December 2023 Check-In
December kind of sucked. Halfway through the month, I caught bronchitis, and it took me 2 weeks to finally kick it to the curb. This completely curtailed the Christmas festivities as I definitely did not want to spread this to anyone else.
The month started off well enough. The first weekend I was able to brew some beer. I ended up brewing a clone of Harpoon’s Winter Warmer. I just bottled it so I’ll find out in a bit if it’s any good, but it was fun to brew another batch as it had been a little while.
I also went to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms teddy bear toss game. It was fun throwing all the stuffed animals onto the ice after the Phantoms scored their first goal. The ended up winning 4-1 which made it even sweeter.
Unfortunately that was the peak of the month. I caught bronchitis and probably laryngitis, and the rest of the month was me coughing up a lung barely able to speak. I was initially hopeful that I’d be able to recover in time for Christmas, but then it wouldn’t give, and then my wife caught it and we were both down for the count. All things considered though, we had a nice quiet Christmas together, coughing aside.
Another good thing that came out of it was that I was able to finish migrating my site from Next.js to Eleventy. Shortly after Christmas, I took my Next.js implementation offline and replaced it with Eleventy. So far, I’m quite happy with the result.
The rest of the month was just us taking it easy.
Monthly Round-Up
🏃🏼♂️ Running & Biking
- Running: Nope
- Biking: Nope
🏋🏼♂️ Lifting
- Lifted a little before sickness, but otherwise, not much.
📚 Reading
Finished
- American Whitelash by Wesley Lowery
- Humble Pi by Matt Parker
- The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard
Started
- The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan
✍🏻 Writing
- Continued my reading logs
- Wrote about brewing another batch of beer
- Wrote about moving away from Next.js
- Wrote about data privacy
- Wrote about wondering how guitar players make it look so easy
- Wrote about switching to Eleventy, now being on Eleventy, and the process of switching.
🎮 Gaming
- Completed Horizon Forbidden West
- Continued Super Mario RPG
- Started Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores
- Got back into Halo Infinite Multiplayer
📺 Watched
- Finished Schitt’s Creek
- Finished Altered Carbon
- Started season 4 of For All Mankind
- Started season 3 of The Mandalorian
- Started The Pacific
- Started & Finished Band of Brothers
🎬 Movies
- Father Christmas is Back
- U-571
- Snowpiercer
- The Menu
- Alien: Resurrection
- Quiz Lady
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
- This is the End