after an eventful week, this is my final update for the year! it's been quite the joyous ritual writing each of these little blog posts, and i plan to keep this up next year.

• i did quite a bit of baking over this past week! 🧁
  • managed to save a curled sponge cake batter when making coffee and walnut cake on Monday. melted away the lumpy butter by whisking while gently heating over a double boiler
    • the cake ended up tasting like a sponge cake was briefly acquainted with an incredibly weak coffee back in 1997
  • i struggled to make coffee cake icing twice this week. whenever i add the coffee, all the butter precipitates out and goes all lumpy. it's probably because the coffee is too warm!
    • i managed to rescue one of my failures using a double boiler, though! because i didn't have a scale and eye-balled all my measurements, it turned out too sweet. i mixed in some cornstarch dissolved in water, and cooked it down into a delicious glaze
• spent Christmas with a friend and her family in Bath! it was all around a lovely time 🎄
  • caught the coach, which was a three hour journey from London Victoria
  • on the way there, i read an article titled Nine ways evil woke snowflakes have ruined Christmas from Quality Street wrappes to 0% beer in the London Standard (ew to the rename), and i'm unsure as to whether it's a bit or not...
  • had the privilege of experiencing a Polish Christmas Eve dinner, with a delicious four course meal
  • played tarneeb on Christmas Day after a lovely traditional turkey on Christmas Day. the veg covered in a heart-stopping amount of butter
• i got Christmas gifts of some Mensa puzzles. i'm now thinking again about getting my IQ tested properly
• couldn't sleep, so i went for a 4am walk in Bath. it's so eerily still and silent
• watched two episodes of Under the Bridge on Boxing Day
• visited a friend in Watford on Saturday evening, and had a lovely time doing karaoke 🎤
  • she gave me a gift of some Cadbury Heroes
  • laying them out, there were 5 Eclairs, 4 Crunchies, 4 Double Deckers, 4 Fudges, 4 Wispas, 3 Creme Egg Twists, 3 Dairy Milks, 3 Dairy Milk Caramels and 2 Twirls. Eclairs are objectively the worst, hence why they're the most frequent.
• took some time to organise some of my digital affairs 💻
  • designed a content schedule for 2025. i've got so many things i'd like to write about! ✏️
• tapped away at a blog post for next year
• planned to do a post about Coding Black Females mentorship in February, but now i can't (big shame)
• i've made some improvements to the homelab and the website
• made some tweaks to my personal website. wrote up a /uses page, for the services, tech and gear i use
• set up ntfy for notifications. considering linking it to a gateway of some sort so i can get emails from homelab apps
  • linked it to watchtower to let me know when images are due to update. i feel like the setup is too basic for a full blog post, but i'll write about it in an infrastructure review at some point
• considering setting up feature flagging and secrets management
• took 15 minutes to clean up my password manager. now i just need to keep it clear
• started redesigning my blog's theme to more closely match my main site
• booked a call with a recruiter for next week ☎️
• took some time to water the plants in the living room, trimmed some wilted leaves 🌺

looking back, 2024 was almost a complete write-0ff. such a write-off, in fact, that it's not even worth publishing a year in review for. looking forward to 2025, however, i have quite a few things i'm excited for. this will be a pivotal year for me. (look at me go, manifesting!)

i think my overall goal for the next 12 months is to incrementally improve myself, driven by data i collect about how i spend my time and what i do. i'm envisioning it to be much less miserable than it sounds, i promise.

this will likely be my last blog post for the year, so i'll see you all in 2025! 🎆