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Freedom Friday, But Still On A Tuesday
Dec. 23rd, 2025 11:52 pm...I miss The LEGO Movie, that was a fun movie. But yes, today was the last day of work before my long Christmas break, and I'm pleased to say I enjoyed it for the most part --
Work – Ended up having a pretty decent final day at work this week, featuring:
A) A trip down to the Fiscal office to give them a check that they needed to deposit for us, followed by a stop at the Catholic Foundation office to give my old supervisor his gift card (he was thankful)
B) A morning spent mostly working on the GL, which was fairly chunky today thanks to a good amount of credit card stuff being posted yesterday (took me long enough that Fiscal called to see if it was actually coming or not, which was slightly annoying but what can you do)
C) A couple of calls – one from a guy who I e-mailed a month ago about a failed payment (we were finally able to redo it today), and one from someone who had an overpayment on his pledge (he’s gonna apply it to next year’s pledge, so I’ll have to wait for that to be sent in before doing any reversals) – and one e-mail from a parish I contacted last week to confirm an address for a donor (they had the same one we had, so don’t know why the newspaper came back) and what their current phone number is (as the one we had kept giving us a busy signal – I forwarded the new number to my new supervisor so she’d know)
D) A few checks to put on, including the matching gifts from yesterday and a Capital Campaign payment from a lady who had some credit card issues before (called her and assured her we had the payment here, since we promised we’d do that once we got the check)
E) A quick poke through some of the returned mail (nothing particularly exciting, though I was able to ditch one reminder when I confirmed the person in question had an active online pledge)
F) A few reversals to move some one-time gifts onto a pledge and turn some overpayments on pledges into one-time gifts
G) And a last-minute “hey, you can go home at 3:30 PM” e-mail that came in at 3:04 PM. *shakehead* Good thing I’d just washed my lunch container, honestly!
So yeah – nothing too exciting, just wrapping up whatever I could before the end of the day. And now I officially have twelve days off, hooray! Hopefully they will be good ones!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with the The Great British Baking Show Holidays collection on Netflix! Specifically, with Episode 2 of that collection, featuring Rav, Rob, Benjamina, and Sandy returning to the tent hoping to impress the judges with their Christmassy bakes and thus take home the title of Christmas Star Baker. Today I got through:
A) The end of the “Signature” challenge, where the four were tasked with making “bombe Alaska tarts” – aka small tart-based versions of a baked Alaska, complete with ice cream covered in meringue on top! Rav and Rob’s both turned out quite messy (with Rav’s melting on the slab and Rob unable to get his meringue browned in the time limit) but tasty; Benjamina had a good look to hers, but as per the judges, the flavors weren’t quite right (her chocolate tart crust in particular was a bit bitter); and Sandy knocked it out of the park with a perfectly-made chocolate-and-mint bombe tart that sliced beautifully and tasted great, earning her a Hollywood Handshake (basically, if Paul thinks you’ve done an amazing job, he will offer you a handshake – as he’s a pretty critical guy, this is a coveted honor in the tent). Nice!
B) The whole of the “Technical” challenge, where the four were tasked with creating a Kransekage – a Danish/Norwegian dessert consisting of stacked rings of a flourless almond cake (just ground-up almonds, egg whites, and sugar in there) held together with white icing (thank you Wikipedia). As this was a Christmas-themed show, their Kransekages were meant to look like Christmas trees, and thus the rings had to be rolled in finely-ground pistachios (for the greenery) and have a little star on top. In the end, Rob couldn’t get the pistachios to stick to his rings AND overbaked them by a lot (Paul compared them to biscotti); Benjamina accidentally made too few rings and overbaked them a little; Sandy struggled with very flat rings, though she arguably had the best luck getting the pistachios to stick; and Rav ended up on top with the best bake, even if it was a little messy. *nods*
C) And most of the “Showstopper” challenge, where the four were tasked with creating “magical ice” cakes – they could choose the type of cake and filling, but it had to invoke the feeling of a “winter wonderland” with some sort of sugar work. Sandy ended up making a sort of fancy sugar shell backdrop for her cake; Benjamina did a fancy abstract sugar piece to stick on top of hers; Rav did big old shards of sugar and, at the last minute, added some spun sugar to the bottom tier –
And Rob, who decided to be overambitious and add some tiny pâte à choux (thank you Wikipedia) pastries to the top of his (think little eclair-like balls), never actually finished his sugar work and thus had to present his cake without it. *facepalm* Dude. Why are you here. Seriously, why are you here. *shakehead* Ah well – we’ll see what the judges think and finish this episode off tomorrow, just in time for Christmas Eve!
