Kristin

So, this year, I chose two reading challenges for myself, and I tried to choose them advisedly, so they would affect my year's reading, but not control it.

( Starting with recapping my 2025 reading challenges… )

I also found that this was a year where I was changing. And… there were times I resented the challenges that Early 2025 Me chose, because Current 2025 Me wanted to read other things but also wanted to complete the challenge she'd set for herself previously.

I suspect that I may not do any structured reading challenges next year. Or, maybe if I find some shorter-term ones. They aren't something I've traditionally done: 2025 was a first time. And I enjoyed it, despite my grumbling here. But… I also think I need less pressure on my reading life going into 2026. Let my interests take me where they will and push myself to make the decisions, rather than letting those choices be influenced as much by previous decisions.

( Finishing with reading streaks and page count goals )

I've been trying unsuccessfully to come up with a new password.

It's rare that I'm doing this myself: long ago, I outsourced the vast majority of my password creation to my password manager. Makes it much easier to not reuse passwords.

But one of my earliest passwords has stuck with me through thick and thin. (I think I first used it about 30 years ago.) At one time, it was, in some form or another, everywhere in my pre-password-manager days. Sometimes with digits added or a form of punctuation thrown in to get around rules that, at the time, felt pretty obnoxious. There is almost nowhere that I continue to use that password today.

Yes, I said almost.

That one place? My login to the computer I own.

But the time has come to change it. Not because I think it needs to be more secure (though it probably should be), but… because it refers to a part of my identity that is no longer. And in an area of my life where I have been moving in a different direction.

But I don't know what I want to change it to. And it's one of those passwords that I want to be easy to type because I need it every time I unlock my computer, and often when installing things on it. And trying to find that easy-to-type, having-meaning-to-me, and not being trivially easy for others to guess password feels like I may have to relax at least one of those points.

OK… I'm getting wrapped around my own axle every time I try to post here. So… I'm going to try something here for the day… take some of the recent things I want to post about, and write about them in a shorter form than I usually do here.

I'm probably going to number them today, just so that I don't waste too much time and energy on subject lines. However, you may find numbers are missing: if so, that says more about me than about you… it's usually about how wide a circle I am comfortable sharing with, and not so much about the particular people that are being excluded. To the point where… a missing number may mean that I decided what I was writing for me and either that I shouldn't share it here, or that I can't find the words to feel comfortable sharing (i.e., it may turn out as a private-for-my-eyes-only post).

We'll see if this works…

One of my worries when I started with fountain pens is how easy a time I have had over the years in losing things… could I hold onto fountain pens long enough without losing them for it to be worth buying them? And, until this week, the only fountain pen I had ever lost was a disposable one. (And that mostly because I don't care enough about it.)

But that was until this week. Yesterday, I went to get ready for Homework Saturday (the weekly trip to Panera or some other place that's not home for breakfast and for H to work on schoolwork). I usually end up copying my calendar into my planner from Google (among other things), so I went to gather my bag of supplies and my purse and… my purse was unzipped. And my three-pen sleeve was not there. This has my favorite pens: two of my first pens and my most recent purchase.

Off and on throughout the day, I'd look around the room to see if I could find the pen sleeve. And so far, it has not yet turned up.

From my planner, it looks like the last time I used my pens was Memorial Day. What I can't remember is where: was it at home? Or was it when we went out that day? I have like half-memories of being home, but… vague enough that I'm not sure if they're real or I'm trying to will them to be true. 

I just looked up our stops on Monday: Panera, Barnes & Noble, an attempt at a restaurant that wasn't open, an Arby's stop, and home. If I'd had more search time before we were there yesterday, I would have asked at Panera when we were there. I need to think about how we came back that day. Where would I have gone when we came home? Where would I have put the sleeve. One ofthose half-memories is me thinking "I need to be careful or I'll forget where I put that." Is it real or not? Who knows? But it's not detailed enough to aid in the search.

I have already done the "figure out replacement value." The two old favorites would be about $45 to replace. I am annoyed that the pen I bought only the weekend before the holiday weekend is among the missing. And I am less certain about replacing it. And if I do replace it, with what? The model I bought or the model I thought I was buying, even though it's not available in the same color. And, presumably if I buy it, I buy my preferred nib thickness, rather than the only one the store had in stock when I bought it.

I think it may also be a split-purchase situation. Replace the two cheaper ones if they don't turn up by the end of this week (perhaps with different colors of the same models, in case the originals show up after I replace them). And wait another two weeks before considering replacing the newer one, which is more expensive than the other two combined.

