What I’m Up To – Nov 2025

(As of Nov-Dec 2025)

Start of month: List out goals. End of month: Notes on progress.
Ongoing: AP English teaching. Climbing. Open mics. House cleans. Hikes.

Cordelia: More Than a Conqueror (YA novel) – Cancelled publication. No longer sits right with me.
Same folk album as the past three months – Paused.
Chainmail items + ideas – Also paused. (seeing a trend here?)

Attending a 1-day Japanese Tea Festival – YES. One of the greatest afternoons spent alone this month – another was wandering the grounds and building of the Aga Khan Museum.
Taking an in-person reflexology certification course – Finished the in-person course. Time to get some case studies under my belt, get those exams out of the way, and be a certified/registered practitioner! 🙂
Exploring (yet another!) education-based business opportunity – Exploring in thought only so far…it would be another little bit until it’d get off the ground thanks to some new private English students picked up this month…
Noir film studies – Watched a few classics. Good genre.

The BCIN exam – General Legal + Small Buildings – Registered for Jan 2026. I’d leave this note here and NOT bring it up again to see who actually reads these end-of-month updates, ha! 😉
My defaults and instinctive reactions to things – Oh my…so many things pre-programmed that I need to rinse and refresh!

Hunting

Nasty chord progressions and skanky rhythms that make me scrunch up my nose and shimmy – YAS! Live band jams, acid jazz, CHON…hmmm. Good music.
In-person go and chess buddies to play with – Found one (and a half)! Played a few times – enough to prove to myself how utterly a novice my flighty mind is at this game. So horrible…ahgg.

Learning

Cooking with fire, a wok, and a shoestring budget – Fun times. Cabbage, barley rusk, and eggs from local farmers. I splurge on good olive oil, local honey and bee pollen, and sometimes the odd freeze-dried superfood drink mix from a tiny small business hours away…
Sight-singing/sight-reading music – Tiny bit of progress. Not much. Need more.
How to blend clarity with chaos – Getting better with this. Spent the month running around and getting used to living on my own. Lots of fun things came up, and just as many weaknesses and blindspots surfaced. Guess December would be for quieting down and mending and slow learning…if only I could sit still long enough. XP

Creating

Projects with the following codenames: dusty, confessions, aye, and miksang/quietus – FINALLY made progress in Confessions, after a whole year of just thinking about it. Dusty has its own pen and notebook now, but not time and attention – whoops. AYE is set up, but needs a LOT of clarification, deepening, and such. And that last one…has never been touched.
Long overdue emails to impossibly-patient friends – Some progress made here, ha! Still catching up…

The nuances and beauty of talking to strangers and building connections from “nothing” – Beautiful; but towards the end of this month, I realized that my closest friends have been with me for years, a few that I’ve known for decades. (And considering that I’m nearing my mid-twenties, that’s kinda big.)
What makes committing to an individual/practice worth it – One thing I’m learning is that there’s no point in committing if you simply don’t care enough. And yes, there IS a limit to how many things you care about and how much you do. And there are such things as having reasons to care and having reasons that you can’t and don’t dare rationalize…

New friends and connections in the places I now live, work, and play – I’m smiling as I think about them. Don’t know how long these tenuous, still-shallow connections would last, but I’m grateful to have them.
My present youth, agility, and energy – YAS. Huge one.
Being close to more cafes, bakeries, and trails than I have time (and money) to fully explore. – Ha, still very true. XP