2. Work on “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Fucking CHECK – not only did I make sure to carve out a little time to work on this story before my workout, I ended up going on a marathon editing session after supper, leading me to complete THREE PAGES on this tonight! :D Which, given how annoyed I’ve been at having to constantly skip my writing time to get other stuff done the past few days, I was quite pleased by! So now I’ve edited:
A) The group arriving at the Van Dort estate – and seeing the place completely surrounded by carriages, with Victor revealing that the place is only this busy if his mother’s thrown a party; Smiler attempted to suggest it might be a search party, but no one was buying it – least of all Victor, who didn’t think his parents would be able to find that many people to search for him
B) Victor leading the way to the front steps, and the group encountering Barry, the Van Dorts’ butler, who promptly asked Victor where the hell he’d been (expletive left out but implied) and who he was with; Victor explained he’d had a bizarre few days and introduced Alice and Smiler to him – cue Smiler barreling in with a grin and a long speech about how they’d been dealing with ghosts and murderers and whatnot, but it should all be fine now, leaving Barry a bit befuddled XD
C) Smiler asking what was going on, and Barry revealing that Nell was hosting a Very Important Soiree for all the most influential families in Duskwall (a most-of-the-day affair with lunch and dinner provided, along with musical entertainment, a tour, and dancing) to make up for the fact that the planned Van Dort/Everglot nuptials did not go according to plan. A deeply-annoyed Alice asked if they’d even looked for him, and Barry confirmed that they had – for the Names before his canceled wedding; ever since, the focus had been on repairing the Van Dorts’ reputation, and there was not a lot of staff to spare – especially since Mayhew, their driver, died recently (Victor was horrified, as you might expect, though Barry was at least able to assure him that Mayhew’s corpse was collected and burned before his ghost could get out)
D) And Victor asking where his parents were so he could talk to them, smooth things over, and get a reward for his new friends for helping him (Smiler was like “we didn’t help you for a reward,” but Victor said it would make him happier to give them one, and they and Alice both confirmed they wouldn’t turn one down if Victor insisted) – only for Barry to block his way as he tried to lead them inside, noting that Alice and Smiler were not exactly the same caliber of people as the guests; Victor was extremely insulted, especially when Barry said they should wait by the servants’ entrance, but Alice and Smiler took it in stride and said they were fine waiting there. Victor was still annoyed, but knew he wouldn’t win the argument to get them in the house proper, so he let them go
*nods* Good solid chunk of writing – I’ve missed working on this story, I really have. I want to get it up and done so I can move onto the next one. :D As it stands, I’ve left off with Victor preparing to enter the breach and find his parents in the main ballroom – tomorrow, we meet the Duskwallian versions of William and Nell, and poor Victor gets yelled at a lot. :( Gee, I wonder why he decides to leave...
