§ Hello there. Welcome to 2026.
§ I worked on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day for the first time in a while, trying to save up some PTO to use later this year. As a result, the holiday felt a little less pronounced.
Nevertheless, Caroline and I continued the now four year tradition of cooking a big bibimbap dinner for her family to celebrate the new year. Meanwhile, Cleveland was hit with another big snow storm, this one even larger than the one on Thanksgiving. An overnight 40° drop in temperature also brought an abrupt end to the strangely warm end-of-year weather I mentioned last week.
§ On New Year’s Day I posted my third annual mosaic of weekly photos from the past year. As an extra bonus, I also put together a giant annotated image of all of my weekly photos from these past three years combined. It is interesting—if a bit existentially disconcerting—to see the past 156 weeks of my life laid out all together like this.
§ The meal tracking project I started at the beginning of 2025 has finally come to an end. With all 365 dinners accounted for, here are some final stats:
- I cooked 78% of meals at home last year. Out of the remaining meals, 7% were eating at friends or family member’s houses and 15% were from restaurants.
- Throughout the year I ate somewhere around 150 unique dishes. “American” food was the most prevalent cuisine at 38% followed by “Mexican” food at 29%. Apparently I cooked tikka masala 21 times, which feels like a lot.
- My favorite dish that I cooked for the first time last year was either harissa roast pumpkin or Indian cabbage curry.
As I mentioned recently, I’m not going to be continuing this project into 2026—I found quickly diminishing utility from the project as the year progressed. Still, I’m glad I stuck with it for the entire year.
§ The rapidly declining quality of streaming services finally prompted me to take the take the plunge and try out Jellyfin. Like many self-hosted open source projects, it’s a bit rough around the edges and requires more time messing with Linux filesystem permissions than I would prefer. Nevertheless, getting it configured and organizing all of my media has been a fun side project this week. Now I just need to exert the necessary self-control to stop fiddling with and tweaking everything. I’m not doing a good job at this so far.
