puzzling.org – by Mary

puzzling.org – by Mary
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December 2025
June 2022
This entry is part 13 of 13 in the series
Year in threes
End of year reflections
Three moments of 2025
The forecast for
seeing Mt Fuji
from Lake Kawaguchiko on my son’s birthday was amazing, right up until the day of his birthday, when it turned sour. We roamed Oishi Park on a cold morning and saw
the summit
for a moment and ate, of all things, frozen yoghurt, which seemed to have a stranglehold on the local tourist economy. Fuji also wasn’t visible from Skytree the day we went up there.
But the day after his birthday, we took the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Nagano. The Shinkansen experience was itself quite interesting to the kids because you can flip the seats around to face the rest of your party. And, as we flew through the outer suburbs of Tokyo, dim with distance but a sort of a miracle:
Fuji! Fuji!
When
my son was selected for this summer’s cricket squad
, we gathered in our bedroom to chirp in celebration. My daughter recalled that in the previous few weeks, my husband had got a new job and I’d had a new set of responsibilities awarded at work, and immediately hoped that her turn in a lucky time for our family was about to come.
The
full moon rising
as my sister, my husband and I sat on the Opera House steps waiting for PJ Harvey to play. We arrived later than we would have liked, considering that we wanted to avoid standing, but found a place to perch, only moderately uncomfortably.
Three meals of 2025
Rich chocolate cake (nearly mousse) and macarons
in our neat apartment hotel in Tokyo, for my son’s birthday. He really didn’t want anything at all to happen for his birthday, but he was objectively incorrect.
A bagel and a milkshake at Glicks Balaclava.
I am pretty Melbourne-naive, I’ve spent just a few weeks there in total and if it isn’t on Lygon Street, there’s no chance I know it’s there. (If it was on Lygon Street about fifteen years ago, there’s a 50-50 chance.) So it was good to catch up with a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, somewhere I would never have learned of on my own.
Last meal at Quay
, a few weeks ago. The articles that described it closing also mentioned that, at their time of writing, many reservations remained, a sign of the decline of fine dining in Sydney. Availability was not so apparent 3 days later, when I found out it was closing.
But it was not too long a wait until a cancellation. Andrew and I were sat at the same table as the first time we ate there. In my opinion, it is (was) more a lunch venue; hours and hours of sun and views, but our last meal there was a dinner; my highlight was pearl meat, Southern squid milk custard, white asparagus, young almonds, super chicken broth. And, always, the Poolish crumpets with truffle butter.
Three photos of 2025
Three pleasures of 2025
One million
fist bumps and back pats and hugs
with my now-huge son. Every year feels like surely the last, but not yet.
E-biking.
We got an e-bike to help my son do some more independent neighbourhood commuting, especially to his all-consuming cricket, but I also use it to commute a bit. I’m still working out how, or even whether, to balance it with manual biking but it’s fun to be out in the wind either way.
December 19 was my daughter’s last day of primary school, and also
Sydney’s hottest equal hottest ever December day
. After school the children and many parents went to
Dawnies
and I stayed in the water long enough to feel unpleasantly cool. Perfect.
Three news stories from 2025
I learned about
the Bondi terrorist attack
at a different holiday event, walking up Second St Ashbury to see their famous Christmas lights display, while receiving sudden messages asking if I was in Bondi without any context.
May their memory be for a blessing.
Neri Jose Alvarado Borges’s
autism awareness tattoo
for his brother, and his imprisonment in CECOT that seems to have come of it.
Almost entirely meta-level awareness of
the mushroom trial
. I didn’t follow what witnesses were being called, or what was being said in court, but rather
what the media said about itself
Three sensations from 2025
Much to the kids’ dismay, we refused to take red-eyes to and from Japan on the grounds that beds are for sleeping in, not planes. Thus, flying out of Tokyo mid-morning to
the sounds of some unaware passenger accidentally listening to a police drama
through their phone’s speaker rather than their headphones: sirens blaring, boots stomping, cries of alarm hostages or victims.
The
unexpected, and knife-sharp, pain in my knees
coming down the Ben Johnson trail in
Muir Woods
to the main trail from the hills. And, on a later trip and
an even longer walk
, when crab-walking down Telegraph Hill after walking from Fort Funston over the course of the day.
The weight of
my huge Rhiannon Gill mug
, home of endless green tea and soy milk lattes at work.
Three plans for 2026
2026 is more of a blank to me than many upcoming years are when I write these. It comes from a few things: my older child is coming up on an age when his own aspirations and plans need to be part of any family plans, or else be a separate path to them, and in any case we’ve done a lot of travel in the last few years and have entered a relative fallow.
Family cricket.
I’m putting together a wider family trip to see a BBL match before the end of the season in a few weeks.
New couches.
2025 Mary acquired these in desert and sea colours, 2026 Mary just has to wait for them to arrive. And clear the space for them, currently occupied by toddler-era home furnishings. And I don’t mean the younger of our two children either.
Three to cheer nationals.
My son’s cricket has split our marriage in two on spring and summer weekends for a few years, as he increasingly plays all-day games both Saturday and Sunday. But in the year he’s 16, he can handle one weekend alone carpooling while the rest of us go to AASCF Cheer Nationals on the Gold Coast; my third year of Nationals as an audience member but Andrew’s first. Hotels with pools full of human pyramids are a new era for our family.
Three hopes for 2026
This might be our electric vehicle year.
EVs, house changes, music, photography are on some kind of rotation in my head for things I want to do. Finally, though, charging infrastructure has come to our neighbourhood and not left us with a “OK but charge how?” problem as street parkers. We still have a “OK but children the size of adults” problem with any car at all, but investigations continue.
Mother-daughter trip.
Speaking of cricket splitting the marriage in two, Andrew and son going to India on a cricket training tour in April doesn’t count as a plan for
me
. But my daughter has asked to plan-to-plan while they are away: can she and I have an autumn holiday together?
SCUBA trip.
I am starting research on a scuba/snorkeling resort trip in the spring, perhaps in Indonesia.
Top right, top left, and bottom are by
Rhiannon Gill Ceramics
, top middle by
cbf ceramics
By
cbf ceramics
By
Bruce McWhinney
Regret: not purchasing a yellow-dawn coloured porcelain mug by
eru studios
This entry is part 20 of 22 in the series
Autumn
May 2022
All photos.
December 2025
November 2025
All photos.
May 2022
This entry is part 19 of 22 in the series
Autumn
April 2022
All photos.
March 2022
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How L. Ron Hubbard Made An Antichrist Using Sex Magic
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Books
Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood & Abortion, edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont
Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters
Cinder House, by Freya Marske
The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial, by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
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