Christmas was a quiet one. Usually, about 40 of my extended family descend on one person's home for the day. This time our family was fractured across a couple of countries, so I spent it with my brother and Boxing Day with my partner's family.

Felt weird not being surrounded by the cacophony that is my family, but I did crush some excellent naps over the break.

I have four tomato plants growing in my greenhouse, combined with the cucumbers and the mystery plant that turned out to be pumpkin, it's a mini rainforest. However, one tomato plant has blossom end rot, apparently a problem caused by a calcium issue, but the true catalyst is infrequent/too frequent watering. The other plants are producing like mad, and they all get watered at the same time, so unsure what my approach is here. They're fussy plants these. Good lessons for the future though, this is the first of many attempts.

Strange update. Once upon a time I played a lot of Battlefield V, across two accounts, probably about 1000 hours in it. Enough to be a menace. Back in the day I was in a 'clan' and we'd typically just have a bit of fun in a server, if we ever started to dominate a match we'd split ourselves up to make things even. Since Battlefield 2042 came out, most of us have stopped playing, because it was hot trash and it burned our love of the game. Now we hear that the BF V servers are popular again, and there's a new clan running the roost. Allegedly they're talking shit about us and other old clans, so we've been summoned, to come back for a shitfight.

Is it stupidly childish? Yes. Could we ignore it? Entirely. Am I reinstalled and testing my aim? You bet.

This weekend the battle begins, the glorious old guard BDSL (Basement Dwelling Sweat Lords) vs the whiny upstarts EZPZ.

Oh! So turns out my partner loves, and I mean fuckin' looooves, The Great British Bake Off. It's surprisingly hard to track down, legally or not. Most streaming services don't have it in NZ, and those that do, have like a season at best.

I didn't know she adored this show, and apparently she had been trying her best to solve this access issue, on and off, for the better part of two years (we have been together for almost seven..). She finally told me this week, about her deepest desire. I checked which Netflix region had the show (USA does!), flicked my VPN on in our NVidia Shield, changed to USA, and restarted Netflix. Great British Baking Show was the first thing that appeared as a suggestion and my partner lost. Her. Shit. She was wriggling, actually wriggling. I asked, once she had stopped writhing on the couch, why she never told me about this before? Took all of five minutes to rectify. She didn't want to bother me with it, apparently. Which sucks, cause she can bother me with anything and I'll take it off her plate. The new job environment is still paying dividends it seems, my partner feels comfortable coming to me with things she thinks are inane.

Reading a book next to her on the couch, cat in her lap, as she critically judges ganache application on the screen filled me with an awful lot of joy.