Posted by bzedan on Dec 22, 2025
Image description: A photograph of a path through a Mediterranean climate park of scrub and heavily bearded palms. Gold late-afternoon winter light drips through the leaves of one tree that is changing with the seasons. End ID.
I'll make this quick because we're all busy, the schedules get weird and the world gets hectic these last few weeks of the year from a drunken mix of holidays and year-end management that society has carefully honed to peel you to your marrow.
This week I got some good words in on the current project--which isn't even the project I'm going to be making myself promo in 2026, lol, that's just how it goes. More good work lovingly done on gifts, including my yearly "how tf do I mail merge again?" challenge. I fully forgot to blog this week, but put something up anyway.
We did get to go to our favourite gardens for the shortest day of the year and everything smelled amazing (as it always does if you go midday), and I got rocked to my heels by the piled-up leaf scent of one of the Oregon oaks they have. Most of their oaks are live oaks, with their smart, small dry-weather leaves and kooky acorns. For whatever reason California Botanic Garden also has two Oregon oaks, who will never get as big as the one I grew up around. They do a solid job in a far too dry environment, with their stupid big leaves designed to catch what sun they may. There is a already mouldering, ready to mulch, smell to them that I'd never before encountered the way I did today: fully goddamn dry without the soggy wet richness of eternal damp. None of the "baby I love to burn" oil-rich smells that otherwise permeate Calbg.
Anyway, a lovely time. Onward we go as the days lengthen once more.
Thank you always for your support!
Crossposted to Patreon.