubt I will get around to linking to it here sometime after that.

Something I noticed from this experience is that I seem to specialize in presentations that all need one slide with the same phrase on it:

DON’T PANIC

(In large, friendly letters, natch.)

Two

I have two crochet projects in progress, a corner-to-corner blanket with no particular pattern to follow that I can do while watching TV, and a tapestry crochet beanie that I thought would be my “out and about” project but is proving to be so fiddly that I’m not sure when I will ever finish it.

So I did not need a new project, but then The Woobles released a Yeti for the Christmas season and now I want to make them for everyone. Fortunately, their patterns are simple enough that I can make them while tired and hanging out on the couch after work. But it does mean acquiring the supplies for the duplicates just as I am making progress on getting through my yarn stash.

Three

As an early Christmas gift to ourselves, and after an extended period of wondering if the morning back pain was due to aging or a mattress in need of replacement, we bought a new mattress.

Reader, we should have done this a year ago. The combination of new mattress and heated mattress pad means I woke up feeling amazing.

(You are probably wondering which one we bought, but usually our approach to these kinds of problems is to just go with whatever The Wirecutter is recommending unless we have some edge-case need, because life is too short to do exhaustive research on every purchase.)

Four

Enjoy this mashup of all of Darlene Love’s performances of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” from The Late Show With David Letterman:

Five

It was a pretty tough week at work. One of the projects I’m working on has a way of giving me more and more bad news the deeper into it I dig. But through sheer, dumb luck we managed to catch a very serious problem right away that we would ordinarily have needed a day or two to notice, and in resolving it we are making our systems more resilient. Sometimes the best you can do is be good enough to take advantage of your luck.