3. Watch something on FreeTube/Invidious: Check – and for Christmas Eve Eve, we had the eleventh day of OXmas and “XMAS CHALLENGE Day 11: CHAOS MODE | Gang Beasts Seasons Beatings Challenge! 👊” on OXBox! Yes, it was time for the now-annual Gang Beasts beatdown as Andy the Pink Pirate, Mike the Tan Cat, Jane the Yellow Granny Murder, and Ellen the Pink & Purple Penguin headed into everyone’s favorite floppy chaos fighting game to duke it out for a Christmas point! How did it go? Let’s take it stage by stage:
( This gets long, so under here it goes )
TL;DR version: Mike proved to be incredibly good at Gang Beasts and – despite the best efforts of everyone in the later stages – won the round and FINALLY secured himself a Christmas point! I’m glad – it would have been sad if he’d gone through the entire game with a zero score. Tomorrow, we wrap things up with the final Christmas Challenge – well, potentially. If Andy or Ellen win, we have a champ; if Jane wins, we have a three-way tie (unprecedented!); and if Mike wins, we’ll have a two-way tie for both first AND second (as he’ll have caught up to Jane). We’ll just have to wait and see what happens! Hopefully Mike got all his pointless Christmas rage out in this game. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, but in a bit of a weird way – you see, I did my queuing for Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) this morning instead of this evening. Reason being, I wanted to make sure I could get my “hey, my birthday is coming up, give some love to my Valicer In The Dark verse if you want to do something for it” post up today so people would have some time to see it, and I didn’t really have time to work on it last night, so… *shrug* But yeah, I dropped the completed version of that (trimmed down from my attempt at doing a VITD masterpost to just linking the stories I have on AO3 and explaining that, if you want to read my tumblr stuff, you are on your own XD) into the queue for today, and then put the completed set of 2025 Not-Incorrect Valicer Christmas quotes in for Wednesday! ...because I finished those on Sunday and completely forgot to mention it as I was so brain-fried at the end of the day. *shakehead* I gotta fix my Sundays going forward, I can’t keep ending them feeling so stressed out like that… Anyway, yeah, so I’m good over on VLA(NS), at least through tomorrow. We’ll handle The Christmas Queue tomorrow morning.
(Oh, and I did end up deleting the ask that I had on Valice Multiverse – it was basically just “Rap Bear, son of Rap Bear’s father, says that his son, Son Of Rap Bear, will be on the open mic tonight” and I had no idea where to go with it. The only answer I could come up with was one of my characters going “...yes, and?” *shrug* We’ll see if more interesting asks pop up later!)
Not too shabby! VERY glad I got to do all that work on "The Van Dort Vacancy," I think that really helped my mood. :) But now I really should at least CONSIDER going to sleep, since it is pretty late. Tomorrow, my must-dos are:
1. Get all the posts for the Christmas gift fics going up on tumblr sorted and into the queue for Christmas
2. Watch the 12th Day of OXmas, which may or may not be the grand finale (we will see)
3. Work some more on "The Van Dort Vacancy"
4. Get in a workout
*nods* Important stuff, all of it! We'll see what else I can fit into the day -- might finally be able to watch that hour-long "guess the soundtrack from one second of music" video the OXBoxers did a few weeks ago, if I'm lucky. We'll find out, I guess! Night all!
Work – Ended up having a pretty decent final day at work this week, featuring:
A) A trip down to the Fiscal office to give them a check that they needed to deposit for us, followed by a stop at the Catholic Foundation office to give my old supervisor his gift card (he was thankful)
B) A morning spent mostly working on the GL, which was fairly chunky today thanks to a good amount of credit card stuff being posted yesterday (took me long enough that Fiscal called to see if it was actually coming or not, which was slightly annoying but what can you do)
C) A couple of calls – one from a guy who I e-mailed a month ago about a failed payment (we were finally able to redo it today), and one from someone who had an overpayment on his pledge (he’s gonna apply it to next year’s pledge, so I’ll have to wait for that to be sent in before doing any reversals) – and one e-mail from a parish I contacted last week to confirm an address for a donor (they had the same one we had, so don’t know why the newspaper came back) and what their current phone number is (as the one we had kept giving us a busy signal – I forwarded the new number to my new supervisor so she’d know)
D) A few checks to put on, including the matching gifts from yesterday and a Capital Campaign payment from a lady who had some credit card issues before (called her and assured her we had the payment here, since we promised we’d do that once we got the check)
E) A quick poke through some of the returned mail (nothing particularly exciting, though I was able to ditch one reminder when I confirmed the person in question had an active online pledge)
F) A few reversals to move some one-time gifts onto a pledge and turn some overpayments on pledges into one-time gifts
G) And a last-minute “hey, you can go home at 3:30 PM” e-mail that came in at 3:04 PM. *shakehead* Good thing I’d just washed my lunch container, honestly!