In the meantime: figure out whether I can drum up any memories of what happened to it

Sports fans, whether they will admit it or not, often tend to be a bit superstitious. And that can lead to an Observer Effect assumption: that whether we watch or don't watch has an effect on the sports we enjoy. (For me, that often seems to be the tendency for "my" teams to lose when I watch them, even if they win the previous and subsequent games.) Obviously there's a whole lot of confirmation bias in these superstitions, which I'm sure would break down on the slightest examination with any rigor.

But this week, my "is it me?" moment is where two of "my teams," in two different sports, in two different countries, on two different continents, both sent their head coaches packing, within a day or two of each other. In both cases, the teams have been winning far fewer games than fans expected. In both cases, the coaches involved seem to be lauded as genuinely good people who have done good things for their teams, but whose teams are now in different situations from when they were hired (and, by implication, they are no longer the right person for the teams' needs today).

The first was my Ottawa Senators. They went into this season with (in the eyes of the fanbase) unreasonable expectations, mostly because of off-ice conditions. After years with a… polarizing owner, and then a period that felt far longer than it was with that late owner's daughters owning the club while seeking new owners, the new owners were finally handed the reins shortly before the start of this season. The new owners are hockey people, but smart enough to not want to jump into decisions hastily. If they'd had their way, I think they really wanted the coach to see out the season before making offseason changes next spring/summer, but the results have been disappointing. (The team had already lost its General Manager to a scandal, where punishment was controversially announced long after the behavior at its root, such that the results of investiation and the announcement of the team's punishment came under different ownership than was in place at the time the scandalous behavior took place.)

The second was one of my Premier League teams: Nottingham Forest. Their manager, Steve Cooper, has been much loved, having brought the team up to the Premier League after many years away from the top level of English ⚽️. (In fact, after playing in the Premier League for five of the first seven seasons of the league's existence, Forest had played 23 consecutive seasons in lower leagues before being promoted back to the Premier League in 2022.) So far, this season, they are in 17th place out of 20 teams, only one rank above demotion out of the Premier League. They have lost more than half of their games this season, with only 3 wins and 5 draws to go with their 9 losses.

And… when these happen in the same week? It is really hard to not apologize for jinxing the teams I support. Intellectually, I know that I have nothing to do with it, but emotionally, it can sometimes feel that way (Aren't emotions annoying sometimes?!?)

One added bit of weirdness is that both the teams replacing their coaches are going to people that I have previous rooting interests in. In Ottawa, its longest-serving previous head coach has been handed the reins on an interim basis (presumably for the rest of this season), and a former team captain has been appointed assistant coach. At Forest, they brought in a man who previously coached the other Premier League team I cheer for* (though my opinions of him are far lower, based on how short and unsuccessful his tenure at that team was). Hopefully things go better with him at Forest, because he is the new manager, not an interim appointment.

As for new-guy results? The Sens, under their new coaching staff, took a 3-0 lead in the first period, before eventually squandering that lead to a 4-3 loss. (Change isn't instant, I know, and this change was in the middle of a road trip. The Senators play a lot of games right now, making up for having been given extra days off to accommodate jet lag around playing two neutral-site games this season in Sweden. They play again tonight in Colorado before playing at home on Saturday in their final game before Christmas.

Forest haven't played yet, but have a similarly busy stretch: they play Saturday at home, and play a pair of games between Christmas and New Year's. They then have three weeks until their next game, which will hopefully be good for giving the team and its new manager time with each other (though I am not sure what else is on the ⚽️ calendar, and whether they will be missing players during that break for international play)

* Yes, I cheer for two different Premier League teams. I had cheered for one for a few seasons after watching a documentary series. My interest has waned somewhat since the manager and so many players of that era are no longer with the team, but I still enjoy watching them (and most years, they qualify for European play, so it gives me a rooting interest in whichever competition they qualify for each year). I actually started cheering for Forest before they were in the Premier League (though not for nearly so long as most). A player I liked from the Canadian national team and from Toronto FC of Major League Soccer was transferred to Forest, so I started following them. Laryea didn't get much time to play there before he was loaned back to this side of the Atlantic, but I enjoyed watching their fight for promotion and have continued to follow them in the PL. Except when the two teams play each other twice each year, they often don't feel like they're in the same League, because Spurs are high in the top half of the table, while Forest's main goal in their season and a half has been "don't get relegated."

Thanksgiving was mostly good: we watched the parade coverage on TV (yay!). Our livetweeting became a livetooting this year. It mostly worked well. Then we watched the National Dog Show coverage. (Shrug… it's okay, I guess, but H like of it.) And then, later in the day, we had our annual Thanksgiving viewing of the 2011 movie Tower Heist. Though I'm not familiar with Die Hard, I suspect Tower Heist is as much a Thanksgiving movie as Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The main reason we watch it every year at this time is because of a fun police chase scene that goes through the Macy's parade. (Some years, that has felt a bit awkward, given terrorist attacks with trucks driving through gatherings of people. Nobody is hurt in this movie version. And the truck is ( SPOILER ).)

