Having joined the ARVO meeting program committee, my December has been consumed by abstract reviews which between overbooked clinics, Kaiser referrals, and scribe absences, kept me plenty busy at work. Our department did well enough this year to bring back the holiday party, although the DJ was a fail. We also squeezed into the Glassberg-mobile to attend the Ob-Gyn chair’s gathering for a second year in a row, but ghosted the Kit Lam luncheon when it turned into a potluck. We kept our in-laws busy this month with childcare, and gave us time to try out Shoku Ramen Bar near work, and HK-styled Flame Cafe outside 99 Ranch. Both were solid. We also munched on an Insomnia ice-cream cookie-wich on the way to watching the Rise of Skywalker, which despite providing some fan service, was too sloppy a movie to provide the satisfying conclusion to the Star Wars saga that we had hoped for. Back home, I took advantage of holiday deals and leftover grant money to gather components to build a new PC for my home office. The new rig sports a Ryzen 7 3700x CPU with a Kraken X72 liquid cooler on an ROG Crosshair VIII Hero mobo with G.Skill Ripjaw memory, ROG Strix RTX 2070s graphics, and a 970 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD, all powered by a Focus PX-750 power supply and housed in a sleek, windowed H710 case. With this much horsepower, it’s a shame we don’t have a PC game to enjoy for the holidays. Instead, we fired up the PS4 with our new GOTY edition of Spiderman to get us swinging through the digital Big Apple to prepare for the NYE ball drop.

We spent most of November vegetating at home as we braced the chilly weather and battled a stubborn cold that kept us coughing for weeks. We tried to warm up with new Well Season dim sum and Kotchen DIY hot pot, but was not impressed by either restaurant. We also evaded cooking for my lab holiday party and ordered out from Taqueria Guadelajara. Most of the students were studying for finals and couldn’t stay for our usual board gaming, but we did manage to make it up with another lab outing at the newly-renovated Mikuni the following week. At work, I was busy preparing graduate lectures, manuscript revisions, and a record of 10 upcoming talks in January. This freed me up for Thanksgiving to drive down to Stockton for home-cooked lunch with the in-laws. We returned to Vacaville for Black Friday shopping, where we were exhausted despite scoring just a few coats and sweaters, and filled on lumpia and lechon kawali from Ma Sarap before heading home. Heavy rain kept us indoors for the rest of the weekend, as we successfully revived the wind fish in Link’s Awakening and watched cute baby Yoda get rescued in The Mandalorian on the new Disney+ service. We set up our Christmas tree as in prior years, and also repurposed some old string lights from our previous pergola to decorate the front porch. Hopefully, we’ll recover from our cough soon to enjoy the holidays.