So yeah – nothing too exciting, just wrapping up whatever I could before the end of the day. And now I officially have twelve days off, hooray! Hopefully they will be good ones!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with the The Great British Baking Show Holidays collection on Netflix! Specifically, with Episode 2 of that collection, featuring Rav, Rob, Benjamina, and Sandy returning to the tent hoping to impress the judges with their Christmassy bakes and thus take home the title of Christmas Star Baker. Today I got through:
A) The end of the “Signature” challenge, where the four were tasked with making “bombe Alaska tarts” – aka small tart-based versions of a baked Alaska, complete with ice cream covered in meringue on top! Rav and Rob’s both turned out quite messy (with Rav’s melting on the slab and Rob unable to get his meringue browned in the time limit) but tasty; Benjamina had a good look to hers, but as per the judges, the flavors weren’t quite right (her chocolate tart crust in particular was a bit bitter); and Sandy knocked it out of the park with a perfectly-made chocolate-and-mint bombe tart that sliced beautifully and tasted great, earning her a Hollywood Handshake (basically, if Paul thinks you’ve done an amazing job, he will offer you a handshake – as he’s a pretty critical guy, this is a coveted honor in the tent). Nice!
B) The whole of the “Technical” challenge, where the four were tasked with creating a Kransekage – a Danish/Norwegian dessert consisting of stacked rings of a flourless almond cake (just ground-up almonds, egg whites, and sugar in there) held together with white icing (thank you Wikipedia). As this was a Christmas-themed show, their Kransekages were meant to look like Christmas trees, and thus the rings had to be rolled in finely-ground pistachios (for the greenery) and have a little star on top. In the end, Rob couldn’t get the pistachios to stick to his rings AND overbaked them by a lot (Paul compared them to biscotti); Benjamina accidentally made too few rings and overbaked them a little; Sandy struggled with very flat rings, though she arguably had the best luck getting the pistachios to stick; and Rav ended up on top with the best bake, even if it was a little messy. *nods*
C) And most of the “Showstopper” challenge, where the four were tasked with creating “magical ice” cakes – they could choose the type of cake and filling, but it had to invoke the feeling of a “winter wonderland” with some sort of sugar work. Sandy ended up making a sort of fancy sugar shell backdrop for her cake; Benjamina did a fancy abstract sugar piece to stick on top of hers; Rav did big old shards of sugar and, at the last minute, added some spun sugar to the bottom tier –
And Rob, who decided to be overambitious and add some tiny pâte à choux (thank you Wikipedia) pastries to the top of his (think little eclair-like balls), never actually finished his sugar work and thus had to present his cake without it. *facepalm* Dude. Why are you here. Seriously, why are you here. *shakehead* Ah well – we’ll see what the judges think and finish this episode off tomorrow, just in time for Christmas Eve!
2. Work on “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Fucking CHECK – not only did I make sure to carve out a little time to work on this story before my workout, I ended up going on a marathon editing session after supper, leading me to complete THREE PAGES on this tonight! :D Which, given how annoyed I’ve been at having to constantly skip my writing time to get other stuff done the past few days, I was quite pleased by! So now I’ve edited:
A) The group arriving at the Van Dort estate – and seeing the place completely surrounded by carriages, with Victor revealing that the place is only this busy if his mother’s thrown a party; Smiler attempted to suggest it might be a search party, but no one was buying it – least of all Victor, who didn’t think his parents would be able to find that many people to search for him
B) Victor leading the way to the front steps, and the group encountering Barry, the Van Dorts’ butler, who promptly asked Victor where the hell he’d been (expletive left out but implied) and who he was with; Victor explained he’d had a bizarre few days and introduced Alice and Smiler to him – cue Smiler barreling in with a grin and a long speech about how they’d been dealing with ghosts and murderers and whatnot, but it should all be fine now, leaving Barry a bit befuddled XD
C) Smiler asking what was going on, and Barry revealing that Nell was hosting a Very Important Soiree for all the most influential families in Duskwall (a most-of-the-day affair with lunch and dinner provided, along with musical entertainment, a tour, and dancing) to make up for the fact that the planned Van Dort/Everglot nuptials did not go according to plan. A deeply-annoyed Alice asked if they’d even looked for him, and Barry confirmed that they had – for the Names before his canceled wedding; ever since, the focus had been on repairing the Van Dorts’ reputation, and there was not a lot of staff to spare – especially since Mayhew, their driver, died recently (Victor was horrified, as you might expect, though Barry was at least able to assure him that Mayhew’s corpse was collected and burned before his ghost could get out)
D) And Victor asking where his parents were so he could talk to them, smooth things over, and get a reward for his new friends for helping him (Smiler was like “we didn’t help you for a reward,” but Victor said it would make him happier to give them one, and they and Alice both confirmed they wouldn’t turn one down if Victor insisted) – only for Barry to block his way as he tried to lead them inside, noting that Alice and Smiler were not exactly the same caliber of people as the guests; Victor was extremely insulted, especially when Barry said they should wait by the servants’ entrance, but Alice and Smiler took it in stride and said they were fine waiting there. Victor was still annoyed, but knew he wouldn’t win the argument to get them in the house proper, so he let them go
*nods* Good solid chunk of writing – I’ve missed working on this story, I really have. I want to get it up and done so I can move onto the next one. :D As it stands, I’ve left off with Victor preparing to enter the breach and find his parents in the main ballroom – tomorrow, we meet the Duskwallian versions of William and Nell, and poor Victor gets yelled at a lot. :( Gee, I wonder why he decides to leave...