I have had some Mastodon frustrations: my server has been giving a lot of errors for days… I had lots of issues while trying to livetoot (errors instead of posting, long delays in receiving H's posts from another server, even though she was getting mine fairly quickly. And then… my server was down for about 12 hours Friday. And… I found that threw me off. Especially because communication was… lacking. (Partly because the admin didn't know what was wrong. There was a configuration error, and that meant that X couldn't talk to Y and was failing silently. Admin actually had to sleep on it and come back to the problem with fresh eyes before he could see (and then fix) the problem.

As a result, I've now found a Plan B. I set up an account on another server. Right now, it's just a placeholder. But… if my server goes under or there's another long outage, I can at least import my follow list and read and respond. (I'm not 100% sure how comfortable I am with the server. But as a temporary home, it would do. With so many servers closed to registrations or invite-only, I was mostly focused on finding a place. (I am also leaning to smaller instances: the one I'm on quickly grew from 60 users to 20,000 users. And I don't think they have enough resources for that. Especially if the admin is the only person on the tech side of things. The "hit by a bus" continuity issue. Or, the "if he walks away from/gets bored of running the server." He's also expressed some frustration at the number of reports he's receiving. And… I wish it would be productive to shout at him "THIS is what happens when you acquire 20,000 users and don't limit registrations!" But it wouldn't be, so I'm not telling him that.

This morning, another mild frustration. One of my pens needed to be cleaned and was ready to be filled with a new ink color. But first, the old color was slightly stubborn in coming out of some parts of the pen. (I suspect that's largely Kristin should have looked up how to clean this type of fountain pen, with a side of wanting to switch from a darker ink to a lighter one, so really wanting to be sure that the old ink woudln't contaminate the new ink.

Then, I wanted to put Queen and Castle (a nice gold color from Ferris Wheel Press) into my pen to try it out… but I couldn't get the cap off the ink bottle! (I think it was tough to begin with and then I think I may have also made it worse, because I forgot my "righty tighty, lefty loosy." I wrestled with it for several minutes before deciding, I probably need a wrench to get this cap off. And I'm not dealing with that now. In any case, I had another new ink color to try, so instead, I used the same company's Ruby Royal Flush) to fill my pen. It's… nice. I think it's a little darker red than I was hoping for. I'm a little anxious about how much glitter is in these inks. A little afraid of issues with it getting stuck in pens and being tough to clean. But it'll look nice. And the holidays are a good time for a red ink, too!

This week has really put me out of routine… in both good and bad ways. But… I've been trying to get myself less rigid about the routine (with the day out of town to help shift my mind a bit)… which is one reason that the answer hasn't been "getting back into routine." Trying to do more of the figuring out what I want/need to do, rather than "what I always do next" when I have time for it.

It is good to get the pen thing "solved." This morning, I did the "write out my daily calendar" thing, but with "the pen I (used to) hate." With the same ink that was in my other pen, it glides nicely. I no longer hate the pen: I'm currently blaming that ink.

My pen/ink order arrived just before H got home from work, so I have opened it, but not used any of it yet. I'm slightly disappointed by my set of ink samples. They don't allow any special requests for their random sample set (which is understandable, since they are offered at a discount from the price of buying the same number of individual ink samples (which they also sell). But that meant that three of my eight are of a brand that I am unwilling to put into pens (partially because of issues with consistency, reports of some of their inks behaving badly to the point of damaging pens, and that the brand comes from one person who appears to push politics I disagree with, including with his ink business). So… nearly half of them are never going to be used.

That said, there's a lot of good in the order, too: there are three full-size ink bottles in colors I'm looking forward to using. There's a pen which I kind of like: for a cheap pen, it has a pleasing weight to it. I'm going to put my favorite ink in it, on the basis that… after my last bad new-pen experience, I want to fill new pens with either their included cartridge (rarely: ink cartridges and me don't seem to get along and I'm always worried I will damage the pen or the cartridge (or myself) when I attempt to puncture the cartridge to install it. I think the last one I got, I needed H's help to get it on) or, more usually, fill new pens with an ink I know already. Right now, there are only two inks in that category. And there's no sense having my two stub-nibbed pens with the same color.

*****

This morning, I got back to the crossword puzzle I'd been working on. A couple of other guesses came to me and seemed to work out… but I still had an area with a lot unknown and a lot of guesses. So I finally started looking things up. And… in the end, I think it came down to one wrong letter I'd put in the grid that was causing me multiple problems. Even more annoying? It was an assumption. But it was fun to see how quickly, with that mistake out of the way, how quickly the rest fell into place.

