In related news, here are five albums (and one EP) I love from 2025, in no particular order:

Of Monsters and Men | All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade

While it’s not their best album, it’s been six very long years since the last album from one of my favourite live bands ever.

There’s a Tuesday | Blush

Great album for a road trip! One of the best debut albums in recent years.

Charlie Cunningham | In Light

Great for headphone listening. Charlie Cunningham keeps getting better and better, and this is a standout favourite of mine.

Taylor Swift | The Life of a Showgirl

Although I’m still smitten with the Folklork/Evermore albums, I think this is one of her best, but my opinion is a bit controversial.

Lowswimmer | Godspeed, Fantasy

Solo album from a musician better known for his collaborations with Novo Amor, this is very much in the same vein.

Old Sea Brigade | If Only I Knew, Pt. 2

I’ve always liked a small handful of Old Sea Brigade songs, but this EP doubled the number of songs of theirs that I like.

At the end of every year, I open up my photo library, pick a few interesting photos and movies from each month, and write something about them. Rather than clogging up your social media feed every day, you only have to hear about what I’ve been doing once a year.

January

I doubled down on my habitat restoration work in Coolidge Reserve, which also doubled my laundry workload. I’ve been spending time in the stream at the bottom of the gully, which is deep, narrow, and muddy. So far, I’ve avoided any Romancing the Stone moments.

From above, the reserve looks pretty amazing. A neighbourhood group has done an amazing job over the last 20 years, transforming a barren rubbish tip into a beautiful forest with thousands of hours of hard volunteer work. They’ve done 90% of the hard work and I’ve swooped in to do some drainage work and weed removal to unlock some lost potential.

February

The cicadas arrived this month. Although they are annual visitors and don’t reach plague numbers, I was impressed with how loud their songs were. I attempted to capture it on video, but the kākā insisted the video be all about them instead.

One day, I heard what sounded like a tiny helicopter coming from my patio and discovered this big fella. Kapokapowai | Carové’s Giant Dragonfly is the largest in New Zealand and one of the biggest in the world, with a 130 mm (5.1 in) wingspan.

March

In mid-March, I flew back to Portland for six weeks to visit the birds (and Eric!). I had been away for 9 months, which was a few months longer than my original plan.

The birds were happy to see me and my hat.

We went on a hike up the Salmon River—the birds stayed at home—and it turned out to be one of the most beautiful hikes we’ve ever done. An incredibly lush forest with lots of old-growth trees.

April

We did a weekend trip to the Oregon coast, staying in Newport, a quiet little town that had some remarkably good restaurants. We did some hikes on the way there and back and visited the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

Then, we finally got around to hiking the Eagle Creek trail, which was closed by fire for several years right around the time we moved to Portland.

May

Returned to Wellington with a number of projects waiting for me. I had ordered about 250 plants from two local sources that provide free plants for conservation projects on public land. The area behind my house became a temporary plant nursery.

After clearing invasive plants on the south side of Coolidge Reserve over the past year, I (literally) uncovered the extent of issues with our storm drain system. It’s a vicious cycle in which poor drainage, invasive weeds, stunted forest growth, and erosion all lead to a downward spiral. Despite zero interest in managing drainage projects, I decided the cycle needed to be broken. I spent several months consulting with engineers, drain layers, and many of the neighbours who own the 20 properties that feed into this private system.

In the meantime, I did some planting in areas of previous land slips as a stopgap measure.

Autumn is the very short feijoa season, and I thought I missed most of it by being in Portland, but I was happy to learn that there is a second crop that appears in May!

June

Eric sent me some photos of our garden in Portland. It’s been four years since we ripped out the lawn and planted a native garden. It’s really exceeded our wildest expectations. I’ve been trying to get pictures yearly to track the progress, but I wasn’t there this time around.

One of my regular volunteer gigs is at the Forest & Bird Nursery in Wellington. It’s been a great education in native plants, especially recognising plants at the seedling stage. Plus, I love their lichen-encrusted sign.

If you’re wondering where I get all my energy, it mostly comes from my magic mix of nuts, dried fruit, grains, and seeds. Given its similarity to the food mix I make for my flock of birds, I used to call it “macaw mix”, but I’ve since renamed it to kākā mix to honour the local parrot.

July

Fall is peak fungus season! We’ve had a wetter-than-usual winter up to this point, so it was a bumper crop.

One of the benefits of living in a small place is that everyone knows everyone, especially in the conservation community. The photo of me below got featured in a newsletter, and I’ve been stopped on the street a few times with people recognising me from this photo (when I’m wearing my hat, anyway).

August

I started making my own yoghurt earlier in the year and wrote up a long-winded article about my experiences. Or you might consider it “comprehensive”.

Eric visited for four weeks in August/September, working remotely for Apple for this trip. At the end of his workday, we usually go for a walk. This short hike up to Omaroro Reservoir is a favourite hike and a bird hotspot.

September

Speaking of Eric, he recently got approved by Apple to work remotely from New Zealand full-time. We recently passed our 20-year anniversary, but the past few years, we’ve only seen each other for a few months a year, which has been difficult.

We managed to rent out our house in Portland to our regular bird care person, a stroke of luck that kept us from the difficult task of rehoming our nine parrots. I made a quick visit for about ten days. From dawn to dusk, we slogged through one room at a time and sorted everything into donate, sell, and keep piles, with the latter being the smallest by far (thankfully).

Back in Wellington, I joined a group doing monitoring of Pohowera | Banded dotterels. It’s sort of a needle-in-the-haystack exercise, but it’s been a great experience to become experienced with bird spotting, something I’ve never been particularly good at. I’m part of a group that does weekly counts, nest monitoring, and banding.

I unexpectedly got involved in a political campaign, working for Alex Baker, one of nine candidates for Mayor of Wellington. I’d dabbled a bit working for campaigns over the years, but usually I end up not fitting in, or the candidate gradually becomes a sellout. But Alex was someone of great integrity and attracted some really wonderful people who were a joy to spend time with.

October

Behind our rented house in Wellington is a council reserve with 100-year-old radiata pine trees that are mostly nearing the end of their life. Whenever there is a big storm, a few of them come crashing down spectacularly. It’s a fascinating story unfolding as these old trees retire and an understory of natives gradually takes over.

My big neighbourhood drainage project, which has been many months in the making, finally got moving. These are not quite as fun as bird photos, but this work will have the side benefit of helping our wonderful birdlife flourish even more.

I don’t eat desserts much, but I half-invented this one, and I’m pretty proud of it. Dates stuffed with pistachio butter, covered in 100% chocolate and sea salt.

November

After heroically managing the move-out from our house in Portland, Eric arrived in Wellington for good this time. He’s working Tuesday through Saturday to match up with Apple hours in Portland/Cupertino, so that leaves us with Sunday and Monday as our weekend. We did some long hikes around Wellington to prepare for a three-day planned hike at the end of November.

Then we embarked on our trip down to Fiordland. After tolerating a couple of days in Queenstown, we did the three-day Routeburn Track.

For the remainder of our trip, we rented a car and did some day hikes and drives around Te Anau and Milford Sound.

December

We visited this fun new sculpture in Waitangi Park in Wellington. It’s really trippy.

I’ll finish the year by sharing some bird videos from Zealandia, where I’ve worked on a couple of their conservation teams for the past couple of years. It’s quite a privilege to contribute to a place we first visited over 15 years ago that is doing so much good for native birds.

First, some sunbathing Toutouwai | North Island robin, extinct in Wellington until their reintroduction in 2002. They are only just starting to live and breed on the fringes of Zealandia, but the future is hopeful with the efforts of Predator Free Wellington.

And a Hihi | Stichbird feeding on a flax plant. Even in Zealandia, I don’t often see them, so it was quite special. This bird struggles even in the sanctuary due to a lack of native vegetation and gets supplementary feeding. It may take many decades before it might be able to survive outside of the sanctuary.

Instead of keeping captive birds as I have for most of my life, working with wild birds is what gets me out of bed every day. Thanks for making it to the end of my letter. Drop me a line if it’s been too long. Happy New Year!

Read my other annual letters here.

Siskel and Ebert sidebar

When I do find myself reading entertainment reviews, I'm often reminded of Siskel and Ebert.

For those that don’t know, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert had a show on PBS for 25 years where they reviewed the latest movies, until Siskel died in 1999, years before Taylor Swift’s first album. They were such different people, almost complete opposites in some ways, which made it entertaining even if you didn’t care about the movies.

I was a teenager at the time, so I had extreme opinions, but I always adored Roger Ebert, a sentiment that persisted later in life. And I really disliked Gene Siskel. To me, he was the stereotypical film snob. The one who had all sorts of expectations about how movies should be, how plots should unfold, and how various genres should be represented. I found it stifling. Roger Ebert, on the other hand, seemed to have more of a beginner’s mind and was more interested in being entertained. He valued movies that were really out there, that broke the mould. If a movie made him laugh or feel something new, he loved it.

