works of wanderlust

Tag: december-ish

  • uncooked

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What is your best winter treat recipe this year?

    I have been somewhat remiss in my kitchen efforts this whole year, falling back on a routine of regular home cooked meals, sure, but flopping spectacularly when it comes to anything more adventurous or creative. In fact, the Kid has almost entirely taken over on the holiday baking this year. As I wrote this she had just finished two more batches of cookies and they were cooling on the counter.

    That said, I have been pondering making candy over the holidays.

    We watch so many of those cooking channels on YouTube and eventually they all delve into the curiosities and challenges of cooking sugar into its various delicious states of charm. I would actually say that if I had one food-based resolution for the winter it would be to expand my candy-making efforts.

    But other than that… I’m mostly just eating the treats, not so much making them this year.

    *sigh*

  • hiragana three

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What was the best anything that you read in 2025?

    Japanese signage. 

    I’ve never been a great student of language. 

    In grade school, having started elementary in a town that was apparently not following the provincial French language requirements for the curriculum, we moved and my new school dropped me into learning our second national language about three years behind everyone else. I never really caught up. I lagged in junior high. I fought to catch up in high school, literally spending a summer trying to get into a groove that would allow me to join the full IB class rather than being one of those partial nerds. I have dabbled in Duolingo. I even tried my hand speaking in both Quebec and France. No dice. I’ve spent the last ten summers helping out the France pavilion at our local heritage festival (because my neighbours, from France, run it) and the best I can do is kind of keep up understanding a third of what is said.  I don’t speak French.

    When I lived in Vancouver for three years I enrolled in night school because I got it in my head that I should learn German. I bought books to study, I bought fiction to pretend like I could read it, I travelled to Germany and tried to have simple conversations. It was a lot less effort than I put into French (and a lot fewer opportunities to practice) and to this date I kind of understand the very basics, but I couldn’t talk my way out of a biergarten during Oktoberfest if my life depended on it.

    This past year I embarked on my third serious language adventure: Japanese. I’ve documented a bit of it in this blog, of course, and there are numerous references herein to my efforts and my adventures into the world of the Japanese language in 2025.

    Japanese tho has been different. The biggest reason is that it does not use the western alphabet.

    In fact, most of my efforts this past year have been devoted to just trying to memorize the hiragana and katakana (and a few kanji this past couple months) of the primary character sets that compose the basics of written Japanese. There are a lot. Nearly fifty basic hiragana symbols plus marks and variations and rules and applications that adjust how it all works. There is a similar number of katakana, and a similar twist on how they are used. There are literally fifty thousand or so kanji symbols and not even fluent speakers are expected to know more a couple thousand of the core symbols. 

    I have used apps and flashcards and books and worksheets and classes and even a poster hanging in my office.  It has been a huge slog, but a rewarding one. And particularly rewarding was being able to stroll through the streets of Tokyo, ride the train to Kyoto and explore Japan’s hot spots in November while having a thousand daily opportunities to notice that some of that effort to learn those characters (and a bit of basic vocabulary) had stuck. I couldn’t really claim that I could read it, but it wasn’t all incomprehensible. I could look at things and recognize shapes and words, especially important ones about numbers and food and such.

    I’m far from fluent, I fully admit that, but reading a bit of hiragana on the beautiful streets of Japan was probably the best thing I read all year.

  • campfire foul

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What’s something you should have cooked in 2025 but didn’t?

    It’s fifteen degrees below zero and snowing heavily as I write this so it seems pretty unlikely that in the remaining fourteen days of this year I’ll convince myself to clear a path to my outdoor fire pit and settle in for a campfire cookout in the backyard.

    I don’t know why we didn’t make that much of a priority this past year.

    I mean, we had some mixed weather this year, sure, and I was distracted with other projects, too. But not once—not even one time—did we set a campfire in the backyard this past summer, let alone have anything resembling a cookout out there.

