2024 Winter Solstice Update

by on 2024-12-21 | License Permalink

What a long half-year!

I honestly feel that it’s been about four years since I was writing my Summer Solstice update. I think it’s because having a small child means that the days can become a bit long and tiring, but they also each hold new challenges and firsts which means my perception of time stretches with all the novel things that occur.

The tail end of the summer was great. We did get COVID just after the Summer Solstice which represents my second infection. It was definitely much milder than my October 2023 infection but still pretty brutal, and with the added stress of having to parent a small child — who also had COVID — at the same time. Aside from that, we really enjoyed our summer and made good use of the light and the heat when we had it.

Since October I’ve been on parental leave with my daughter D. My wife works three days a week which means that I am D’s primary caregiver for “only” three days but it has been a shift in the household rhythm. My confidence with her has grown monumentally since taking her on solo adventure days. I definitely did my “share” of parenting before but was hamstrung because D was exclusively-breastfed, refused a bottle even if it contained breast milk, and only started on solid food in September.

I was really worried about what that would mean for my ability to look after her solo given that I do not own a set of mammaries. However, since she’s been weaning herself with solid food she’s also been very willing to drink breast milk from a sippy-cup which has meant that I can take her out and about and have adventures. This has been fun and we’ve been enjoying a relatively cosy winter knocking about the local parks and trails, and meeting our friends in the city centre weekly.

My wife started back at work at the same time as starting her treatments for multiple sclerosis which has had an impact on her health since she is now immune compromised and adjusting to having to parent and work in the same brain.

On a sad note, my friend R died tragically in December. I won’t write much about it here as I’m still processing it, but it threw up the regular cocktail of grief as well as a lot of guilt for not being a better friend and anger at capitalism for its part in creating conditions which lead to this tragedy.

Finally, we’ve all been poorly in the house for what seems like forever. Over the last few years I’ve either been in good health or had COVID, so I’m unaccustomed to being “somewhat ill” for an extended period of time. My ability to recover from illness has definitely decreased with age, repeated COVID infections, and the demands of parenting. So it’s not been a fun December until now.

But the Solstice Tree and the decorations are up. Our lungs and heads are a bit clearer now, there’s twinkling lights and warm radiators and as of writing the Solstice is just around the corner. This is our second Solstice with D after the Summer Solstice earlier this year, but Winter Solstice is very special to us and we are really excited to celebrate it with the newest member of our family for the first time.

Key Events

There are a few things missing from these as I haven’t been as stringent about logging them as I might’ve been, especially with things pertaining to D. There are so many firsts with a baby — and especially as a new parent — and they come so quickly. I have tried to live in the moment a lot more and I can tell you the rough age and season that D balanced herself for the first time, or took her first steps while holding my hand etc. I can’t, however, tell you the exact date as I didn’t manage to log them.

Hobbies

As with last time, this is relatively brief compared to previous years because my primary focus is caring for my young daughter. This said, I have had the time to do a few things here and there but I have to be very conscious with how I use this time.

Lately, I have been interrupted more by illness than with parenting which has thrown a wrench in a few things but thankfully the house seems to be crawling out of that now.

Archery

Archery remains a tertiary hobby for the time being, sadly. I definitely want to aim to do more in 2025 though.

I haven’t shot anything since the last update. My bow’s nocking point needs re-tuning and I don’t have the know-how to do it solo. My coach, P, is amazing and has offered to meet me on a Saturday morning to help me fix up the bow so this is an offer I am planning to take him up on early in the New Year.

We are planning to attend the fun shoot on Boxing day. We really enjoyed it last year and are hoping that we’ll make it a bit of a family tradition in the future.

Creative Writing

Once again I’ve not done lots of creative writing this half a year, but I have put pen to paper several times.

I managed to do some serious plot work for one of my planned stories which goes by the name of Broken Scar in my head. I think if I’m ever going to show anyone my fiction, this will be the one. There’s still a long way to go with it but it’s the one I think has the best legs.

I also started composing some poetry when I was out walking with my daughter asleep on me. I got home and went to commit it to paper but I was interrupted and the “muse” fled. Oh well, that’s the beauty of poetry I guess.

Exercise

This is mostly holding steady which is both good and frustrating because I want to be progressing.

