My Christmas gift to myself was not reading the book on the 24th or 25th.

Finished reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. Reporting on the show trial of the bureaucrat who kept the trains running to Auschwitz, Arendt uses it as a narrow lens to look at the Holocaust. Her discussions of then-modern Germany and Israel are not generally relevant today, but the question that will keep coming back to me is how to resist from within such a system.

Today, it’s been snowing since the middle of the night; we have maybe six inches of accumulation, but it’s hard to tell because it’s blowing around. It’s currently 24°F and falling.

Christmas was delightful: Mom and Greg and Jocelyn and the kids came over. The kitchen victory was that we’d prepared all food the preceding days, and only had to reheat things.

Holiday status: finished cooking daube Provençal for Christmas dinner; went to the grocery store for the trip after the final trip before Christmas; took a home covid test. (Still to do: baking blueberry scones and kouign amann; wrapping gifts.)

A few snowflakes coming down right now on Capitol Hill.

Finished rereading The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian (Aubrey–Maturin series, book 8). We’ve kind of settled into the sweet spot of the series, if memory serves, and in any case this book is its own sweet spot, a pretty balance of sailing, spycraft, politics, and interpersonal drama, along with a return to the beloved H.M.S. Surprise.

Got my third vaccine dose (Pfizer this time).

Finished reading The Citadel of the Autarch (as the second half of the Sword & Citadel compilation). This was far and away my favorite of the four books, with a narrator who finally seems human, and something of an explanation for some of the seemingly-irrational events of the earlier books. Was the payoff worth it? Yes; I’m still not a fan of the semi-inscrutability of the earlier books, but they had their own compensating virtues.

Tonight’s kitchen victory: beef/mushroom hand pies, and chocolate crème brûlée for dessert.

Finished reading The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe (as the first half of the Sword & Citadel compilation). The narrator seemed even more of a character, and less a pawn of the author, than in book two. Not coincidentally I enjoyed this book more than the previous two.

Took the bus and light rail to Capitol Hill, then walked back home, following the route of the rail tunnel as best I conveniently could: four hours, 11 miles.

Got this part of the site under version control, finally, and updated the style to match the main site (e.g. better link colors in dark mode).

I wrote a little bit about nut-free granola.

Finished reading Light Chaser, a novella by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell. A fun, short, fairly simple story about a woman traveling a route through colonized space at near–light speed.