Back to Taylor Swift

So, I’m not historically a Taylor Swift fan, but like many people, I “discovered” her with the release of Folklore during COVID. Previously, she was in the “pop star” bucket that I purposely ignored, because I can be a snob like Gene Siskel. But I read a story about how she released this surprise album, and it basically broke the internet. I had to find out what the heck was going on.

And I was hooked from the first song. I don’t think I listened to anything else for several months.

After that, I started listening to older albums, found a lot that I liked, and continued to listen to new albums as they came out. But Folklore and Evermore, the follow-on album that was in the same vein, remained tops. I found her 2024 album (The Tortured Poets Department) to be especially disappointing, and felt like maybe the whole thing had run its course.

But this new album (The Life of a Showgirl) has really grabbed me and refuses to let me go. One song, which I’m embarrassed to say is called Wi$hli$t, has really become one of my all-time favourites. After listening to it for 10 days straight now, I took a break and listened to Folklore/Evermore again and I’m thinking this might have exceeded those.

I can’t say that I feel her musical accompaniment is anything special or that her lyrics really grab me. I can’t even really say that I think she has an amazing voice. However, I feel like she has invented some of the most clever and unique vocal melodies I’ve heard, and that’s really the reason I think she’s unique. Some artists might have a couple of clever vocal lines on an album if they’re lucky, but I feel that Taylor Swift sometimes has several per song. This is probably why Folklore was such a perfect entry point for me, as it was a stripped-down album that was mostly just her vocal melodies.

Reading the reviews

Since I’ve been in this little Taylor Swift new album bubble for a few weeks, I was curious how the album was being received.

After reading a few reviews, I was back to thinking about Siskel and Ebert. Most of the bad reviews sounded like Gene Siskel back from the grave. It was all about expectations. How should a late-career album from a 35-year-old billionaire who is engaged to a football star sound? What should the lyrics be like? It felt like the negative reviews were loaded with all these expectations about how the album should be, and then it was compared with how it actually was and found lacking.

Then I found a review that sounded like Roger Ebert back from the grave. From Rolling Stone magazine, this review gave the album five stars. While acknowledging the existence of her incredibly successful career, they also decided that it was simply a great album. There was nothing in there about what the album should have been like.

Addendum

Roger Ebert died in 2013, only getting to enjoy Taylor Swift’s country career, her crossover albums, and the very beginnings of her becoming the pop star she is today. I wonder what he thought of her.

I’m also glossing over some of the complexities here. There are quotas and surpluses and a lot of nuances. There are also races where multiple positions need to be filled. But I think the takeaway is that if you genuinely rank your preferences when you vote, the system ensures that your vote is much more likely to matter than in a traditional system.

You can read more about ranked-choice voting here.

Should I rank all the candidates?

One of the downsides of ranked choice voting is that it’s much more difficult to rank a list of candidates than it is to just choose your one favourite. As the list of candidates gets longer, this just gets exponentially harder. A common strategy is just to rank the candidates you like and then just leave the rest blank.

Now, this is actually a decent strategy if you feel equally negative about all the candidates you don’t want to see elected. If you genuinely don’t care who, amongst the candidates you don’t like, end up getting elected, then feel free to leave all those blank.

However, maybe you do care. I invite you to try a thought experiment. Look at the list of candidates and cross off the ones you like, and review the remaining list. If those were the only candidates running for office, are there some you feel are slightly more palatable than others? Because with ranked choice, that’s literally how it could shake out. Your preferred candidates could be eliminated, leaving only candidates that you don’t like.

A common myth I see in the media and even in voting guides is that you shouldn’t rank people you don’t want to win. But this is a misunderstanding of how the system works. By ranking candidates you don’t like, you aren’t helping them win. You could be helping candidates you dislike slightly less win out over candidates you dislike even more.

It’s easy to understand why people feel this way. When you rank a candidate you don’t particularly like, it can feel like you are voting for them, but as the candidates are eliminated one by one, the more preferences you have recorded, the more likely your ballot will be used to choose a candidate you prefer over the next one in your list.

Case study

So, I’m going to use the 2025 Wellington election for mayor as an example to help illustrate. There are 12 candidates running. I’ve included a photo of the ballot with my first pass at how I think I’m going to rank the 12 candidates. Focus on the point I’m trying to make rather than critique my choices if you can help it. :)

Now, my preferences are left-leaning, and there is a temptation to simply rank the more left-leaning candidates and leave the conservative ones blank. However, there are conservatives, such as Diane Calvert (who I ranked 6) in this race, who I feel is more palatable than Karl Tiefenbacher (8), for example. And then we start getting into the people that don’t just have bad ideas, they are unfit for office, such as Ray Chung (12) or Rob Goulden (11).

So, for a left-leaning voter, the temptation may be to leave all those blank because you don’t want your vote going to a conservative. But you have to consider the scenario where all your left-leaning candidates have been eliminated. Seems unlikely to happen in this case, but it’s something that you should take into account.

So, back to this example, let’s say Diane Calvert wins. You may realise, oh my gosh, since my higher rankings got eliminated, I probably helped her win. Which you sort of did, but you also helped her win over someone that you felt was an even worse candidate.

The Ray Chung effect

In this particular race, one candidate, Ray Chung, is a candidate that no progressive (or reasonable) person wants to vote for. I won’t go into the gory details, but it’s worth pointing out that if you feel he’s the worst possible candidate, and you rank him last, that last-place vote will never actually be used. If the field ends up getting narrowed down to two candidates, there is no more elimination, and the person with the most votes at that point wins. So, nobody’s last ranking ever comes into play. So, if it makes you feel better not to rank Ray Chung, you can leave it blank, and it’s equivalent to ranking him last. For some people, the last-place ranking might feel like a satisfying thing, so it’s up to you.

But it’s worth pointing out that if there’s a candidate that you feel is the worst, and you don’t rank the second-worst candidate, you may be inadvertently helping the worst candidate win. Let’s say that all but three candidates have been eliminated, and the remaining ones are Ray Chung, Karl Tiefenbacher, and Diane Calvert.

Let’s look at my ballot again with the eliminated candidates removed.

If I didn’t rank any of those three candidates, my ballot at that point is no longer relevant. However, since I ranked Diane Calvert, she gets my one vote. Combined with other votes, perhaps she would prevail over Tiefenbacher and Chung. Sure, it’s not the result I wanted, but because I ranked even the candidates I didn’t want to get elected, I ended up with a candidate I don’t like versus one that is unfit for office entirely.

Conclusion

I hope that this helps people understand the power of ranked choice voting. I know it can be depressing to think that an election may come down to a handful of candidates you don’t like, but think about places in the world that don’t have ranked choice voting, and all you ever get is two shit-tastic candidates. With ranked choice, there is a much greater opportunity to elect someone that is broadly liked, but would have failed to get elected under a more traditional voting system.

I feel that if more people leveraged the power of ranked-choice systems, we would be less likely over time to end up with a situation that most people are unhappy with.

But now everything is plastic. Studies have shown that recycling is the 60th most effective action you can take to reduce carbon emissions. That’s out of a list of 61 possible actions!

Recycling does divert waste from landfills, but I argue that recycling is important primarily because it confronts you with your own waste stream. For the past couple of years, I’ve lived in a place with no recycling bin pickup, so we put our recycled materials in a clear plastic bag by the kerbside. This has made me even more aware of the enormous stream of plastic shit I generate.

My giant containers of Cyclops yoghurt, which I consider the best yoghurt in the world, were the biggest offenders. I tried one local brand of yoghurt in glass bottles, but I was not a fan. So, I took matters into my own hands and decided to try making it myself.

Buy plastic to save plastic?

Turns out yoghurt makers, even the ones that don’t use electric power, are mostly plastic. I’m not a fan of buying more plastic to save plastic, so I found this old-school yoghurt maker.

Country Trading Co in New Zealand sells it, but they have a web presence in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. NZD $70 for the kit (US $45).

Including the packaging, everything is aluminium, glass, cardboard, or paper. In exchange for no plastic, it requires more work on your part. A plastic yoghurt machine handles the whole process, whereas this yoghurt maker requires you to cook and cool the milk, only using this jar and cannister for the fermentation process. So, you’re trading less plastic for more work on your part.

Tools

The yoghurt maker comes with a decent instruction booklet, and I did find a number of recipes online, but I found the instructions to be quite sparse and didn’t handle many of the inevitable questions I had. When things went wrong, there wasn’t much guidance. So I decided to write up a much more verbose description based on my experience making about 50 batches of yoghurt over the past year.