    That is significant in the context of the history of this blog. A lot of people still hit this site via the URL that I set up way back five years ago at the beginning of 2021. My writing as the Cast Iron Guy was meant to be a reflection on a lifestyle as much as a cooking tool. We were mid-pandemic and I had it in my mind that I should give myself some motivation to live a simpler lifestyle (at least in my off time) and step away from technology a bit more. Cast iron cookware was kind of symbolic of that in both a literal and an abstract way. Abstract because cast iron is hardy and simple and grounded in an idea of legacy and making something better through using it. Literal, because part of that lifestyle was literally me buying a new and improved backyard fire pit and doing a bunch of cooking over an open fire out there, a lot of it leaning into cast iron as the key tool.

    Four summers later and I seem to have strayed from that mission.

    So here we are in the deeps of darkest winter days and I have this thing I should have done a lot of last summer but didn’t, stuff I should have seared, roasted, toasted, and grilled over the open flames in my backyard fire craft zone… but did not.

    Grilling season 2026 is a long way off as I sit here in my pjs wrapped in a blanket huddling to keep cozy and warm from the cold, but maybe realizing that I missed the 2025 season in its entirety should be a kick start to watch the weather more closely in the new year and get my matches ready.

  • poetic war

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    No.

    Ugh.

    Ok. 

    I’ll bite …a little bit, for the blog.

    I was doing a little experiment the other week. I had a perfectly good reason to post a pointless video clip on social media the other day, but I didn’t want to use my main account. Nor did I want to use any of my other side accounts. So I did what any sane tech savvy nerd would do and I created a brand new account, followed no one, gave it a stupid profile name and pic that pretty much no one would associate with me, and posted my video. I did nothing special, did not share it, followed no one and did not tag it or add any meta data. It was not clever, funny, or controversial. I was merely posting it as a random clip I’d filmed to check how some function of the system was appearing. Within two hours it had received 12 likes.

    For context, we just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and I posted a few dozen curated photos representing some of my best work and amazing photography in that country, and my best post, with five hundred and fifty odd followers, got 8 likes. Eight. Just eight. Total.

    Somehow, this temporary burner account had received 50% more attention in the duration of our car ride home for a (completely random and the content was not the point) jittery eight second video of a snow plow out the front window of our car (what I just happened to be looking at while I was plotting this technology query) than for something I had purposefully shared for beauty and enjoyment …and to put a little of both out into the world. A fucking snow plow. Twelve likes.

    This really isn’t a bitter post about not getting any likes on my content. I don’t actually try to promote my stuff. I just put it out and whatever. And I really don’t even care. I’m not posting for validation. Or money. Or to be found. Or anything other than curating my own public collections of my creative work and personal giggles… whatever.

    But “likes” represent something else entirely. They represent exposure. They represent voice. They represent the attention and interests of others. They represent the choices made by programmed, unthinking, not-human algorithms, choices about who gets to see what …and when …and how frequently.

    And what most people are sharing these days happen to be things that largely represent culture and politics. And we all kind of understand that those folks… well, they are not trying to represent anything in a balanced or nuanced way. And same are even working and designing content to divide and anger us.

    Put those things together into one big brainy thought and you might get a glimpse of the major imbalance and deep illness in our culture this past year (and probably even further back). 