The entire house has been sick since around mid-November and I’ve been no exception. This has affected my strength training by making me miss the odd training session. I have a philosophy that I train unless I feel it would actually be dangerous or unhealthy to do so, including when mildly sick, so this shows how sick I’ve been!

In October I picked up running again, this time with some “barefoot” running shoes to help work around my knee injury. The first two runs were amazing and I love how the shoes force me into a really interesting and safer new running form. My third run, though, resulted in a foot injury I’m yet to fully recover from. I get severe pain in the foot when walking I was limping around the house barely mobile for days.

I’ve been able to address the worst of it by switching my regular boots for my hiking boots during the day when I’m out. This seems to directly help the injury likely due to the extra padding in the boot. The injury does seem to return after I switch back to my regular boots and walk about town, so I’m really hoping that I’m not confined to hiking boots and no running forever.

I will go and see a medic if it hasn’t gone by the end of January as at the moment the official NHS advice for such an injury is basically “just see if it goes away with rest”. This is fine to a degree, but if it hasn’t went after a quarter of a year I’m going to press for getting it looked at properly.

Hiking

No real hiking to speak of either. I hiked with D down the coast from South Shields to Sunderland, to meet with my sister-in-law and my nephew at a local play café. We really enjoyed it aside from a very cold nappy change on the cliffside.

I have soft plans to spend a day hiking in either the Lake District or the Cheviot Hills with a friend early in the New Year; if I feel healthy enough and A is happy to take D for a day to give me the time.

Languages

I dropped learning Norwegian as Duolingo became untenable due to its rampant enshittification. I’m yet to pick it back up but I have soft plans to grab a book of Norwegian grammar from eBay if I see one come up but I may actually ditch it in favour of Mandarin because the local university run Mandarin evening classes that are accessible to the public. Mandarin was my second choice for a third language so that would fit nicely.

My Esperanto is still strong although I am really missing writing my diary in Esperanto. I actually think I know how/when I’m going to work this back in now, but we’ll see!

I’ve struggled with finding good Esperanto reading material. I haven’t been able to find a good Esperanto fiction book to sink my teeth into since I read La ŝtona urbo last year. I tried searching for an Esperanto copy of Solaris but apparently they were a limited run, and I can’t find an ebook anywhere. I mostly find myself reading things from facila.org since this is one of the only places that produces material in Esperanto that isn’t just about Esperanto itself.

I’m a bit annoyed at the “Esperantujo” at the minute, more generally. It could be that I’m too insular so I’m not ready to give up on it, but I find it very self-obsessed and I really don’t enjoy the western centrist/liberal political skew that it has. By far the most regular publication is Libera Folio and most of the articles are about various congresses or faction of the Esperantujo social infrastructure, and when there are some world-politics or interest pieces they often contain pro-imperialist lines such as a recent article about BRICS basically parroting Russophobic and Sinophobic lines1. I yearn for some Esperanto-speaking leftists but at this point I’d take a good novel!

I am also having to walk back slightly on speaking to D solely in Esperanto due to some advice from an Esperanto newsletter; although I read and write Esperanto pretty fluently, my speaking does need work and I’m worried that this will affect my relationship with D as well as her ability to acquire the language and relate to it. I still speak to her partially in Esperanto so that she’s not confused — she loves it when I look at her and exclaim “Mia filino!” — and I’ll continue to read her Esperanto children’s books; but I’m going to re-frame the language as a sort of “spice” that I add to our relationship rather than doing the pure “one parent one child” approach.

I’m hoping that she still gets a broad feel of the language and wants to participate, but it seems that the general wisdom is that unless you are very fluent in speaking and listening Esperanto it’s better to wait until they’re old enough to start learning the language rather than hoping they acquire it from a parent who is slightly hesitant and doesn’t express themselves as elegantly as they could.

It’s not all grumpy news though. My friend M and I are planning to start an informal Esperanto club, which is really just an excuse for us to get together every so often and chat in Esperanto and about GNU/Linux at the same time. I’m still unsure what this will look like in practice, but if it’s feasible I’ll also bring D along so that she is exposed to more conversational Esperanto. I have also joined the EAB mostly out of a sense of obligation but also to take a first step into the Esperanto community in Britain in case D takes to the language and I need a community to expose her to.