Here’s what I use to make one batch of yoghurt:

• 2 of the yoghurt makers listed above (so I can make large batches)

• 1.5 L of whole milk

• 50ml of cream (double cream or whipping cream can work)

• Packet of yoghurt culture (or commercial plain yoghurt, or saved yoghurt from a previous batch)

• Optional: vanilla beans or paste, honey

• Large enamelled cast iron pot, sufficient to hold all the liquid

• Stainless steel whisk

• Stainless steel ladle

• Stainless steel funnel

• Stainless steel colander

• Large bowl for whisking the final product

• Jars to store your yoghurt

• Optional: 2 pieces of cheesecloth for Greek-style yoghurt (available from Country Trading)

• Thermometer (available from Country Trading as well)

• Silicone scraper

• A bunch of time!

I’m using a silicone scraper from the place I’m renting, which is made of silicone, which is partially plastic. Since I didn’t buy it, I am less annoyed by it, but I think I’ll find an alternative eventually.

Experimental mindset

I would encourage you to think of yoghurt making with an experimental mindset. The first time, try to follow a recipe. But each time you repeat the process, take note of what you did, evaluate the final product, and then consider making small changes the next time. I started with the longest and slowest techniques possible, refined them over time until I was really happy with the quality of the yoghurt, and then worked on simplifying and reducing the overall time while not compromising the quality.

At the end, there’s a section for troubleshooting that can give you some ideas of what tweaks to try if it didn’t turn out exactly as you wished.

Cooking

Before starting the cooking process, I’d recommend having the yoghurt maker, glass jar, ladle, and funnel ready to go. You want to get the milk mixture into the jars when it’s close to the 45°C temperature, so if you’re fumbling around for supplies, it may get too cool.

The process starts with adding the milk and cream into the pot, along with the seeds from half to one full vanilla bean. Note that the cream isn’t mandatory, but my goal was to replicate my favourite yoghurt, which uses added cream. I’m planning to try vanilla bean paste in a future recipe, so I will update the recipe with how that works. Note that vanilla beans easily double the cost of your recipe and are not required for amazing yoghurt.

I whisk everything together to make sure the cream and optional vanilla beans are mixed up nicely. Attach the thermometer to the bowl so the tip of it goes halfway down into the mixture without touching the bottom of the bowl.

I’ve experimented with different methods to heat the mixture up to the target of 90°C. The key issue is that you can burn the milk if you heat it too quickly or don’t stir it often enough. Until it gets up to about 70°C, you can just whisk the mixture every few minutes, but be more attentive as it gets hotter than that.

I’ve tried two approaches:

• Whisking once a minute while allowing the temperature to slowly rise up to 90 °C

• Whisking continuously while jacking up the heat

Whatever approach you take, I recommend setting a timer to go off once a minute the first few times you make yoghurt to make sure you don’t get distracted and forget. Burned milk can make the pan harder to clean and may slightly alter the taste, but you’ll still end up with great yoghurt, so don’t worry.

One thing to note is that the temperature reading on the thermometer will rise a bit as you stir, as contact with the hot sides of the pot will raise the overall temperature. You should always check your thermometer reading only after you’ve been stirring for 5 seconds or so, as it will be most accurate.

Once the temperature hits 90°C, you can turn off the stove. You have several options for cooling down the mixture to 45°C, which is the target temperature for adding the yoghurt culture.

• Just leave it as is and wait for it to cool

• Put the bowl in the sink, stopper it, and fill the sink with cold water

• Same as above, but add ice to the water in the sink

There are pros and cons to each approach. It can take a really long time to cool, especially in a cast-iron pan, and you risk letting it cool too much if you’re not paying attention. Putting it in the sink and filling it up with cold water can cool it down in under 5 minutes. Adding ice can shave down your time by half or more.

Just as with heating the mixture, you’ll get the most accurate reading while whisking it, as it will cool a few degrees while stirring. If using the water or ice cooling method, I like to take it out of the bath when it drops below 50°C so I don’t overcool it.

What if I screw it up?

None of the recipes I found in my little yoghurt book or online told me what to do if I messed up any of the cooking process, but I did my own digging and got some answers.

If you end up boiling it over 90°C, the worst that can happen is that you’ll get more burned milk in the mixture. It’s not a health risk, but maybe it might end up tasting weird; there’s no harm in eating it.

If you end up cooling it below 45°C, the fix is simple. Just put it back on the stove and gently heat it back up to 45°C. No harm, no foul. The key thing is to get a temperature that the yoghurt bacteria will like. You don’t need to start over with the whole process!

Fermentation

When it hits 45°C, add the packet of yoghurt culture if you went that route, or add a tablespoon of some plain yoghurt, either from store-bought yoghurt or a previous batch you made. Whisk it together nicely.

Now, put the funnel in one of the jars and start ladling in the mixture. The recipe I’ve listed here will fully fill up the two jars, so you can fill them to the brim. Depending on which cooking method you use, you may end up with varying amounts of milk as some will have boiled off. If you find that there’s excess milk, just decrease the amount of milk in the next batch, and you’ll be good to go. The proportions of milk to cream are not important.

Screw the lids on the jars, insert them into the yoghurt maker, and close the lid. You want to leave the jars in a room temperature sort of place, so not next to a single-pane window on a winter day, for example.

If your house is cold and it’s winter, this can impact the fermentation, and you’ll end up with failed fermentation or more watery yoghurt. There are a couple of things you can do, either together or just one of these options:

• While you are cooking the yoghurt, fill the glass jars and the yoghurt makers with hot tap water. Empty them out just before you ladle in the milk.

• Put the yoghurt makers in your oven (off) and close the door. The heat emanating from the yoghurt makers will get trapped in the oven and slow the cooling process.

Wait a minimum of 12 hours. If you open the yoghurt maker and the glass jars are still warm to the touch, you could get more fermentation to take place by leaving them for another few hours. When you open the jars and tilt them a bit, you should get an idea whether fermentation was successful. If it’s still liquid, it failed! If there is some firmness to it, then you have some fermentation. If it’s really firm, then you've got a lot. It’s a matter of personal preference, but in general, you want to maximise your fermentation to get the most health benefits.

When the interior glass jars are no longer noticeably warm to the touch, the fermentation process is over, and there’s no benefit to letting it go longer. As you evaluate your final product, you may find you want to extend the time to get thicker yoghurt, or you may find that you can still make great yoghurt and decrease the time. There’s no harm in experimentation!

Greek yoghurt?

Your choice at this step is whether you want to make regular yoghurt or Greek-style, which can be thicker, creamier, and higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates. All yoghurts are really great for you, so it’s really more of a personal preference. Removing whey will alter the taste profile. Some people feel yoghurt tastes less like yoghurt with less whey, while others say the exact opposite!

Regardless of what path you choose here, I would dump the yoghurt out of the jars into a large bowl for whisking. You may need to scrape out the jars as the yoghurt will sometimes adhere to the sides. Even if you opted out of using cream, you may also get a layer of cream rising to the top of the yoghurt. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the yoghurt will taste uniformly better, in my opinion, if the cream is evenly mixed in.

Once I’ve whisked the yoghurt until it’s smooth, you can make the decision about Greek yoghurt. For regular yoghurt, just skip to the next section.

For Greek yoghurt, I re-use my cast iron pot I used for cooking, put the colander inside it, then line the colander with two layers of cheesecloth. I carefully pour the whisked mixture into the lined colander, then put the whole concoction into the refrigerator.

I would wait 4 hours for the draining process, but it’s all up to your personal preference. As the whey is draining into the bowl, you’ll notice that the level of the yoghurt drops in the centre, so eventually you’ll figure out a nice visual cue for when the yoghurt has drained the amount of whey you want to drain.

Another visual clue that it’s ready is that the yoghurt will separate from the edge of the cheesecloth if you lift it a bit from the edge. This indicates that it has dried out a bit. It’s much easier to extract the yoghurt from the colander if it’s dry enough, when it will detach easily from the cheesecloth. If it doesn’t separate, it might stick to the cheesecloth when you try to remove it, requiring some scraping.

So, at this point, I dump the yoghurt out of the colander back into the bowl I used earlier for whisking. Save the whey for a moment here. If you think the yoghurt is too thick, you can add some whey back into the yoghurt and whisk it up. Note that after refrigeration, the yoghurt will thicken even more, so this is something you’ll have to experiment with over time.

The excess whey can be discarded, or you can do a search for some interesting ideas for what to do with excess whey.

Packaging up the yoghurt

Whether you went the Greek yoghurt route or not, here’s the point where you can add some final ingredients, like maybe a teaspoon of honey, then whisk it in.

