It’s been a pleasant, mostly regular year. If there is a theme, I’d say it’s that I’ve entered an analogue phase. I’ve stepped back from the digital and embraced the physical. That means vinyl records, lifting heavy things, making my photos look like film, biking and hiking down paths with no GPS, sweating sweat out of my own body onto the solid physical Earth.

It’s partially a reaction to the Internet becoming an inhospitable place. Much of what we see is created by artificial beings we can’t understand, and anything online is suspect, even if it’s wearing the face of a real person. It’s all robots collaborating with algorithms to make human thought as bland as possible.

In this new world, being human as fuck is an act of self care. Maybe an act of rebellion.

That means unique human failings too, though. My right shoulder hurt for much of the year, until it suddenly switched to my left shoulder. Age is coming for me and my family—all the more reason to enjoy life instead of scrolling the algorithms, I suppose.

Here are a few highlights of 2025 and some mostly unrelated pictures.

• Wandering Toronto despite Meg slipping on ice moments before we left and injuring her leg. New appreciation for people with physical difficulties.
• Good friends getting married in Hamilton / Ancaster.
• A haunted road trip from Guess Where Trips in May.

• A Canadian election that went okay. In last year’s blog post, I was worried Canada would follow the U.S. into right-wing extremism. We didn’t do that. It’s not the best result and we’re still fucked in both the short term and long terms (we’re seriously doing pipelines??), but it could’ve been worse.
• Pelee Island for a friend’s 50th (!) birthday.
• AAIC conference in Toronto, feeling good about my job, making a difference in the world, and the world getting better every year, at least in terms of treating horrible diseases.

• Adventures in Flesherton and Collingwood, exploring an abandoned ski resort. Celebrating Pepper’s 6th birthday with jumping around on cliffs, her being happy and healthy making me happy and healthy.
• Lots of bike rides and forest adventures, and equally nice, relaxing on our deck with some drinks after.

• Lowlight: David Lynch died this year. I don’t admire many celebrities, but his filmmaking and general vibe really clicked with me, so that was a bad loss. And while we can’t say that climate change killed this particular person (maybe the decades of smoking are more to blame), we can be certain that deaths like this will come for more of us, sooner, because of climate change. And we’re still building pipelines. Fix your hearts or die.
• My last hermit crab, Death Crab, also passed away. RIP. He was one of the best crabs I knew.

• An ice storm, Christmas dinner in the dark during a power outage, the usual stream of holiday / birthday parties that I love, but they do overwhelm my introvert brain by the end.

Ok. I don’t think anyone reads blogs any more, so this is mostly for me. Dear diary, etc. But if you are an actual non-machine human person out there, reading this, I hope you had a great year, and that 2026 is good too, and that neither of us get sick or die. Keep being as human as you can be. Bye!