Logs

The logs continue their trend into sparseness. While my reading has reached a nice equilibrium as I have been able to read consistently in the evenings; being off work and thus not at a computer has meant that I haven’t been able to listen to many albums all the way through. I’ve been able to watch exactly two movies since the Summer Solstice, and only because I had a quiet day at work with all my jobs done and also when my wife overnighted with D at her mother’s and I ended up with a bit of “me” time.

I’m really keen to see what shape these logs will have at the next Solstice update. By then both A and I will be back at work and parents, so the household rhythm will have changed once again.

Albums

Lots of old favourites here, including some very old faves of mine harvested from my old archive drives. A main trend here is me reliving my teenage metalhead years, starting with Kamelot’s Black Halo was amazing and I adored it. I also enjoyed nerding out to the incredibly cheesy — and incredibly fun — DragonForce. There’s plenty other metal strewn about these logs as well.

A standout moment for me was listening to The Death of Slim Shady by Eminem. This was the first Eminem album I listened to since The Marshall Mathers EP and it really stuck with me. I think what made me appreciate it more was the fact that I knew it was a concept album going in and had done some reading about Eminem’s Slim Shady persona.

I also indulged in a bit of nostalgic pop music. I was too dark-and-edgy™ to admit to liking Lady Gaga growing up but really she’s an amazing lyricist and musician. I really enjoyed going through the albums that were released when I was coming of age but never appreciated enough. Really enjoyed them. Later on I also got “Despacito” stuck in my head, so managed to pick up a cheap copy of Luis Fonsi’s Vida and made my way through the album. It was fine but obviously Despacito is the standout track.

November actually contained quite a march of the earworms all in sequence. The main cause of this was my daughter having a bit of a fussy phase and me wanting to entertain her by dancing to upbeat music. This resulted in a few cheesy earworms and me grabbing the containing albums so that I had local copies of the media. As a result I got into They Might Be Giants and Macklemore, who it turns out are each really cool. I ended up listening to Macklemore’s Gemini and really enjoyed it; this might be the first time I’ve seriously bopped to hip-hop! Other than that, the 90s band Pulp made an appearance after I got “Common People” stuck in my head for a few days.

My friend sent me some Meshuggah albums for the pure djent glory and I enjoyed the one I listened to. Being all nostalgic, I also picked up some music which I listened when clubbing during my twenties and am thoroughly enjoying both Die Antwoord and VNV Nation.

This time I didn’t use DeDupelist2 for removing duplicates as I wanted to force myself to rely less on web tools. A handy resource taught me that a simple awk command will do the trick3.

Books

Not tonnes here but more than I thought there would be since I’ve been able to adjust to our new household rhythm and pick up my reading pace a bit.

The absolute highlight of this half-year has been reading through The Expanse by the James S. A. Corey duo. I utterly adored this series from beginning to end and finishing it was really bittersweet. They nailed the ending, everything was well-written and compelling the entire way through the series and the characters were all consistent and amazing. It has set the bar very high.

I also had a good few moments with my continued read through Pratchett’s Discworld novels. I usually use them as palette-cleansers between larger works as I can normally chew through a Discworld novel pretty quickly and it is a nice change of tone. Of the ones I read; Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum, and The Fifth Elephant have been my faves. I am fairly certain that The Witches and The Watch are my favourite groups to follow, with Rincewind being the opposite. I really don’t enjoy the Rincewind books at all. The Last Continent wasn’t very fun, fairly hard to follow and disconnected for me, and just felt like a bunch of pastiches of Australian stereotypes.

I picked up Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher on the recommendation of a friend, without realising that it was a fantasy-romance book. Whoops! The world is great, as were the characters but I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much as T. Kingfisher’s other work. I think I’m just learning that romance novels — including fantasy-romance — are just not for me. I don’t seem to get on with the “beats” of a romance book despite the fact I somewhat enjoy romance plots as part of larger or other works.

I read All Systems Red to get acquainted with Murderbot. It wasn’t what I expected but still quite good and I look forward to reading the next few books, perhaps as palette-cleansers between other larger works. I also really enjoyed Planetfall by Emma Newman. This was really novel, really interesting sci-fi. A picked it up and recommended it to me and I really enjoyed it as well. I might read more by Emma Newman soon.

The lowest moments for me were reading through a few Suneater books by Christopher Ruocchio. They are… problematic. I picked up the set a while ago because the premise is quite cool, I have a soft spot for space opera, and a few YouTubers had recommended them as comparable to both Red Rising and The Expanse; two series which I really enjoyed.

