There's a spare corner in the barge, so I decided to fill it with a log burner. After all, it gets cold on the cut in winter, and we don't want our sailors to freeze. I looked at a few photos online, and then decided to just mess around with some bits of plastic tube. The result looks OK when seen through the windows, it even has a tiled hearth. If we are going to make smoke, there better be a way to let it out, which means a chimney on the roof. Here, it became apparent that I'd not thought…

Shit, I can hardly log in to anything right now. Almost everything is set up for “two-factor authentication” whether you'd like to or not. I feel like I'm witness to the doom that is soon to come to many. #journal

Over the last few weeks, largely in an attempt to inject some whimsy in my life, I've managed to visit 3 free book swap locations (4 if you count Tesco). One of the many joys of living in a fairly rural county is such things are possibly and all blessing go out to those people who maintain them. Two were converted former phone boxes (the classic British red phone box) and the other is a shack on the edge of someone's garden. The shack is the closest and would be fairly easy to visit again. I…

My mom was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950. Growing up the youngest of eight kids in a small house off the downtown core, she was quiet, shy, and always the baby. Her three older brothers received the bulk of the family’s praise, attention, and money for education, while the girls were taught to sweep floors, work the stove, and scrub the work clothes clean. My mom used to sit on her front porch and memorize all the license plates of cars that drove by. She’d guess the numbers from a distance,…

Paint the whole world with the story of ITV's long-running lunchtime show, Rainbow!

About a week ago, I found myself falling into the old habit of turning on a TV show for ten minutes, getting bored, spending forty-five minutes looking for something else, watching that for ten minutes, and repeating this process over and over. I set a new rule for myself a while back. When I catch myself in one of these loops, I either boot up a video game, open a book, do some writing, or work out. Basically, I find something else to entertain me so that I don't waste an entire Friday evening…

One of the perks of being both perpetually unemployed and a credit card nerd is the ability to "afford" to go somewhere on a whim with the help of award travel and the generosity of your best friend who is willing to host you for free. And it turned out to be one of my best decisions... maybe ever? One of my closest friends, initially "just" a language partner, told me last month that he would be headed to the Bay Area for a few weeks on a business trip. His first time in the US. We had met in…

while i'm living in my parents's house, i've been experimenting with where and when and how i can film videos. this chatty update was one of those experiments, sitting at the open patio door while it was raining, but the light was so good!

I had a bit of a freakout day today, I won’t go into all the details, but it was a thing to do with work where I realised– –ergh, actually I started writing about it but I don’t think it belongs here. Better to whinge in my journal, I think. To sum up: I’m at a bit of a dead end career wise, and I’m going to have to start thinking laterally to get out of it. I had a look at job listings online, and what a morass that is. Better to stay at the job and at least bring in some semi-regular lucre…

Pressure is always around us in many forms: atmospheric pressure, pressure of the mattress against our body during our sleep, peer pressures, internal pressures born from old relational patterns that make us react with age-old learned reflexes when confronted to similar pressures in the present... Pressure is part of living. Being "under" the pressure is not the only way to deal with pressure. One might decide that some kind of pressure may be dealt without connecting any kind of emotion to it,…

I’ll jump straight to the headline: I’m calling time on my role as CEO at Welcoming Australia. When you believe in an idea and its potential, you build it in a way someone else can lead. That’s been my modus operandi since I began community-centred work; by that measure, it's almost time to hand over to someone else. In May 2027, at our National Symposium in Melbourne, I will deliver my final address as CEO of Welcoming Australia after more than 11 years in the organisation. The comfortable…

Some reflections and learnings after 2,000 days of meditation. No, I can't levitate. Yes, I'm imperfect and still have a lot to learn.

Going all the way back to the early days of The New Leaf Journal in November 2020, I have published five articles on the subject of rotting decorative pumpkins in Brooklyn. We have so many articles on rotting pumpkins, as well as happier non-rotting pumpkins, that I created a collection page for the topic. While I courageously bring the surely international New Leaf Journal audience important reportage about decomposing pumpkins in Brooklyn, I would prefer – for aesthetic reasons – to not have…

Book review for The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I rated it 4.5 stars. I originally gave this book 5/5 stars when I read it 7 years ago, and classed it as one of my all-time favourite productivity books so I figured it was due for a re-read and a proper review. It’s a fairly entertaining read filled with stories about the ways that habits work for and against people - from a gambling addict who ruined her life, to how Starbucks train their employees. The one problem with The Power of Habit…

Ode, snap. Vol. 7, No. 3 I’m not a very good photographer. I tried to change that a few times in my life (as recently as last year, in fact) — I spent too much on a camera and got really into Flickr and hung out with (i.e., tweeted at) creative types who owned nice lenses and had at least a dilettantish interest in taking good pictures — but it didn’t matter, I don’t have a knack for it and I lack the patience and inclination to learn and improve. (More like F-Oh-Just-Stop-Already, amirite?)…

