Do we promise that all these movies are good? Nope. There’s a bunch we haven’t seen yet… plus you need to bear in mind that our three year old is the litmus for whether a movie makes the cut or not. BUT we made this list for ourselves this year, so we figured we’d share in case an extra movie or two makes sense within your December family rhythms, too. And anything we should add to our list?

2019s Best Books

Jan 11 2020
I managed to read 1 more book in 2019 than I did in 2018 and I didn’t wait until May to write about them. I feel pretty good about that. But one book different is basically the margin of error with book you start in 1 year and end is the second. It’s interesting look at my GoodReads “My Year in Books”. They give a page count (which is a little strange given I usually listen to audio book, but it’s probably roughly accurate).
Here is the 10th Christmas playlist. I made the first one by myself. Erin’s helped me with all the rest. And I’ll share a few photos from the year while I’m at it. This year’s CD felt like a bit more of a struggle. We could not find a lot of good Christmas music that came out this year. So we ended up turning to some older songs. My original goal was to make 10 Christmas playlists.
This post is a lot later than I would have liked, but I’ve held off writing it until I had a chance to finish migrating my blog to a new platform (more on that later). I’m glad I can do it now, on the new setup. 2018 was a slightly lighter year for books, only 19. Goodreads now has a feature where you can see your “Stats”. It’s pretty cool. Looks like my best year (since I started keeping track around about 2011 was 2013 with a whopping 30 books.
The 8th Christmas playlist is also the biggest, clocking in at 77 minutes. Why so much music, you ask? Well, we (mostly Erin) found a lot of good raw material this year. Several of the albums that showed up on this years playlist will probably show up again on future playlists. We realize that CD players are things that most people only have in their cars now a days and we want people to be able to enjoy this music however is convenient.
I finished 25 books in 2017. Not bad. I got the number up from last year but I think it’s mostly because I read lots of “fun” books. Lots of fantasy. Another factor is that now with 2 children I have less time for things like movies and TV shows, audiobooks and podcasts are what I have time and energy for these days. Non-Fiction Politics: The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith it great.
This is the 7th year for the Christmas playlist and at this point I was expecting to be scraping the bottom of the Christmas music barrel. Good news though, I’m quite happy with this years playlist. I found a couple of great compilation albums including one from a couple years ago. Maybe I’m not as good at searching the Internet for stuff as I thought. If you need more good Christmas music here are the links to past playlists.
According to what I tracked on Good Reads, I finished 20 books is 2017. I feel OK about that. I wish I had a done a bit more “serious” reading, there was a lot of entertainment in there, but it was all fun (at least most of the time) and even in the fluff there were some interesting ideas. Non-Fiction Politics: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is one of my favorite books of all time and one of the most important books I’ve read.
This year got our act together before the 1st of December so you can enjoy a whole month of hand picked Christmas music. If you need more good Christmas music here are the links to past playlists. (2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010). My goal is make it to 10 of these. That should be close to 12 hours of better than average Christmas music, then reassess. We’ll probably keep doing a Christmas playlast but we might lighten up our rules.
I’ve had my eye on OpenBazaar for quite a while now and at the start of April of this year (2016) it went live. You should check it out, but a short summary would be that it’s a distributed on-line marketplace. It uses bitcoin for it’s currency. Anyone can join the network and sell their products on-line for free. The software is free, setting up a shop is free, accepting payments are free.