3. Watch something on FreeTube/Invidious: Check – and for Christmas Eve Eve, we had the eleventh day of OXmas and “XMAS CHALLENGE Day 11: CHAOS MODE | Gang Beasts Seasons Beatings Challenge! 👊” on OXBox! Yes, it was time for the now-annual Gang Beasts beatdown as Andy the Pink Pirate, Mike the Tan Cat, Jane the Yellow Granny Murder, and Ellen the Pink & Purple Penguin headed into everyone’s favorite floppy chaos fighting game to duke it out for a Christmas point! How did it go? Let’s take it stage by stage:
( This gets long, so under here it goes )
TL;DR version: Mike proved to be incredibly good at Gang Beasts and – despite the best efforts of everyone in the later stages – won the round and FINALLY secured himself a Christmas point! I’m glad – it would have been sad if he’d gone through the entire game with a zero score. Tomorrow, we wrap things up with the final Christmas Challenge – well, potentially. If Andy or Ellen win, we have a champ; if Jane wins, we have a three-way tie (unprecedented!); and if Mike wins, we’ll have a two-way tie for both first AND second (as he’ll have caught up to Jane). We’ll just have to wait and see what happens! Hopefully Mike got all his pointless Christmas rage out in this game. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, but in a bit of a weird way – you see, I did my queuing for Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) this morning instead of this evening. Reason being, I wanted to make sure I could get my “hey, my birthday is coming up, give some love to my Valicer In The Dark verse if you want to do something for it” post up today so people would have some time to see it, and I didn’t really have time to work on it last night, so… *shrug* But yeah, I dropped the completed version of that (trimmed down from my attempt at doing a VITD masterpost to just linking the stories I have on AO3 and explaining that, if you want to read my tumblr stuff, you are on your own XD) into the queue for today, and then put the completed set of 2025 Not-Incorrect Valicer Christmas quotes in for Wednesday! ...because I finished those on Sunday and completely forgot to mention it as I was so brain-fried at the end of the day. *shakehead* I gotta fix my Sundays going forward, I can’t keep ending them feeling so stressed out like that… Anyway, yeah, so I’m good over on VLA(NS), at least through tomorrow. We’ll handle The Christmas Queue tomorrow morning.
(Oh, and I did end up deleting the ask that I had on Valice Multiverse – it was basically just “Rap Bear, son of Rap Bear’s father, says that his son, Son Of Rap Bear, will be on the open mic tonight” and I had no idea where to go with it. The only answer I could come up with was one of my characters going “...yes, and?” *shrug* We’ll see if more interesting asks pop up later!)
Not too shabby! VERY glad I got to do all that work on "The Van Dort Vacancy," I think that really helped my mood. :) But now I really should at least CONSIDER going to sleep, since it is pretty late. Tomorrow, my must-dos are:
1. Get all the posts for the Christmas gift fics going up on tumblr sorted and into the queue for Christmas
2. Watch the 12th Day of OXmas, which may or may not be the grand finale (we will see)
3. Work some more on "The Van Dort Vacancy"
4. Get in a workout
*nods* Important stuff, all of it! We'll see what else I can fit into the day -- might finally be able to watch that hour-long "guess the soundtrack from one second of music" video the OXBoxers did a few weeks ago, if I'm lucky. We'll find out, I guess! Night all!