    I have this (probably controversial) notion that I’ve spoken aloud to a few people this past year about our culture and our political reality in 2025. It basically posits that while were all standing around here in fear of some nuclear world war three, what has happened is that the third world war has come and gone and most of us missed it.  That is, WW3 was a war of misinformation and the western world, democracy specifically, has been attacked and has lost …and now most people are wandering around in a state of post-psychic shock trauma not really wrapping their heads around that they and their families have been under literal assault and a kind of emotional and propaganda-based warfare for the last decade or so.  It didn’t ravage bodies in the physical sense, but it has destroyed institutions, collapsed trust in each other, broken relationships, and turned our path forward into one strewn with debris and rubble. It was launched by foreign states who understood that they could not win a conventional nor a nuclear war. It was fought on Facebook and Twitter and a list of other social media sites. It was launched through the traditional media who played their role as unwitting vectors of informational violence. It was bolstered by algorithms that we trusted had our best interest in mind but were really just blindly amplifying whatever seemed to be popular or match a narrative that made us each uniquely cozy and comfortable. The truth was shattered. Reality was broken. It weaponized the minds of the weak and easily-swayed. It turned friends and family into dirty bombs of radicalized falsehoods and conspiracy-laden mistruths. And even now most of us, nearly all of us, are simply in denial that it even happened… all while we keep scrolling through the same militarized platforms that caused it all in the first place and each in our own pretending that it is still all ok. 

    The battle rages unfortunately.

    That was 2025.

    Does 2026 look better for me right now? For any of us?

    Like and subscribe to find out, I guess.

  • these things are

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What object will
    forever remind you of 2025?

    One object? No. How about ten objects from the past year. Memories are not so simple these days. In no particular order…

    The Kobo eReader I bought mid-year to replace my aging Kindle marked a defiantly buy-Canadian shift away from giving all my money to American billionaires, though I still give some of it (unavoidably) that direction, I made a conscious decision to shift to a different platform for my books because… uh… terrible politics.

    I spent a lot of time at my Basement Desk this year, a place I had routinely avoided since quitting my work-from-home job in mid-2023. But in 2025 it was my coding station when I worked on my video game, the spot from where I took a bunch of online University courses, and now it’s become where I’ve set myself up a cozy writing nook.

    I got over my “I’m a biologist” anti-Fake Plants-hate and bought about ten of them to give my dark basement office a bit of colour and texture. I love plants and love botanical things, but when the option was no plants, dead plants or fake plants … well, I finally caved and chose fake plants. Uh. Thanks Ikea?

    The Aeropress Coffee Maker the Wife got me for Christmas last year became my go-to coffee device for most of 2025. It makes good coffee, pretty much equivalent to my pour over standby (in my mediocre amateur opinion) but it is plenty faster and easier to clean up. How much it features in 2026 depends on how much I stick with the coffee routine in the new year.

    Then on vacation I bought a very nice little Rice Bowl in Tokyo from an actual restaurant supply story in the cooking district. It is not a touristy gimmick souvenir, tho, but rather something kinda sorta maybe more real, and it is one of my favourite souvenirs (neck and neck in a tight race) from our recent trip. 

    That Macbook Pro I splurged on late in the year because I started doing contract work in 2025 and needed a dedicated and capable machine to do said work upon. I’ve owned a dozen computers over the years, but this is the first “my” computer that I’ve had in a while (no more family sharing) even though it is pretty much meant for doing, uh, professional work.

    Speaking of tech, I hadn’t done much with my Steamdeck for a while, leaning into playing games when I had the chance on the bigger screen and PS5, but this handheld toy makes the list because along the way of my game coding adventures this year I managed to code enough of a piece of software to boot up and be reasonably playable on my Steamdeck. That’s worthy of a mention.

    Having been that guy in orchestra who was using digital music for a few years I finally splurged and bought a Foot Pedal this year to change pages (you know, with my foot instead of my finger) and it has been game changing for orchestra and music practice. I’m no longer the only guy with his music on an iPad either.

    Oh. Right. Those Steel Toed Shoes which were my exclusive footwear working at the grocery store until about April finally got shoved in the closet for storage and hopefully I only ever need to wear them again to keep my toes safe for personal projects. Good shoes. Frustrating work.

    And finally that Mortar Board that the Kid decorated so uniquely for her high school graduation gets a special mention… and it was in the running for the solo mention had I not caved and put ten items on this list. It’s still sitting on our mantle for the moment, but it was definitely part of a memory-full day.