I typically make Greek yoghurt, which is quite thick, so spooning it into my storage jars requires a funnel, but you may find you need one. I’ve been re-using some sauerkraut containers and my recipes mostly fill up two 500ml jars. My latest batch was especially thick, so the second jar was only partially full.

Then, to make it all professional, I’ll label the tops with an acrylic marker, which can be removed with some isopropyl alcohol or scrubbing with some soap and water.

Overall, this has been a really rewarding experience and turned more into a routine that I enjoy rather than a chore. I’ll even just whip up a batch while standing around in the kitchen eating breakfast, so the time commitment becomes less and less.

I’m super thrilled with the quality of the yoghurt I was able to achieve, especially considering I feel like I set really high standards.

Cleanup

The cheesecloth can just be hand-washed in some lightly soapy water, rinsed out, then hung up to dry. Hanging them in the sun will help them dry faster.

I’ve discovered the glass jars sometimes don’t come clean in the dishwasher, so you may need a bit of hand-scrubbing to get the yoghurt unstuck from the sides of the jar.

Troubleshooting

I’ve had only one batch of dairy yoghurt that was kind of a failure, and that was when I was absentmindedly adding water to cool the milk down and accidentally added a ton of water to the pot. However, I ended up straining the yoghurt and just ended up with a much smaller batch of Greek yoghurt that tasted fine.

If you have total failure for the yoghurt to solidify during fermentation, there are a number of possible problems:

• You didn’t reach the 90°C threshold. Perhaps the thermometer was inaccurate or not placed properly, or you didn’t mix it up before taking a reading, and perhaps took the milk off the heat too soon. By not fully pasteurising the milk, you may have left some bacteria behind that are competing with the yoghurt bacteria, causing the lactofermentation to not work properly.

• The milk cooled down too much for fermentation to take place. It could be the same thermometer issues, or you could experiment with keeping the yoghurt maker warmer during the process, or extending your fermentation time.

• Your culture was bad. I’ve had some packets of yoghurt starter that seemed to fail on me, so I’ve had better luck just using yoghurt as a starter.

If you had successful fermentation, then you just may need to make small tweaks to your process to get the desired thickness, taste, and texture.

In some online recipes, I’ve seen people complain about lumps in yoghurt, but given my whisking at several stages, I’ve never run into that. I’ve also heard claims that more whisking during cooking can lead to creamier yoghurt, but I’ve never tried less whisking, really, so I can’t comment on that.

Raw milk

Since heating the milk to 90°C effectively pasteurises the milk, there is no benefit to making yoghurt with raw milk. Save that for drinking.

Coconut yoghurt

An interesting side note is that I attempted to make coconut yoghurt, using either coconut milk or coconut cream, and using a non-dairy starter or store-bought coconut yoghurt.

And I’ve never successfully gotten ANY fermentation to happen. Given my amazing success with the dairy yoghurt, I’m quite puzzled. The only difference in the recipes I’ve found is that they typically recommend heating to 85°C instead of 90°C, but I’ve been careful ,and at this point, I’m suspecting that the coconut milk or cream I’m using may not be suitable for yoghurt.

So, if anyone out there has a lot of failures and successes with coconut yoghurt to share, I’d love to swap ideas.

Pohowera are classified as “at risk - declining” in New Zealand. We found four birds during our visit to the beach today, but it’s early in the season, and birds are not yet pairing up and building nests, so they tend to keep their distance. Here’s a photo I took of the beach.

Netflix ancient history

For the benefit of those that weren’t Netflix users in the early days, here’s a bit of a background. DVDs were sent via postal mail and the amount you paid Netflix each month was based on how many DVDs you had “checked out” at any given time. When you returned a DVD, the next DVD in your queue would be sent out.

When you added a DVD to your queue, it would go to the end of your queue. Rearranging your queue was a laborious process for the first decade of Netflix, requiring you to manually renumber each DVD in your queue and then hitting a Submit button.

Enter Netflix Fanatic

In addition to being able to drag and drop to re-order your Netflix queue, I really wanted a way to shuffle the queue. I wanted to have a good variety of DVDs checked out at any time. When adding items to my queue, maybe I might add a bunch of similar content at the same time, which would mean in a few months, I’ll end up with all the same type of DVDs checked out at one time.

But a simple shuffle didn’t really solve the problem, so I had to make it a bit smarter.

• Series needed to be kept in order. A TV series might have several seasons, and each season might be split amongst multiple DVDs.

• Keeping a good variety of DVDs checked out was accomplished by looking at the DVD genre and then trying to distribute that genre evenly throughout the shuffled queue

So, to a user, I think it felt like a true shuffle even though it wasn’t. I never got a complaint about it!

Applying this to music

Fast forward a few decades, and as a heavy Spotify user, a common usage pattern for me is just to shuffle my Liked Songs. But as user of shuffle knows, sometimes that leads to jarring transitions in styles of music and loudness levels, to name a few. Sometimes just normal randomness leads to a cluster of similar songs, which gives the impression of not being truly random.

Spotify does create nice genre playlists based on your Liked Songs, but sometimes I want something less explicit than that.

I’d like to shuffle only my own music without jarring transitions and something that feels truly random.

I also feel I must plug a great tool I use called Skiley to create interesting playlists based on my Liked Songs.

So, here’s an idea that Spotify or anyone with a music app can freely steal. Spotify and other music services have rich metadata about each track. Here is a full list of what’s available:

acousticness, danceability, energy, instrumentalness, liveness, loudness, speechiness, tempo, valence, key, mode, and time signature

Imagine that I start playing a track and I’m in shuffle mode. When it decides what track to play next, here’s a hypothetical example of how it could work:

• It could start with doing a pre-shuffle and maybe peeking at the first 10 tracks it’s thinking of playing next

• It could look at the metadata for the currently playing track and then try to find one of those 10 songs that’s most similar to the current track. Certain things like "loudness" would be a good factor to overweight compared to the others

• All this extra pre-shuffling could lead to overplaying some songs, so it could counteract that by looking back in the play history and overweighting songs in Liked Songs that have not been played in the longest time

I don’t necessarily think this is an idea no one has ever thought of, but I’ve not seen it implemented exactly like this. A key thing for me is it would be super easy to use. Launch Spotify, hit Shuffle and it picks a random song, then proceeds to play a non-jarring shuffled list of music. The alternatives to this often involve a bit of work or to pre-decide which genre you want to listen to. By this approach, you could start out listening to a randomly selected classical track but then a few hours later you’re listening to death metal. But it would’ve proceed in baby steps.

If you steal the idea, let me know, I’d love to try it.

I’m gradually getting caught up on my annual letters, which I used to send out just after the end of each year. 2024 was a radically different year for me and more than made up for the terrible year that preceded it.

January

We seem to get at least one ice storm every winter, and this one was especially intense. Everything was coated in a couple of inches of ice for several weeks. Without shoe spikes, it was not really possible to walk around outside. Driving was also pretty tricky even if you had the right car for the conditions.

The crows were getting a bit antsy after a few days, as they couldn’t forage for food on the frozen ground. So, they did some skating around for the nuts I brought them.

February

My annual letter wouldn’t be complete without a bunch of bird videos. First, a bit of flirting between Hazel and his potential new girlfriend, Jasmine.

And Kyle enjoying a spring bath.

March

We’ve lived in this extreme open-plan house for many years and have gradually been closing it off to turn it back into a normal home. Our final project was to close off the attic and Eric’s office, to add more privacy and so that sound and heating/cooling can be better controlled. These photos show the framing of the areas that used to be open and are now blissfully separated.

April

Went on several really nice hikes this month. The first was Rowena Crest, a favourite spot in the Columbia Gorge known for its wildflowers. Also did a challenging hike at Coyote Wall.

And then to Forest Park, adjacent to downtown Portland, which is especially lush in Spring.

May

Did a really amazing hike at Mount Saint Helens. A lesson learned here is that you shouldn’t cancel your plans if the weather forecast looks iffy. There was a forecast of a rainy, somewhat chilly, and cloudy day, so we weren’t sure whether it would affect visibility. But we decided to go anyway. There was hardly anyone there, so maybe everyone cancelled because of the weather forecast. It was just gorgeous there and we had the place mostly to ourselves. It was amazing to return to this area that I’ve not visited for more than 20 years.

Four years after ripping out our lawn and planting a native garden, things are looking really amazing.

June

I had planned a trip to New Zealand to do some volunteer work, but health issues postponed it for several years. But this year I finally made it! I was not feeling completely ready, but decided to do it anyway. I arrived in Wellington on June 2 and booked a return flight for December. Eric stayed back in Portland with plans to visit for a couple of months.