I’m really not sure why people compare Suneater to these series, because other than sitting comfortably in the realm of space opera they couldn’t really be more different in tone and premise. I had problems with Suneater straight away from the first book, Empire of Silence. I ignored the problems because it was the author’s first published book and I was assured they got better. They mostly did, and both Howling Dark and Demon In White were just compelling enough to keep me going although I had growing concerns. This came to a head partway through the fourth book, Kingdoms of Death, which I ended up DNF’ing because I couldn’t take it much more.

I won’t rant too much here because I don’t want to clog up these posts with rants and also because I don’t want to have to translate these rants into Esperanto. However, in summary my main problems with Suneater are that the books are very politically conservative and only grow more conservative as the series goes on. The reason I DNF’d Kingdoms of Death is that the author makes a horrible, racist, caricature of Russian people and demonstrates their own utter political incompetence when describing what they believe is the end-state of a Communist society in the far-future. I can normally grit my teeth and get through stuff like this if the rest of work is good; but it also read like something written by Ben Shapiro. The protagonist and narrator is also a bit of a “Gary Stu” and while the author attempts to give them flaws and an unreliable-narrator vibe, the conservative politics of the author and the series’ setting means that the main character is not very compelling at all.

Ultimately the books read as a cross between some pulpy sword-and-planet fiction (which I am all for at times and with the right context), and Dan Simmons’ Ilium/Olympos duology which was the turning point of Dan Simmons descending into conservative lunacy. Oh well, I’ve heard that James S. A Corey are doing a space opera series soon which I hope will be a balm to this.

After I DNF’d Kingdoms of Death about 400 pages in, I read a bit of Pratchett to take the taste out of my mouth and then read through the Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb. This was my first Robin Hobb and it was incredible. I really liked it. It definitely shows its age, and deserves content warnings for stuff like sexual assault (both attempted and successful) and a few gory scenes; but overall these books were a very compelling fantasy series and I thoroughly enjoyed them. I think I enjoyed the first two books more than the final one but Ship of Destiny is still great. These are definitely very character-driven, which is something that I’ve learned I really appreciate in a story. Everything that happens with the characters feels really well grounded in how they’re established and the things they go through during the novels. I really got a feel for the setting of Bingtown and the Pirate Isles, and the events were page-turning. I ended up making up excuses to stay up past my bedtime to read another chapter or two, and had a few very tired workouts as a result.

As of writing I have also started a re-read of the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (and later Brandon Sanderson). This is something I have been intending to do for a while. I first read WoT in 2003-ish, when there were only 10 books out (plus New Spring), and then never managed to pick them back up as the final books were coming out. I then binge-read them again around 2014 or 2015 before I started logging my reads, but only managed to get through to book 10 again before I burned out.

I plan to read these in blocks of 3 or 4 books initially before throwing in a palette cleanser. I find Jordan’s prose very drinkable so I tend to read and digest these books very quickly so don’t need too much recovery between books. I’ve since read about “the slog” which might explain why I burned out around book 10 last time. As a result, I’ll take it easy and just keep plugging away and just take a break if I’m not enjoying it. I’m not sure what I’ll use as palette-cleansers between WoT books, as I think Discworld might not be appropriate. I’ll have a think about this.

Movies

This is easy, there are only two films. I watched Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny on a quiet day at the office just before my parental leave started (don’t worry all my work was done and handed over to clients!). It hasn’t aged well with a bit of homophobia which disappointed me, but was otherwise very nostalgic and a nice way to kill half an afternoon while writing a handover doc.

I also managed to watch Civil War (not the Marvel Movie). This came at the recommendation of my mother but I was also intrigued after seeing the trailer when A and I were in the cinema for Dune Part Two. I really enjoyed it on several levels. It was a great film to choose for a movie night and I definitely feel I didn’t waste my “me time”.

  1. more like Liberista Folio, am I right? ↩︎

  2. https://dedupelist.com/ ↩︎

  3. I first grab all the relevant lines from the log file in nvim, and dump them into a file inside of /tmp then do some macro-fu to remove the dates and replace the CSV formatting with the “X by Y” format used in these posts. I can then run this against awk '!seen[$0] /tmp/albums.txt to get a deduplicated list of albums. Eventually I’ll work this into a script where I can get this list of albums automatically, but this represents a big step forward now! ↩︎