With the help of some Chicago plebs and chatGPT, I finally have the mempool fees and bitcoin block height set as sensors in Home Assistant. (Using the native bitcoin sensor in HA points to blockchain.com which always had stale data for me.)
I then setup an automation in my office (where I do WFH), where the office lights blink when a new block is mined.
Here is how it looks (I sped the playback for each block after the first few blinks):