Mostly, I was getting settled, but I did get involved with a few groups such as Wellington Bird Rehabilitation Trust and Ngā Kaimanaaki o Te Waimapihi, a community group that does Toutouwai | North Island Robin monitoring and habitat restoration.

I’ve left my birds behind in Portland, but I had the wild birds of Wellington to keep me company.

July

I was staying in a small studio unit for my first month, but with Eric coming to visit, we decided to rent a house. While the house leaves much to be desired, the surroundings really can’t be beat.

A five-minute hike up the street is this beautiful view on top of the Omāroro reservoir, overlooking the city.

I started volunteering at Forest & Bird Nursery, which quickly became one of my favourite places. Great people doing important work, and it has been a great way to become more educated about native plants.

August

Eric came to visit, but he was doing a work-at-home month. We both ended up with bad colds, and then I got COVID for the first time. We did make it to Zealandia, a wildlife sanctuary we first visited in 2007.

Zealandia has been pivotal to the explosion of bird populations in Wellington. By providing a safe place for birds to nest and breed, the population has then spread into the city as they are ambitiously working to remove introduced predators from the entire area.

One of Zealandia’s residents was Orbell the Takahē, who we were fortunate to meet before he passed away from old age several months later.

September

Before heading to New Zealand, I had interviewed for a position at Pūkaha National Wildlife Centre in Mount Bruce, about a 90-minute drive north of Wellington. Initially intending to stay there for 4 weeks, I ended up spending three months there as a ranger in the conservation breeding program. In September, I started my stint there.

I would spend Sunday through Thursday up in a rented house near Masterton and then head back to Wellington for the weekend, about a 90-minute drive away. The nearby mountains were snow-covered during much of my stay there.

I’m not able to show photos from my work in the captive breeding program, but here are some photos from public areas or when I got permission to share a photo.

October

The Wairarapa, where Pūkaha is located, is rich with amazing rainbows and crazy cloud formations that I became a bit obsessed with in my time off.

And then a time-lapse video.

I continued working in the captive breeding program at Pūkaha. Here’s a video of a pair of Kākāriki karaka | Orange-fronted parakeet doing their quiet chatter while eating in the free flight aviary.

Thursday night I would drive back to Wellington and stay through the weekend. I’ll share a couple random videos. I’ll share a video of a tūī feasting on Harakeke | New Zealand flax nectar on a windy day below the Omāroro reservoir.

November

Eric visited for the month of November. I took time off from Pūkaha, and we did multiple mini-vacations that were less than a week each.

One week, we did a driving trip up to the centre of the North Island, which included hiking the Tongariro Crossing, with side visits to Pureora Forest Park, Maungatautiri | Sanctuary Mountain, and a mountain bike trip in Ohakune.

Then, we spent a week on Rakiura | Stewart Island. We opted for the short, small plane flight instead of the ferry, which has a reputation for being quite rough. I sat in the co-pilot seat for the flight over, and Eric on the way back, so that was fun. A highlight was Ulva Island, a predator-free island with some virgin forest a short boat trip from the main island. We loved it so much, we went back for a second day, and each time we were watching the clock to make sure we made it in time for the return boat.

And a bonus video of me trying to be a nature documentarian.

December

Eric and I did some more island hopping in early December, visiting Kapiti Island and Matiu | Somes Island in the Wellington area before he returned to Portland.

I had been offered a longer-term position at Pūkaha as a ranger on the captive breeding team, but I decided that I wanted to be back in Wellington. I was temporarily sort of adrift, but had been doing some habitat restoration work in a small council reserve adjacent to my backyard. I decided to dive more deeply into it, and it’s since become a major project for me. I created a website to track what I’ve been doing and also to document the history of the reserve.

More to come in my next annual letter, but here’s a photo of an area overgrown with invasive plants that I started to tackle near the end of the year.

And Happy New Year from the Wellington waterfront!

Read my other annual letters here.

Here’s what some website that analysed my Spotify history from the last 12 month says are my favourite genres:

1. Permanent wave

2. Rock

3. Indie folk

4. Alternative rock

5. Indietronica

6. Metropopolis

7. Stomp and holler

8. Pop

9. Indie anthem-folk

10. Chamber pop

Here are 25 artists I listened to the most in the last year:

1. Taylor Swift

2. David Byrne

3. Ludovico Einaudi

4. Charlie Cunningham

5. Sia

6. Brett Dennen

7. Billie Eilish

8. Little People

9. VAST

10. Four Tet

11. Simon and Garfunkel

12. CHVRCHES

13. Coldplay

14. Sinéad O’Connor

15. The Paper Kites

16. Etaoin

17. Tycho

18. R.E.M.

19. Novo Amor

20. Imogen Heap

21. Axel Flóvent

22. The Beatles

23. Of Monsters and Men

24. The Naked and Famous

25. Enya

So, what about my favourite decades for music? I love to discover new music and I’m not particularly nostalgic. However, I feel like every song has a magic number of times it can be played before you just don’t want to hear it anymore. For some songs, that number approaches infinity. For many songs, that number is probably zero or close to it.

If you analyze my Liked Songs, my favourite decade is the 2020s and every decade before it is increasingly less popular. Some of that is because newer songs have had less opportunity to be pruned than older ones. Overplayed tracks and artists from the radio era I don’t really want to hear as much anymore. However, I do think that music does keep getting better decade over decade. Maybe more music is available in streamable format nowadays than in the past. Maybe it’s just evolution.

And here’s a graph of how many songs in my library were released in each decade:

Have a happy holiday season

I was particularly fond of using it in August or February. But I never really shared where I got it from. Until now.

So, this is a letter we found in my grandmother Arvilla’s house when we sorted through it after she died. It came from one of her sisters. It’s definitely one of my favourite passive-aggressive letters of all time.

There are numerous highly detailed articles on how to choose a bank in New Zealand, but I thought I’d provide a hopefully visual and straightforward guide. Look for the factors you care about to see which banks meet them or don’t qualify. Note that BoosterSavvy isn't technically a bank, but I included it as it does provide some bank-like services.

You want to support a Kiwi-owned bank:

You need ApplePay:

You don’t want a bank that loans to the fossil fuel industry:

You need direct debits or international money transfers:

You want to bank with a B-corp:

You want a bank that is recognised for high customer satisfaction:

You want a bank with a mobile app that's rated the best:

You want a bank with consistently the highest interest rate on an unlimited withdrawal account:

You want a bank that is customer-owned:

You want a bank that shares profits with customers:

I can’t speak for everyone, but when discussions about which banks to choose come up, I most often hear that people want:

• Kiwi-owned bank

• ApplePay

• Earn competitive rates on savings

• Good for digital-only banking

• Banks that are less driven by maximising corporate profits

• Direct debits are important

That leaves only one bank that meets all the criteria:

And two banks that meet almost all the criteria:

From speaking to The Cooperative Bank, they are working to support Apple Pay, so if that comes to pass, that makes them a top choice.

From an article about Booster Savvy, there is a claim that they are working on adding direct debit functionality. If that’s unimportant, Booster Savvy may be your top choice. See the article linked above for some other interesting features unique to their offerings.

I’m almost two years late writing this annual letter. Honestly, it was such a miserable year for my health that I was going to skip it and pretend it never happened. But I managed to emerge on the other side of it, so now I’m up for it.

January

The year started ominously, with one of our seemingly healthy budgies falling ill and dying very quickly, just seven days into the new year. This video was of him about three weeks before he died, showing off his spin moves.

And then it got worse. Our beloved 28-year-old cockatiel, Betty, who we were told wouldn’t live very long when we adopted her four years earlier, took a turn for the worse and died right on my lap. Betty was an incredibly special bird and was Eric’s COVID buddy, sitting on his shoulder (or lap) most days while he worked in his home office.

One of her endearing little quirks was that she would recognise “She Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC and get very excited whenever it played.

February

We had a nice snowstorm that made our yard look (even more) beautiful and was excellent for building a snowman.

On one of the snowy, icy days, we went to Multnomah Falls, which is the most popular tourist attraction in Oregon. But on this day, it was quite empty and just staggeringly beautiful.

March

The carnage of bird deaths continued with another budgie, Natasha. But here’s a fun video of Natasha doing what looks like a hazing ritual, riding around on the tail of one of our new birds, Coco.

To lighten the mood, I’ll share a video of my bird students learning target training. Usually, the best way to do training is 1-on-1, but our birds live in an aviary and don’t like to be separated from each other. And when I’m training one bird, everyone wants to join in! So, it’s a bit tricky to train birds that are all at different stages of their abilities. In this video, some of the birds can carry the block to the bowl, but others can only drop it into the bowl if it’s right next to them.

