Highlight Reel – Dec 15-22, 2024

It’s almost Christmas, y’all! I don’t know about you, but things have been pretty busy the last week (or two or three). But, my packages that needed to ship to Wyoming have done so (allegedly, they will make it before Christmas), I’ve started wrapping the rest of the gifts, and the goodies are, well, I have the ingredients…. You may have noticed that the dates for this Highlight Reel do not follow the typical pattern. Monday will start all of the festivities with family and friends, so I won’t be around much online, blogging or otherwise. Hope the rest of your year is amazing!

Quote of the Week

Episode of the Week

Re-Watch of the Week

Song of the Week

“That’s Christmas to Me,” by Pentatonix (this song made me cry the first time I heard it, because I couldn’t have explained what Christmas means to *me* any better than this does)

Other “Songs of the Day” this week:

• “Blinding Lights,” by The Weeknd
• “You Give Love a Bad Name,” by Bon Jovi
• “Blue Bayou,” by Linda Ronstadt
• “Down,” by NOTA (a cappella cover of the Jay Sean song)
• “Dancing Through Life,” by Jonathan Bailey, from Wicked

Headlines, Highlights, and Lowlights

• We rewatched all 5 episodes of Dune: Prophecy this week, this time with Luke, in preparation for the final Season 1 episode on Sunday, December 22. Dang, they’ve got a lot to get through in the next hour!! I truly hope there is another season coming. I know it didn’t do well in the ratings, but we’re really enjoying it.
• Managed 2 more episodes of The Penguin, and getting Sofia’s backstory was an exceptional episode, but it’s hard to watch too many of those at a time (unlike Dune: Prophecy, which we watched all 5 hour-plus episodes in 2 days). We’ll finish before the end of the year, but maybe not before Christmas.
• We did not watch either episode of the LEGO Masters Holiday Bricktacular. We’re saving those to watch with my parents sometime during next week. We also have not yet seen this week’s episode of Skeleton Crew.
• All of our remaining regular TV shows finished up the fall portion of their seasons this week: NCIS: Origins, Ghosts (US), and Elsbeth. Looks like most will return between mid-January and mid-February, plus we’ll add in a few others that haven’t started yet, like The Rookie.
• No new movies, but we did take Luke to see Wicked (2024), since he hadn’t seen it. Yes, it is just as good the second time around.
• Re-Watches: We sort of covered both extremes this week: Pacific Rim and American Fiction.
• The Drunk Christmas Unicorns were a little more lively this week (it was windy near the end), so I got some good pictures of varying poses this week.
• I have started increasing my dosage of Zepbound, per my doctor’s instructions, since I’ve been extremely hungry the past few weeks. We didn’t jump straight to 5 mg (like you should) after I lost my sense of taste the last time we tried that, but I have moved up an additional 1 mg to a total of 3.5 mg. You can read more on that here.
• Didn’t get as many things started for my Countdown to 50 – 101 Things in 1001 Days, Version 5 as I hoped this week, thanks to said COVID vaccine. I didn’t feel sick, but I was very tired. I have 17 items completed and 27 in progress. Not much is going to happen on those in the next week with Christmas in there, but maybe I can squeeze in a couple more before the new year begins.

Coming Soon

• Really looking forward to spending time with my family, enjoying good food, good company, good movies (or TV shows, like LEGO Masters), and fun games (we love to play games! cards, dice, dominoes, etc). Sounds like my father-in-law might be joining us for a day as well, which would be wonderful!
• Remember that Marvel’s What If…? Season 3 starts Sunday, December 22 on Disney+ (no affiliation) with a new episode each day through December 29.
• A Complete Unknown – the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet (whose performance has Oscar written all over it) – starts Christmas Day, though it may be after the new year before we get to see it.
• The final Highlight Reel of 2024 will (hopefully) go out on December 31 to wrap up the year. In the mean time, I have scheduled some posts to publish during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day for the MovieMuse 2024 Recap of the best (and worst) movies, shows, events, and items I’ve loved (or hated) in the last 12 months. Hope you enjoy!