There's been conversations on Twitter about what it means to "snap out of depression" lately, and the implications of it and how tiring/ableist it can sound has weighed on my mind a lot. Especially in wake of my deep depressive episode that lasted for a good while (a month plus, even) which made me think about my life up until now, living with this for more than 10 years as I had. "You have to snap out of it someday, no one but yourself can save you" is frankly terrible advice, in my…

It’s the time of the year where horse apples (also known as Osage oranges) are thick on the ground at the local nature preserve. I call them “brain fruit” because, well, look at it, it kind of looks like a green, sickly brain just lying there on the trail. As I understand it, these fruits are not poisonous to humans or other animals, but none of them particularly like it, either. There is some speculation that this fruit evolved to attract a seed-spreader who no longer exists (like a giant…

Hi there. There’s been a lengthier-than-usual gap between Maurilia Station posts, since by mid-year, my creative activity and much else if my life had been purposefully dialled back. The plan has mostly held, but inevitably I find myself doing things. So, I’m back with an update of what I’ve been up to lately. I thought I’d change up the structure of these posts a little too, so I’ve put the shorter updates at the start, before plunging you – quite literally – into my compost bin. I figured it…

So let's make it even more difficult, shall we? When I first saw the Top 9 anime that shaped who I am thing on bsky a few weeks back my thought process was "9 shows? Easy"...but then I realized I was leaving out movies. The more I thought about movies, the more I realized I was leaving out OVAs...and shit, dude - this thought process spiraled. The thought of doing three separate lists of 9 was immediately overwhelming so we've scaled back to 9 total, with three from each category. Yet still, it…

Well not really. It’s going on fall really so right now Siem Reap has beautiful cool mornings. Went out last night for beers. Met with bill. I had my fill. Done with barangs for a time. Now though let’s talk spring. Spring Coffee that is. Really nice and comfortable place not that far from the house. I can sit and write. Which means you will be able to read more blathering. Like usual the WiFi is stellar here. I have run into only a few places that have issues here. One of them is the house…

Could I force her to get up, and would she probably not mind all that much? Perhaps. Is it more respectful to spend 45 minutes whispering to her that I really need to get up and do something, while secretly being very happy that this means I don’t have to get up and clean? Yes. Yes, it is.

This week I bought an iPod Classic 4th Generation (Mono) and I’m planning on daily driving it. It might seem a strange thing to do, but hear me out.

I know that this sounds so passe, but I honestly feel that the action of boycotting is never an old news. We boycott certain products/brands in different ways, times, and reasons. Also, since we are now rampant with the news of Indonesia getting burned (not “burning”. “Being/getting burned”. There’s a difference), there have been some discussions among Indonesians themselves on boycotting palm oil-derivatives products. One of them was an IG Reels by Nadya Hutagalung. Nadya was an MTV VJ for MTV…

Stream of consciousness rambles that beat screaming into a pillow. (Though I might do that after this.) For the past weeks, I've been sleeping later (around 2:00) and waking up at 9:30. I get out of bed around 11:00. If I'm lucky, I'll eat breakfast and continue on with my day. If I'm not, I'll be riddled with an intense fatigue and retreat to the bed and sleep another 2 hours or more. I tell myself I should get to bed earlier so I can wake up earlier. But why? What's the point of waking up…

(And then in October you will pace me at the Munich Marathon, right?) (January 29, 2026)Almost every year since my first marathon I get asked if I’d be running the marathon in Munich. Every year I say, “No, the Munich Marathon doesn’t enthrall me.” The route is boring, yet challenging to run, and there is hardly any support from spectators. In summary, I consider it too big to die and too small to be spectacular. There are bigger fall marathons to run.This year, my friend Tina entered the chat.…

a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to a (late) equinox celebration at a campsite. my husband and I were invited by some friends, and the afternoon went like this: everybody brought a bit of food to share, plus an ingredient for a communal soup. we had a fire where we made the soup, cooked sausages, baked some bread and toasted marshmallows. it was also the perfect cosy spot to sit around, talk and snack. and, in a typical office manner, the next workday I told my co-workers about my weekend.…

If you picked up your phone to get one specific thing done, and you’ve done it, put it down. And just let your mind wander. It’s hard at first. The pull to open it back up is strong, to keep scrolling for one more hit, that small comforting feeling of having checked everything there is to check. Let your mind wander instead. There’s nothing more you will learn from picking up that phone or that next scroll.

Thanks to Claude I spent half an hour playing a game from my childhood that I had not seen running in more than 25 years.

Don’t you have time to read books? Leave a book in your kitchen table. This way, when you’re done eating, you can steal a few minutes from your routine to pick and read a book. That’s the perfect excuse to reduce your scrolling and pause to ease your digestion. Win-win for your body, mind, and spirit. That’s the strategy I’ve followed to read about 10 books so far. You can leave my books in your kitchen table. Available on paperback and Kindle too.