Decently good cheer

Hoo boy, hello! I did it again, dear reader—leaving the newsletter to the end of a day, growing increasingly stressed as I knew I had something to do while pushing on with yet other things. Ah well.

It was a stark contrast to yesterday, which was spent entirely relaxed, out and about with T. First to Chelsea, for some coffee and bread. (The bread ended up being… smoked!? I still don’t know how I feel about it.) Then to the Boucher Forest park, a park with a great set of trails in Gatineau (yes, there are large wooded parks other than Gatineau Park on the other side of the river!) and the nearby Éco des champs farm, which was delightfully empty save for the various animals. (They have a “trust market” system by which you can purchase various goods and admission. The most wholesome, lovely spirit—hoorah for that!) And, finally, to a wonderful dinner out.

Otherwise, to hold onto these various feelings of decently good cheer, I’m studiously avoiding the news (as best one can—it’s hard not to hear about the things going on, ranging as they do from silly to terrible).

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• How do you get from a digital camera’s sensor to a photo you can see? A very practical, easy to visualize explanation of what “processing” really means for digital photography, and how “unedited” is hardly what it sounds like. (via Bill Mill)
• Dan Bouk’s 2023 review of There Are No Accidents showed up in a few of my feeds in the last few days, thanks I think to Mita Williams. Captures the book’s essence well, drawing me to read it—what more could you ask!?
• A great discussion of how, though reported as a single figure, inflation is actually numerous different changes in price levels, and the greater the change, the greater the dispersion in outcomes (some products increase more than the average amount, some less)—which has a bunch of knock-on effects both individually and systemically.
• That reminded me of the Statistics Canada “personal inflation calculator”, which allows you to calculate your own inflation rate, based on your actual expenses (instead of the generic basket used for headline inflation). (I just input my rough numbers using last year’s expenses, and it seems my personal inflation rate was generally lower than headline inflation until January 2023; since then, it’s run 1–2 percentage points higher. Now I’m curious to calculate how my basket compares to the normal CPI basket!)
• I was up and down with some holiday sickness in recent weeks, so Erin Boyle’s reminder to do something slow and small with your hands when sick was very welcome.
• I’ve never really been one to decorate seasonally. (Nor one to decorate much at all.) But this post put into words what I’ve felt felt in spaces where people decorate seasonally: there’s a life to those homes, a sense of novelty worth creating.
• For those making various goals for the year, consider Nicky Case’s motivation technique of “drawing lines on a graph”. (Case’s “30 tips for my 13-year-old self” are also worth a read!)
• Good profile of Molly Gregory, a singular woodworker and teacher—the Black Mountain College years are particularly inspiring.
• Very wholesome story of Ottawa’s “Golden Girls”, the remaining two of three friends who moved in together twenty years ago.
• Enjoyed living vicariously through Sameer’s “moments of joy” from 2025.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas