After another busy year of travel and with colder weather setting in, we opted to stay indoors for the holidays. We warmed up with hot pot over Thanksgiving, and bought ourselves a new wok, wok chuan, and wok station to add some wok hay to my beef chow fun and chao nian gao. With BG3 on pause, we shifted gears to coach Westley through the Outer Worlds 2. This second installment of Obsidian’s entertaining RPG was his first FPS on the PC, and I was amazed at how quickly he learned to free-look, invert Y, and strafe. Black Friday took us out for fried chicken at Bonchon and soul food at Sharky’s, but we shopped mostly online for a new coffee table and patio furniture, replacement reef glasses for Melody, and a smoothie blender, bluetooth speaker, and leather skin for my laptop. Westley’s room also got upgraded with another Billy bookcase, puck lights, track lights, and a ceiling fan. We even gathered fabric and supplies to frame our Peruvian tapestries, and mounted a Frame TV to showcase artwork in the loft. My patience was tested by slow network speeds at home and a database corruption at work, but we also got to dance and teach uterine anatomy at our department holiday party, and watch children and turkeys at yard duty for Chinese school. Otherwise, we began mapping out our spring and summer travel while trying to maximize the dizzying array of benefits from our now-pricier credit card. For Christmas, we baked a hojicha-persimmon cake with our niece and hauled our wok set to our in-laws’ for stir-fried gailan alongside rib roast and an Overcooked rematch. Westley barely had time to enjoy his RG Sinanju, HG Hyaku-Shiki, Clue Escape, and The Guy from Carbot Animations before we were packing again for our next trip. As we approach the year’s end, we look back at our accomplishments: my new R01, Melody’s new deanship, and Westley’s milestones in starting competitive fencing, violin lessons, reaching level 10 at SwimAmerica, and completing COM level 3. I can hardly wait to see what new chaos and adventures next year will bring.