Done Since 2018-12-23

It's been a week. Again. It was lovely having the entire household together for Christmas; We had roast beast and Yorkshire pudding. Instead of cooking the pudding under the roast I poured out the fat into muffin tins, then roasted a batch of Brussels sprouts and potatoes in the pan with the remaining drippings. Worked well -- I'm going to remember that.

For the last several months I've been scared about my budget shortfall. Yesterday I found a mistake in my spreadsheet that brought it down from nearly $2K to just under $600. Still problematic, and there's enough uncertainty that it could easily go higher. But...

siderea's post: The Vimes Boots Theory: Further Reflections applies here. I may be able to break even on a day-to-day basis, but I'm all out of savings, and some things are going to require money up front, including everything I need to make the apartment into something that we can use as a vacation rental. And if anything happens... there's no slack at all.

Speaking of slack, I spend too much time on social media. And yet, here I am. At least I've mostly dumped FB except for the occasional email notification that looks interesting enough to follow up. I stopped reading Twitter last year. Or the year before. I don't miss it.

I have a bad habit of letting things go until it's too late to do anything about them. Usually I end up regretting the missed opportunity, and too often for comfort it ends up being a disaster. See trainwreck.

Here: have a listen to Beethoven's Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls in Japan. Apparently a matryomin is a thing. A thing you can make, if you don't want to shell out $400 for one. You're welcome.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Meta: how to get the url of your last post

This is a test: (The results will be posted in a comment)

### this prints out the URL of the last post you made today:
    wget -q -O - https://mdlbear.dreamwidth.org/$(date +%Y/%m/%d/)  \
       | grep 'class="entry-title"' | tail -1                    \
       | sed -E 's/^<[^>]*><[^>]*href="([^"]*)".*$/\1/'