I read a lot. Like. A lot a lot.
And most of it is through an app called Readwise Reader. (Not an affiliate link. Possibly not even a recommendation. More on that maybe later?)
Without getting too deep down the rabbit hole, I think it’s the best currently available solution to the me-shaped set of problems, but I don’t find it delightful and I would abandon them the instant a better app came along.
With apologies to Robb Knight, from whomst I stole the format.
Continuing and, indeed, accelerating the trend of the previous year, 2025 was marked by a significant amount of travel. Short trips, long trips. At times it felt like I was gone more than I was home, although the statistics don’t bear that out.
My blog is read almost exclusively by the friends who I directly link to it (thank you!) although it looks like one sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been broke containment, for an extremely small definition of “broke containment.”
During last year’s Hobbit Meal (which, apparently, I didn’t post about,) I ended up serving way too much bread. Don’t get me wrong. I like bread. But by the third or fourth meal of the day, it was too much. This year I’ve cut it down just to the biscuits in the biscuits + gravy, plus the stuffing which is technically bread but I think mostly doesn’t count.
Without further ado, here’s the plan.
I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated.
Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.
There’s basically two parts to a budget. There’s the part where you track things, and the part where you use it to make decisions. I’m decent at the first part. Awful at the second.
My seasonal theme is more thoughtful use of less space.
Lately I’ve been trying a new system for how I manage my evenings. Someone else might try “no system” or “having fun” or “relaxing,” but I am not that someone.
Instead, I’ve cobbled together something from the charred husk of the Bento Method that seems to work pretty well for me.
Of course, to make that make sense, I have to describe what came before.
In the early days there was StumbleUpon, and it wasted a lot of time, and I got nothing done for approximately 2008-2016. Very little of that is StumbleUpon’s fault. I just wanted to mention StumbleUpon for some OG time wasting cred.
I’m not a traditionally “goal-motivated” person. For certain values of goal, motivated, and person. I have a formative memory of telling my third grade teacher that I would not be setting any new years resolutions because the idea is quite ridiculous, thank you.
I continue to agree with past-me about that.
“Goals” are sort of like a report card: some people are super motivated by getting good grades for some reason. If this is you, stop it. Grades are a scam. Do as little as you can to pass, and spend as much of your time as possible being curious about the world around you. Go outside. Lick a bug. Everything worth doing is as far from a classroom as you are allowed to get.
Have you ever lost something and then spent the next ten years trying to find it?
I have. It’s an essay about the fall of the Roman Empire. Did the average citizen know the empire had fallen?
No. It took them about 200 years to figure out, but you’re just going to have to trust me because all the kings horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to find that paper again.
I wanted to try something new this week and give an end-of-week status report. No idea if this is something I’ll keep doing, but the best way to figure out if it’s useful (to me or anyone else) is to give it a try.
The majority of this week has been spent working on the website for WizardHQ, a project that all my friends know about, but if you don’t know me personally this is the first time you’re hearing about it. I don’t intend to try to advertise it at this exact moment, please excuse me being vague for now. More to come on that in the next few weeks, but for right now it’s eating up a considerable amount of time.
We’re a couple days over one quarter of the way into the year, so I sat down and worked on a template for planning around my yearly theme.
Part of a yearly theme is not to plan too hard. There’s a reason it’s not a yearly goal or, so help me, new years resolution. But I thought having some sort of light framework for checkin and intention setting would be useful, so that’s what I’m working towards.