April

Installed solar panels and a battery system for the house. Although the solar panels will eventually pay for themselves, batteries are usually not worth it economically. However, they do provide backup power, which can be useful during a heat wave or wildfire smoke event, so we can continue to run air cleaners for the birds if the power is out. We also do get some fairly wicked ice storms in the winter, and although we’ve been fortunate, areas of Portland have been without power for many weeks after an ice storm.

May

An adorable couple of American Robins built a nest on our patio. We put a camera on them, and it was fun to watch them build the nest and raise a family.

June

Another one of our birds, Wendy, tragically and unexpectedly died with an egg trapped inside her. Humans lay tiny eggs, but birds lay really huge ones, especially relative to their body size, so when one doesn’t move properly, terrible things can happen. I’ll share a few videos, first of her taking a bath in the tiny water bowl.

She was doing really well with her training. This is her, on the left, dropping blocks into a bowl and getting a reward.

July

Looking back on this moment in time, this is when my health hit absolute rock bottom. The shit first hit the fan in November 2022 and just kept getting worse month by month. But this was also the moment when the first pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. It would take another year to get there, but I wanted to take a moment to give credit to a few amazing people who helped me come back from the dead.

• Dr Mark Horowitz, a psychiatrist in the UK, whose research I stumbled upon in a fit of desperation, to be honest. I was fortunate to be able to book a telehealth appointment with him. He was the first person who was able to link my situation to a withdrawal syndrome from antidepressants. Without that key insight, I would probably still be incapacitated today. (He has since co-written a book called The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines, which should be on the bookshelf of every prescriber.)

• I started seeing a physical therapist, Jamie Cowan, not really convinced that it could help with pain of this magnitude. But Jamie was doggedly determined and really looked after the whole picture, caring about everything that was happening with me. When relapses left me in tears, she was confident there was light at the end of the tunnel. For nearly a year, I had twice-weekly visits and, believe it or not, did up to 2 1/2 hours of exercises a day, which eventually got me to the point where I could do some normal things again.

• Dr David Ellis, who took on a very tough case and helped see it through to a diagnosis of something called small-fibre neuropathy. He also helped me get in with a psychiatrist who was willing to help me get off the prescription drug treadmill, Dr Jeff Levine.

• Last but definitely not least, Eric Carlson, who stuck by me during this very dark period. I was not much fun to be around.

I’ll have one more important puzzle piece to add in September.

And now a photo update on our garden, about three years after lawn removal.

August

We had to put one of our birds to sleep in August. Amelia was a rescue bird that came to us with obvious ailments that finally caught up to her. She left behind her mate, Hazel.

I set up an Arlo camera outside next to our stream and caught a few fun videos of our neighbourhood birds, including this California Scrub Jay.

September

We adopted a new bird, Kyle, hoping to be a new mate for Hazel.

September was when the final piece of the puzzle took place. I started Ketamine therapy to see if it would help with my neurological issues and some associated severe anxiety. Although I was already starting to show some mild improvement in the previous few months, this was genuinely a turning point.

Looking back on it now, I can’t recommend it enough for anyone suffering from intractable depression, anxiety, or nervous system disorders. I did about 15 sessions of injected Ketamine over the next couple of years, administered by a doctor and guided by a therapist at Rainfall Medicine in Portland. Completely safe, utterly amazing, and worth every penny. Insurance may vary, but the therapist cost, which is more than half the total cost, was covered for me.

I thought I’d share the crazy wallpaper in the building that houses Rainfall Medicine. It was a perfect setting.

October

Our neighbourhood gets pretty serious about Halloween!

We’ve been gradually adding to our Halloween display every year, and this year we bought these metal bats, strung them up, and put some spooky lighting on them. It came out amazingly well.

November

Went to a really amazing Charlie Cunningham concert at the Old Church in Portland, a ridiculously mellow, quiet affair that was in the perfect setting. I was only a casual fan, but this concert turned me into a megafan. After being stuck in the house for much of the year and not able to attend events like this, it was an important milestone.

December

I’d love to end the year on a good note, but our beloved cats, Milo and Reggie, both took a steep decline after not having a great year. We had to put them both to sleep right before Christmas. They were brothers from the same litter and would’ve hit 20 years old by the next February.

Made another trip to Multnomah Falls on a misty day when it was less busy than usual. The nice thing about being 30 mins away is we can pop over there on a “bad” weather day and beat the crowds.

I’ll end the year with this wonderful twisty hallway that went from the room where I received Ketamine therapy down to the bathroom. A couple of times, I had to go to the bathroom while deeply hallucinating, and that was… memorable.

This was a year of twisty pathways that ended much better than it started, but I still had a ways to go.

Read my other annual letters here.

I’ve watched 36 of the 65 episodes so far, each of which is about 45 minutes long. It’s a time commitment, but you can get something from watching just one.

There’s nothing earth-shattering here or groundbreaking new insights. It’s just an opportunity to live vicariously through a guy that took several years out of his life to live in a way that is substantially different from most of us.

Here are some things that I appreciate about it.

Preaching

We’re all bombarded by media that doesn’t just decide the stories we should hear, but also tells us how we should think and feel about it. It’s refreshing to have someone just doing things and narrating them. If the series changes your mind about anything, it’s not because he’s trying to persuade you or make you feel guilty about your life choices. Sharing joy and appreciation for things is more effective than preaching.

Meditation

Each episode feels a bit like a guided meditation to me. Every task of his is an opportunity to focus on the moment, whether repairing a roof, baking bread, or walking in a rainstorm. People think of meditation as something you set time aside for every day, and it’s a constant tug-of-war to fit it in. You feel guilty if you skip it. Maybe you think it’s a waste of time. But you can do it with every task you do daily. Here, you can watch someone who does this all the time.

Thoughtfulness

The word “thoughtful” literally means “full of thought”, but it’s often used to describe an action someone does as demonstrating they are thoughtful. But a thoughtful person carefully considers what he does or says. I feel like we talk too much and think too little, and I’m guilty of this as well. Martijn talks sparingly, but what he says has been given much consideration and isn’t pointless small talk. Instead of being so quick to jump into a conversation or social media thread, it can’t hurt to sit back and think a little first.

Climate

When it rains during the rainy season, Martijn celebrates it rather than seeing it as an inconvenience. It’s very common for even people who believe in climate change to only care about it when it impacts their lives. If it’s unusually balmy in the middle of winter, it severely affects plant and animal life, but humans may be able to get more done outside. If it rains, things grow and turn green and animals have water to drink. And humans have to put on a raincoat. It’s refreshing to see someone that understands the big picture.

Aloneness

Although Martijn has visitors a couple of times a month, usually to assist in his projects, he spends an amount of time alone that most people would find intolerable. But most of us are surrounded by people all the time and plagued by extreme loneliness. Mental health professionals have long articulated this problem, who talk about trying to be comfortable with being alone. But here’s a chance to see someone doing for years.

Machismo

The world seems awash in testosterone nowadays, particularly in the US. Here’s a guy that appears to not give a shit about proving what a man he is. He’s not trying to break a world record or prove he’s got better strength, endurance, or intellect. Although he’s living off the grid, primarily due to the remoteness of his property, he sleeps in a camper in the valley on cold nights. He goes home for Christmas to The Netherlands. Fans mail him packages of useful (sometimes very expensive) things. He’s had a solid career, so he’s able to buy things. It’s hard to resist feeling like he’s cheating, but that misses the point. He’s not trying to prove anything, and that’s very refreshing.

Quality

Spending time on YouTube with someone who cares about quality in everything he does is therapeutic. We are awash in shit products and shit workmanship. You can reasonably argue that he goes too far in the other direction with his projects, but honestly, it’s better than not taking it far enough. The world would be very different if the places we lived in, the products we bought, and the tools we used were all created with much more care.

History

He often talks about honouring the history of a place and the people that were there at the time. Instead of knocking down two very old stone cabins, he feels it respects the land, the creatures, and the former and future inhabitants by working with what’s there. What he ends up with is more of a mash-up of the old and new. Sometimes modern tools are better, but sometimes they aren’t. He has the luxury of time and money to do things his way, but there’s nothing stopping people from at least considering history in their decisions.

Complaining

I feel like half of the words that come out of people’s mouths these days are complaints, criticism, and whining about what is often called first-world problems. It’s exhausting. I realise I’m complaining about this, but sometimes I feel like if we have grievances, maybe we should just complain about the most important ones and keep the rest to ourselves. It’s depressing to be around a group of people when we could be having a nice interaction; it’s just people bitching about their lives. With Martijn, it’s refreshing to have someone that doesn’t gripe about everything and generally accepts the things he cannot change. There’s only one instance I’ve seen where he expresses genuine annoyance, and it’s over some mushroom hunters disturbing his work by wandering onto his property. But he notes that the property has historically been occupied sporadically, and local people don’t know this. So he puts up a small fence with some signs on it instead of trying to get them arrested for trespassing.