H tried her hand (or her computer) at yesterday's NYT puzzle while she was out. It was neat to see how far she got, though she got frustrated by some of the "theme" stuff it had, with multiple letters in some squares. She was good, though, making sure I wouldn't be annoyed if she shared a screenshot of how much she'd done. Fortunately, not an issue. Really, the only issue I can imagine is if I was trying to work it… but I'm still going through my book and not trying current puzzles… and it's a long time before I expect I'd be ready to try a Thursday. (The tricks I've seen seem like they would be aggravating and frustrating to me at this point… but I can see enjoying them when my solving abilities rise to that level.)

I guess the other thing is… my goal doesn't have to be the same every time… and maybe some of those are more able to be puzzles I treat with a goal of learning instead of puzzles where my goal is to solve them successfully. You know… like I might expose myself to it, even admitting that I don't know everything (gasp!)

Anyway… my first "goal" is to get through this book of 50 puzzles. And I've finished 6. After that… I'll do some re-evaluating of where I am and what I want/need to do next.

So… I guess that's all for now. (Been a while since I wrote this much here)

So… the pen order is on its way. Post office says it's expected Friday, but given where the tracking shows it, I would not be surprised to see it arrive tonight.

Which is good because… I've been "off" all week. And I think the pen situation is part of it. Right now, two of my fountain pens have the ink that I think is bad in some way. Which makes them not easily used, a frustrating experience. That includes "my favorite pen." And… so everything I've attempted to write in the past couple of days has been a struggle.

But I'm not yet experienced in cleaning pens and changing inks. I've only done it once. Which means… I need to find instructions and do it. I felt I would be self-conscious and sidetracked if I tried to do it yesterday when H worked from home, so it's on the agenda for this morning: at least emptying one or both of the pens with that ink in them. I want to leave more time for the pens to dry than I did last time… I don't think that was the issue with when I refilled my favorite pen… but I want to be sure.

I'm about 95% of the way to deciding to throw out the rest of that bottle. It's a shame, because it's the largest volume bottle I have bought so far (mostly because smaller size became out-of-stock before I placed my order). But… given that it's not behaving for me… and not behaving like I've seen it reviewed… I'm going to guess it's somehow contaminated. (Which might possibly have happened after I opened it… I may alter where/how I do it to remove some risk of that in future.)

The order arriving soon will have: three full-size bottles of ink, eight small sample vials of random inks (this vendor's "birthday reward") and empty sample vials that I can use for three inks I bought in small samples, which arrived in bottles too small for me to fill my favorite pen with. So I will have plenty of inks to try out. Top priority will be getting rid of the offending ink. I suspect the "pen I don't like" (since I filled it with this ink the first time) may get my favorite ink. (It would be a match for the color of its exterior, as well as helping me determine more surely whether the issue is with the ink or the pen.) My favorite pen will probably get one of the new inks.

There is a small chance that I damaged my favorite pen during the cleaning process. At one point, I set it down and it rolled onto the floor uncapped. I am hoping it landed horizontally and didn't damage the nib. (I don't see any nib damage, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to rule it out for sure.) At least it's not a super-expensive pen. And its model is readily available: the specific color might be more difficult, but there are similar colors that would be easy to buy if it needed to be replaced. (But hopefully it's OK, and it's just the ink that's making me anxious.)

Finally, last night, I broke out the ridiculously cheap fountain pen I bought at a local store a couple of months ago. And… that is probably my pen in main use until I get new inks into pens. It's a disposably-priced pen. (Store owner said she wouldn't buy a converter for it to use bottled inks, since converter would cost more than the pen. I'm not making any decisions until it's out of ink. I don't mind the cost, if I'll use it, but… I like the way it writes, but not the way it feels in the hand or the way the pen looks. So… there is a "will I actually use it?" question. It was mostly bought to up my purchase (because I hate browsing in a small store without buying anything).)

I've also been getting into crosswords this week… ( Kristin rambles about crosswords… )

Anyway… I'm not saying much here, so I'll stop for now.

Just got an update on the package I was waiting on.

About three hours after I posted Friday, I was emailed a tracking number for the shipment, which was apparently delivered on Monday evening.

The frustrating things are:

• I didn't see the email until this morning. (That appears to be my own fault, because the headers don't show any delay in receiving the email.)
• Their web site still shows my order as "Processing," so I didn't have any expectation of having a shipping notice.
• We didn't empty the mailbox yesterday, so it's still in the mailbox over at the leasing office… since I didn't know it had shipped. (If it had gone to the parcel locker, instead of the mailbox, we would have received an email automatically.)

Anyway… what's been long-awaited is a short walk away… and after breakfast, I expect I will walk over for it, so I can put my pens in my new pen roll!