I CAN'T FIND THE BISCUITS!

I am a creature of habit, to the extent that change is a problem. Why not ask my mother, who I still haven’t forgiven entirely for throwing out the biscuit tin of my childhood earlier this year¹. I have had a very nice routine since I arrived in Cincinnati: get on the main road, drive for about 2 miles, and then turn right for the Kroger that has dark chocolate digestive biscuits. And other foods, but as you may have noticed, biscuits are also apparently an important part of my psyche.

And so, this week, I braved the almost-Christmas traffic to head to Kroger one last time before I come back home to the UK next week. I arrived to an almost-empty car park and a sign on the door saying that they had closed. Now, admittedly, there’s a fancy new Kroger² across the road that just opened to take its place, but my habit: ruined. I have to turn left now instead of right! What a personal disaster! Also, it took me twenty minutes to find the digestives.

Oh, I actually was part of a winning trivia team this week! And all I had to give up was eye-rolling at the Union Jacks everywhere in the pub. I think my only real contributions were knowing who Was (Not Was) were and the importance of Westminster Abbey, while also revealing my deep-seated ire against the Shrek films³, but I contributed! Somewhat!

Helvetica update: she has decided that she is a lap cat when I’m on the couch, especially when I’m trying to use the laptop. She would like me to point out that she believes that only being fed twice a day is not acceptable. Let’s hope she never discovers my family’s feeding regime for their cats.

I had one of those rare anti-Impostor Syndrome moments this week; nothing too spectacular, but a day of find inefficiencies, fixing them, and seeing that reflected at scale. And as I come to the end of 2018, I think I find myself in a better place, in a variety of different ways. So there’s that. Of course, I still have four days left of 2018 for it all to go horribly Pete Tong, but I try to be optimistic about these things…