Tomorrow we begin an exciting end of year celebration I’m calling “Finally shred all that stuff in a file box in the closet.”

Today’s temperature drop means I’m surrounded by snoring cats — keeping noses warm with their paws while napping.

My parents have been talking for years about visiting my niece in London. I’ve now spent time on the phone walking my dad through multiple combinations of how to leverage their Alaska miles to make this happen. I am about to go make them an overly complicated spreadsheet. Wish us all luck.

After a month of dueling cheese calendars I’m turning the leftovers into a cheese platter for dinner at my parents house. And I am going to have to make a map to the cheeses based on how many I can potentially include.

Happy holidays from your furiends at the zoo ✨ Thanks to Keeper Megan and Keeper Ali for the holiday pics!

Success so far!

“what is DIE HARD about”

Well, I guess I’m glad for my recent reminder to step up my consistency with masking.

Seattle Man Leaves Out Plate of Cheese for When St. Rat Comes Up Through Toilet Tonight: tinyurl.com/nhf8cr8s

Meowy Catsmas Eve from Beatrice and Ramona. (Jaunty festive bandanas from @thepunchycat.bsky.social.)

The Nutcracker is low key the villain of the story—romancing a 12-year-old?! So his deification by DHS tracks.

For as little as a dollar, you can help make sure these meeces have cheeses this holiday season

Living my best Christmas Eve afternoon life by not working and lounging with the cats in Catsmas themed pajamas and a fuzzy green hoodie. If you want to talk to me about something stressful, please wait until January.

Fine, whatever, this random cat is your new god of the winter solstice

I am not even a fic person and know this is a hugely bad idea. What the actual fuck

whomst among us

Can we get the tax on millionaires AND a new governor?

He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

the person who wrote 12 days of christmas

Will no one think of Bucky?!

Canada: Your reliable resource for both gay hockey sex and actual journalism

There were snacks and candy by yards A whole rainbow of munchable carbs And another murder show streaming on TV And so many bottles of Vitamin D

The most fun part of a swapping in a new monitor is trying to remember how the release on the mount for my monitor arm works.

I hadn’t thought about 60 Minutes in forever, but then they started hiding the news, like a cool scavenger hunt.

Americans having to bootleg broadcast news about our government’s offshored concentration camp is a level of fascism that immediately precedes democratic societies dropping leaflets on us from weather balloons.

For a man who never met a ribbon cutting or self-congratulatory press conference he didn’t love—it’s been lovely having Harrell sulk his way through the final months of his term.

The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees 🧵

Parents everywhere are terrified that their teens’ sudden need to download the forbidden 60 minutes story is a gateway drug to wanting even more news

Clearly middle school social studies classes are failing us. (I read the Odyssey in 7th grade, shoutout to Mrs. Scott, her love of shoulder pads in every ensemble, and teaching us about the cradle of civilization with the B52s “Mesopotamia”.)

One of the things I’m enjoying about the current historians vs AI discourse is the folks in comments discovering the very existence of microfiche and microfilm—considering the amount of very normie research I did using both as a high school/college student in the 90s. Ah, growing up in the 1900s.

Buzzkills. “Could raccoons be our future pets? Science says not for millennia” www.npr.org/2025/12/22/n...

Whatever kind of festive gathering my downstairs neighbors are having seems to involve a lot of off key singing.

My nephew and I played Carcassonne with my parents, and we spent enough time distracted explaining strategy to my dad that he ended up beating us all.

Whenever we learn more about various aspects of the crypto universe, the more I think that the finance tech bros need real hobbies.

I’ve been hacking together IKEA furniture long enough that I appear to have reached that mythical point of having all the pieces I need when coming up with a plan to reconfigure my office area.

Rail $395 million Public transit $753 million Debt $1.7 billion Highway upgrades $5.3 billion someone who is good at transportation planning please help me budget this. my state is dying

Tis the Season #Christmas #HappyHolidays

I was sitting in front of the window. Beatrice was shifting back and forth on the couch and staring at me. I finally realized she was moving around because I was blocking her view of the birds outside.

“The Supreme Court decided not to have a Christmas party for 12 straight years because the justices couldn’t agree on whether to invite the Court’s Black employees” is about as tidy an encapsulation of the Supreme Court’s whole deal as I can think of

Seattle-King County Public Health just released a guide on what to do if you find a rat in your toilet this is not a joke

Asked why no one outside the state of Washington cares enough about its flooded communities that just lost everything they own right before Christmas, today the nation admitted it just kinda assumed the PNW was always living underwater in some sort of giant puddle like that.

Listen others have noted that this study is flawed, but hey, so many people right now are living in their own horrible, shitheaded realities, let me live in the one where eating SHARP CHEDDAR leaves me with a SHARP MIND.

If I am elected President, I will make it illegal to require you to go to work if a pet is sleeping on you.

grimch

Unburying the lede from my essay on why we all feel like numb frozen crap these days… catvalente.substack.com/p/this-is-wh...

I have to think about this bullshit every time my knee is angry enough that standing for longer than a few minutes on a crowded bus is impossible and I ask folks in the seating up front if they can make room. Not everyone looks or acts the way folks expect someone with limited mobility to look.

Just wanna have a body that works

New feature of Covid recovery this round appears to be teaming up with perimenopause to make sure I feel vaguely clammy and warm at all times.

Photographer Christopher Anderson on the Vanity Fair photoshoot