I’ve spent New Year’s Eve with my parents, along with my wife and kids. We did nothing fancy, just had a small dinner while we all waited until midnight came and 2023 gave place to 2024. This year fireworks were more visible from my parent’s apartment, and longer, too — it may have taken longer to finish, as well, 12 minutes if I’m not mistaken.

— I was reading Otavio’s Weeknotes and how he said, as an adult, nothing much changes with each new year, except for remembering to exchange 2023 for 2024 in some forms, especially checkbooks (who uses them nowadays, anyways?), and I couldn’t agree more. Living in Brazil, and having a kid in school does mean, though, news for him: a new grade, new teachers, new subjects and so on, so we try to take the same train and enjoy the novelty along with him.

Within three days of 2024 I finished reading my first book of the year, “Devoradores de Estrelas”, by Andy Weir (“Project Hail Mary”, in English), and this made me very happy, not only because 1/20 of my reading goal this year is already fulfilled, but also because that was a real page turner, as I’ve stated before. So, double happiness, completed with two books I’m already reading now, both by the master, Stephen King.

I’m on vacations right now — meaning I’ll be back to work only by the last week of January. I intend to take these days off not only to read a lot, but also to do fun things with the family. This means a lot of time by the pool, at the club and also a couple of short trips — I might even end up going to the zoo, as requested by my younger son, and maybe go watch our team debut in the regional soccer championship — aka Paulistão 2024. Be it what we do, it’s nice to be able to start the year relaxing a little bit. That’s the first time in my whole life I’m taking vacations in January.

We’ve watched McMillion$, a 2020 documentary HBO Max was suggesting me as an option for quite some time now. It’s a 6 episode series, with, according to Trakt.tv, “a detailed account of the McDonald’s Monopoly game scam during the 1990s as told by the participants in the case, including the prizewinners and the FBI agents who caught the security officer who orchestrated the entire scheme”. Now, I have mixed feelings about that program… while the story was unknown to me, so interesting to follow along, the series was way toooo long, I mean, it could have been told in 2 or 3 episodes tops. There came a time when I felt like fast forwarding some scenes, so I won’t give it more than 3½ stars. Forgive me, Ronald McDonald.

Changed my mind again and since the first of January, I’m (again) inhabiting the Micro.blog neighborhood. I have already imported all of my Wordpress posts to it, and now need to make some small adjustments here and there, but I believe I came to stay. Next step is to stop using the micro subdomain and moving Micro.blog to the main domain.

🎉 Happy new year to you all!