It has become a tradition in my family to watch the 1994 version of Miracle on 34th Street around Thanksgiving. It’s one of the things we do to kick off the Christmas season. We watched it this evening.

Another Thanksgiving in the books. Except for one thing, it was a pretty ordinary holiday.

It's a Thanksgiving miracle! I wasn't expecting my clarinet to be repaired for at least another week or so, but I got a text from the shop late in the afternoon today that it was ready to be picked up.

I've written several posts about how I acquired and got my current laptop working – a Dell Latitude E7470. It's several years old, but it's been running like a champ and has come into my possession at the perfect time, given my current hobby project.

Getting a new shared Mastodon instance going is a lot of work! I've put in a lot of hours the past couple days on getting ZCMI.social off the ground. It's not just the technical side of things with domain, hosting, and administration – there is a lot more to it.

It's been a whirlwind weekend, but I somehow started a new Mastodon instance! ZCMI.social is now a thing.

Occasionally over the past couple years, I've thought about starting a Mastodon instance for members of my church – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

My new Andor sticker arrived and it looks great on my laptop!

The battery cable I ordered arrived today. I installed the battery without too much hassle and now I have a 100% working Dell Latitude E7470 laptop for a total cost of ~$250!

Streaming music services like Apple Music and Spotify provide unprecedented convenience and instant access to more music than we've ever had before. But when it comes to my favorite music – music I want to be assured I can listen to whenever I want – I still purchase or burn CDs.