Disconnecting

Even people glued to their phones will admit they need to disconnect more. What I love about this series is that you see someone doing what we all should be doing more of. He’s using the internet for his projects and to keep in touch with friends and family. He only stares at his phone when he’s using an app that identifies plants. Of course, we don’t know what happens when he’s not recording, but it’s nice to see someone not always staring at their phone.

News

He never talks about the news, and it’s kind of intoxicating. While it’s important to be informed about what’s going on in the world, it’s NOT important to know what’s going on every single waking moment. It’s not important to read about the last stupidity of some random person with some kind of political power. You don’t need to check the body count of the latest natural disaster every hour.

Doing

I realise the irony of saying this, but we must focus more on our lives instead of spending all our time reading about or watching others live theirs. You don’t want your gravestone to say what a full life you had observing other people having full lives. It’s easy to argue that Martijn isn’t putting a dent in the world by renovating some cabins in the Alps. But he’s giving something back to the world by sharing his life with 400,000 people. Most of us take and don’t give back anything to benefit others. He’s inspired me, and I think many others should consider bending the course of their lives at least slightly in a different direction.

Judgement

The few articles I’ve read about this series, even those that love it, are full of judgments. He’s boring; he dresses like an Amish; he’s obsessed with minutiae; and so on. But he’s just this harmless guy having the time of his life. He’s a craftsman and a designer. There’s a term called freudenfreude that I love, a play on schadenfreude. It’s the notion that you can derive happiness from seeing the joy and happiness in others. You can practice cultivating this feeling by watching his series.

Control

We’ve all heard the saying that you shouldn’t worry about things you can’t control. Well, here you can watch a guy do it in every episode. As a spectator, seeing how he handles things lowers my anxiety. He gets frustrated occasionally, but he generally seems to have an “it is what it is” mentality. And that goes a long way. If it rains ten days in a row when he’s trying to build a roof, that’s just Mother Nature.

Mother Nature

It’s cliché to have this city guy from Amsterdam becoming one with nature and showing great appreciation and reverence for it. But after 50 episodes, it seems highly unlikely to be an act. When it rains, it’s not a monkey wrench in his latest project; it’s much-needed moisture for animals and plants. And it’s a time to take a break and work on something different.

Learning

There’s a difference between accentuating the positive and ignoring the negatives. It’s easy to watch this and get cynical when he tries to make lemons out of lemonade. Usually, it’s something that didn’t go as planned or something that turned out to be a massive dead end. Turning a failure into a learning experience sounds excellent in theory, but it’s nice to see someone reinforce that.

Observe

He takes frequent breaks to look at his fantastic view or the trees. He has the luxury of having no deadlines he’s working under, but it doesn’t take long to stop and appreciate what’s outside your head sometimes.

Accomplishment

Even in the middle of a very messy project, he always takes the time to clean up at the end of the day, even though tomorrow will bring more chaos. It provides a sense of accomplishment, and there’s also a meditative quality to it. What seems like a waste of time is a moment of reflection on what you’ve done that day.

Conclusion

I appreciate that this Martjin Doolard fellow has shared several years of his life with hundreds of thousands of people. In a world dominated by quick snippets of text, images, and movies flying around the Internet, this is refreshing, even if it’s only a break before returning to the madness.

Here is a curated selection of photos I’ve taken of them, from California to New Zealand to Oregon. At the end, I will crown the champion.

People always think baby animals are cuter than adult animals. The same also seems to work for plucky trees, which is part of why this fella is the winner, even though he may actually be really old! He survived quite a while in this precarious spot with decent foot traffic. Perhaps no one bothered to look down and say hello as he was catching some afternoon rays. From the plucky tree capital of the world: The Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in California.

One article is published each week and is basically the bizarre but true stories of individual people. Here’s a sampling of what’s there currently:

• I didn’t burp for more than 20 years

• I gave birth to the world’s 8 billionth baby

• I almost died while pole dancing

• I’m a world champion stone skimmer

• I paddled a giant pumpkin down a river for 11 hours

If you’re pressed for time, skimming through the headlines is a nice diversion. I’m a subscriber, but if I weren’t, I’d subscribe just for this column.

• 219 songs from 219 artists, all released in the last 10 years

• Note that this does include older artists that have made new songs

• Spotify says 237 genres are represented, but there really is not THAT much variety

So, if you feel like there’s no good music anymore, I hope you find something new to like. I believe great music has always been created, but it was never as easy to find as it is today. But it’s also easy to get into a rut and finding new music takes time!

If you’re a Spotify member, click the logo in the upper right corner of the player below to login. If you don’t have Spotify, you can listen to 30 second previews of the first 100 songs.

Or you can create a free account to hear the entire playlist with occasional ads.

Time for my annual recap, presented in 4K (where available). As I’m retired and living in a house with 15 birds, there’s excessive bird-centric content. If you have kids, it’s similar, except my kids have much more beautiful plumage. Some of these might be repeats for those that follow me (or Hazel the cockatiel) on Instagram.

I have my office in the attic, where I’m typing this. I’m lucky to have a fantastic view of the tree-lined streets of Portland. There are six houses across the street, but in the summer I can only see parts of two of them. More than a hundred more city blocks are in the distance.

January

The farmers market is part of the weekly routine. While it caters mostly to humans, other species are also represented.

February

I took two classes in bird training at Avian Behavior International a few years ago. Last year, I started putting it into practice, training our parrots to do simple things like coming when called and simple tricks like spinning around. I got much farther this year, especially with Jasmine, our super smart cockatiel.

She’s grunting as she reaches the apex of the leg, but the audio doesn’t pick it up.

It took her a long time to master carrying the ring around, and then to figure out the right way to put it on the peg.

It’s been slow going, but she seems to understand what’s expected of her.

March

After a couple of birds passed away, the population of the aviary stood at 14 for most of the year.

I put together two videos that show what it’s like to be a bird, eating and flying in our aviary.

Everybody eat!

Now everybody fly!

April

A freak snowstorm blew through in April, the latest snowfall in Portland history. Heavy, slushy snow collected on tree branches, causing significant tree damage. Our next-door neighbour was out before sunrise trying to remove snow from his tree as he saw the branches sagging down to the ground.

May

After limping around in pain for seven years, I decided it was time to have foot surgery. I couldn’t put any weight on it for six weeks after the surgery, so I had two scooters in the house to motor around on. I chose not to include the really gross post-surgical photo.

June

After two-and-a-half years, our newly planted garden is looking pretty impressive. One of the goals was to have the yard look much like what you’d see walking around in the forests outside the city.

July

Our two cats are getting close to 19 years old now. Although they are brothers from the same litter, Reggie is showing his age much more. He’s had a few seizures, and his arthritis is at the point where we call him “animatronic Reggie” because of his stilted way of walking.

August

Speaking of old, Betty is now estimated to be 27 years old, which is ancient for a cockatiel. Despite a lot of health problems, she is a pretty happy-go-lucky bird, hanging out with one of us most of the day.

Birds that don’t have a partner love to have their heads scratched, because they can’t do it themselves! Betty makes a cute squeaky noise when she gets attention.

Maybe she’s squeaky because she’s old.

September

Cancelled for two years due to COVID, we finally had a chance to go to the Swift Watch twice this year. Every night in September, thousands of Vaux’s Swifts (sometimes over 10,000 birds) congregate around sunset at an elementary school blocks from downtown Portland. Then, they stuff themselves into the school’s chimney in a span of 15-20 minutes. It’s a spectacular event that can draw over a thousand people each night.

We ended up going twice this year.

A bit of screaming as well as gasping.

October

We went on one of my favourite hikes since moving here. Our miserable hot and dry summer extended into the fall, with August, September, and October being the hottest in Portland’s history with very little measurable rain. The city was depressingly brown, so this spectacular hike at Cape Lookout on the coast was a great antidote. Foggy, lush and green, and quite muddy near the end.

After leasing a couple of different electric cars over the years, I finally found one worth buying. My first all-wheel-drive car and my second Hyundai.

November

We welcomed two new birds to the aviary, a cockatiel and a Bourke’s parrot that grew up together.

It wasn’t just Jasmine that had a successful year of training, so here are some tricks that the others have learned.

I always see videos on Instagram of budgies skateboarding, but it seemed improbable. But it actually wasn’t too tricky to get Mochi to do a few basic things.

Hazel learned to bob his head on command.

This budgie will spin endlessly for a treat.

December

Like the rest of the country, we got hit with a dramatic winter storm. High winds and ice combined to give everything a windswept wintry glaze, including the our windows!

The end

I’ll wrap up with my favourite new t-shirt of 2022.

Read my other annual letters here.

Being a geek, my fondest memory of this hotel was getting this handed to me when we checked in:

You probably know this is a room key. Back then, it felt like something from the future. When I lost the key one time, they just reprogrammed the room and handed us new keys. Magic!

Based on this nice history of hotel room key technology, this particular key card was state of the art around the time the hotel opened in the 1970s. Looking back, I was struck how many years passed before I saw any kind of key card at a hotel again.

It turns out that the “hotel of the future” vibe I was feeling was part of the design. Built two years after the moon landing and one year after Tomorrowland opened, it was located within walking distance from Walt Disney World. They wanted a hotel to echo the futurism of Disney.

But then a zombie apocalypse happened.

After 9/11, bookings plummeted, and the already-troubled Hyatt let the property fall into foreclosure a couple of years later.

[…]on September 12, 2003, the Hyatt Orlando Resort abruptly closed down giving only a day’s notice to employees, and guests were told in the morning to leave by noon regardless of their itinerary.

Orlando Sun Resort—Abandoned FL—2021 Apr 5

After several failed attempts to keep the place operating, it was abandoned in 2012 and still sits there. Never redeveloped. Just being slowly replaced by vegetation and mould. A photographer named David Bulit wrote an article about the hotel and included several creepy photos. Here are 5 of them.

Abandoned properties seem to fascinate people, including me. Here’s someone who even made a short film about the property. Who knew I stayed in such a famous place!

It’s hard to believe that a prime location within walking distance to Disney World would sit unused for so long, but the history is quite complicated!

There’s no shortage of reasons to consider shifting your spending away from Amazon. Wikipedia has a 17,000-word article with 423 citations on the subject! I think the downsides of Amazon are well known, but many people find switching to alternatives difficult. Even a modest shift is better than nothing!

Rather than adding to the debate about the merits of Amazon, here are some practical ways I’ve shifted some my spending away, should you decide that’s something you want to do.

Note: Many people assume that Amazon has the cheapest and fastest shipping, the best selection, the lowest prices, and easiest returns. These things are likely less true than you think. Try doing some comparisons with local stores or using Google Shopping. Also, note that Amazon utilizes dynamic pricing and surge pricing, where prices can fluctuate frequently based on demand and your perceived ability to pay.

Here are some strategies to consider:

Buy local

This is an obvious alternative, but hard for frequent online shoppers to consider. But here’s some things you can do to add local shopping to the mix.

Idea one: Start with somewhere you shop regularly, like a grocery store or pharmacy. Keep a running shopping list on your cell phone and then pick up everything you need on your regular visit. You’re less likely to run out of things and have to make emergency Amazon purchases if you’re more organised. If the local store don’t stock something you want, most will let you place a special order. Pick it up on your next regular visit.

Idea two: Think about something you buy frequently, like pet supplies or supplements. Find a local store that sells one of these and do a scouting run. Check out the inventory and prices. Ask questions of the staff to see if they are helpful. Perhaps you’ll learn something or find some new products. Maybe you’ll like interacting with humans for awhile. If it turns out that Amazon works better for you for this type of product, then at least you are making a more informed decision. Most likely, it’ll be a tradeoff, potentially taking more of your time, so weigh it against any benefits.

Idea three: Find a large retailer that sells a wide range of products. Something like Target or Fred Meyer or Walmart. Remember that the goal isn’t necessarily to find an amazingly great store, but an alternative to Amazon. You may also find that in-person shopping really does have some advantages to poking around on a junked-up website, trying to find and compare items.

If you can’t find a particular product, go to the company’s website, which will often list locations near you that carry their products.

Delivery

With services like Instacart, you may be able to buy products you normally buy from Amazon. Delivery can be very quick (hours, not days). If price is your only determining factor, this route may cost a bit more, but you would be supporting local businesses and gaining the ability to buy more perishable or specialty items that Amazon may not have. Although the stores tend to be larger or chain stores, sometimes you’ll find some truly local options. Also, there are some alternatives to Instacart that I’ve not explored.

Buy direct from the manufacturer

People often don’t consider buying products directly from the company that makes them. There are many advantages:

1. Prices are sometimes better than Amazon since there are fewer middlemen involved.

2. Companies make more from a direct purchase, so if you like their products, you are supporting them more strongly with your dollars.

3. Companies have more knowledge of their products and can give better support.

4. Company websites can be more coherent, informative, and targeted to the product you are looking for.

5. You’ll be much more assured of getting a product that’s not a counterfeit.

6. Some companies have loyalty programs that will give discounts or better shipping for repeat customers. Volume discounts might also be available.

You may be surprised how many companies offer free shipping without membership fees, although sometimes there may be a minimum purchase amount. Fast shipping is increasingly common.

You can even use Amazon as a resource to find who makes a given product and then find the manufacturer’s website. Then you can buy it from them instead.

Specialty retailers

If there is a category of products you buy frequently, there are lots of excellent niche online resellers. Benefits include more organized and targeted shopping experiences, staff that knows the products better, and potentially a lot more diverse products in a given category. For example, it can be a lot easier to shop for categories of products for your dog on a pet-centric website rather than in an endless, mixed-up list of products with the word “dog” in the title somewhere.

A specialty retailer may also offer a curated selection of products. Rather than just selling every single product, a retailer might hand-pick higher quality items, which may be easier than wading through Amazon search results. Using Google Shopping can be a good way to find these specialty retailers as well as manufacturer websites that list online outlets for their products.

Some examples:

• iHerb for supplements and personal health items

• Chewy for pet supplies

• Etsy for handmade, vintage, or off-the-beaten-path items

Other online behemoths

Competition is good. If I have a choice between Amazon or another huge online retailer, I try to choose the latter. Amazon has enormous retail power and it’s better for all consumers to redistribute that power. I’m not a fan of the companies I’ve listed below, either, but if a large online retailer is your only option, try one of these instead.

Examples: Walmart, eBay, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, Costco, Wayfair, and so on.

DoneGood

An interesting alternative I’ll mention specifically is DoneGood, a company that sells products in multiple categories that are from brands that meet certain categories of ethical criteria. It turns out that there are far fewer ethical products in the world than there should be, but this can be a great place to support some businesses trying to make the world a better place. They are still effectively a startup so certain categories can be sparse, but you’ll likely find a lot of brands you’ll never find elsewhere.

Wait

Unless it’s really, truly urgent, just wait a few days. How often have you bought something on Amazon and felt like you didn’t need it? Maybe you don’t want the hassle of returning it, so you just keep it. Try waiting for a few days and see if you still want it. Just put it in your cart and come back later for it.

Conclusion

If you are worried about eating too many animal products, you don’t have to become an overnight vegetarian. Start with a couple of meals a week and see how it goes. The same goes for buying too much crap on Amazon. Try shifting a few things somewhere else and see how it goes.

I’ve found I’ve been able to reduce my Amazon purchases significantly. Not only am I not missing anything, but I’m better off for it.

But crows aren’t exactly beloved by all. Among other things, they are blamed for driving down songbird populations. People sometimes notice an increase in crows and a corresponding decrease in songbirds. This can be disheartening for those trying to attract these birds to their backyards. But I think all creatures are innocent until proven guilty, even humans!

When seeing two events or facts that are associated, the first thing that should come to mind is that correlation does not imply causation. Follow that link and you’ll see this amusing ad for a literacy service. Both are facts, but one didn’t cause the other. I think.

In the case of crows, did they cause the decrease in songbirds or is it just a coincidence that they seemed to appear around the same time?

It’s complicated!

I did some research and stumbled on an article in a blog called Corvid Research, written by a published corvid scientist. So, what does it say?

To start off, crows do kill songbirds—adults, nestlings, and eggs. But so do raccoons, squirrels, foxes, hawks, owls, bullfrogs, rats, mice, and cats.

So, what happens if crows are removed from a population?

Recently, Madden et al. published a comprehensive literature review of 42 studies across 9 countries that looked at the impacts of corvid removal on a variety of avian groups including gamebirds, passerines, waders and other ground nesting birds. They found that in 81% of cases corvid removal made no impact on prey abundance or productivity.  

Do crows reduce other songbirds?—Corvid Research

So, what’s going on then? There’s an little-known ecological phenomenon called compensatory mortality. Sometimes when a predator is removed from an ecosystem, other predators essentially fill in the gap, leaving the mortality rate of the prey animal (songbird, in this case) relatively unchanged.

The same research found that removing all predators had a positive effect on prey populations in 60% of the cases.

Conclusion

If the crime is driving down songbird populations, crows are not guilty. Mostly. I think it’s a good lesson in not making snap judgments in cases where it seems like the cause and effect is obvious. A guilty verdict made by humans is based on a deep dive into the evidence, not from just reading a headline.