Long time since I put anything here. Shrug Let’s try again. What’s happened this year in the de-Jager-Grigoriadou household and in the de Jager head?

2025 in travel

Over the 2024/2025 transition we were in New Zealand. The boys had an absolute blast, as you’d expect, with their Kiwi cousins. We decompressed from the trip with an extended-family gathering at Hopewell Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds (delightful): lots of fun in kayaks and SUPs, and I took a slightly too ambitious rowing trip that ended up lasting three hours and left me aching all over but very proud of myself. I took a short trip myself up to Whanganui to visit my highschool best friend and his family, and the rest of our time was spent in Golden Bay luxuriating in family closeness and peace and quiet.

This year we resolved to see a bit more of the beautiful country we live in. In March we spent a long weekend at the Prespa lakes. We didn’t get on the water but did take a long walk along the island of Agios Achilleios, enjoying the ruins and the cows and the cows in the ruins, and also visited a partially restored water-driven mill. I was struck by the huge stacks of cane poles in the fields by the road, and wrongly assumed that these were a local speciality: it turns out the local speciality is beans, and the poles are imported in enormous quantities to support them. Having learned this we followed a personal tip to a family bean business, and brought home about 10kg of beans of various kinds.

In April we visited the Netherlands, as surprise drop-ins at a party organised by my PhD office-mate. Thanks to Dim’s generosity we had a place to stay in Amsterdam. The boys were extremely enthusiastic about biking around town (their enthusiasm didn’t wane even in the rain, which surprised me). We played board games with Marieke & Niels & family (this theme will come back later), and drove up to Wieringerwerf for the party with Michael & Julie & family at a campsite on the Ijsselmeer. The boys were deep in a backrooms phase and made awkwardly spooky videos of the genuinely spooky atmosphere, where the land and the sea are both all horizon, huge wind turbines lurk in the distance in all directions, and what should be a beach is instead a mixture of evenly-graded crushed rock and some kind of plastic-rubber sealant.

June had me in Amsterdam for work, and I continued on by train to London to stay with Robert & Lena. (I also attended a conference and caught up briefly with Ola & Stephen, but I was both ill and entirely social-battery-short-circuited by that point, so that part of the trip was less successful.) Besides the great joy of conversation not inside a rectangular frame, the highlight of the trip was my introduction to the Victoria & Albert Museum. We also visited the Natural History Museum (in its spectacular building) and the British Museum (where I particularly enjoyed the Assyrian winged-lion gateway guards, with their repeating-motif beard patterns and their leg structure that makes no sense unless seen as a relief sculpture that happens to be wrapped around both sides of a three-dimensional base). But the V&A was where I fell in love, to the point where I expect to make another visit to London someday just to spend more time there. I particularly enjoyed the exhibition of British studio pottery (now closed), and brought home the enormous “visual catalogue” to preserve a little of the experience. (That wasn’t the only book I bought on the trip; in fact I came home with 12kg of new books, although I’m not responsible for quite all of them. That’s more new baggage, by weight, than what I left with originally.)

We had some summer holiday time in July in Katerini (with Olga’s brother and his family visiting from Sweden), then spent fully half of August in the university campsite at Poseidi on Chalkidiki. For various reasons this holiday wasn’t very restful (more on this below) but at least we got some time at the beach.

Rounding out the travel for the year (except for a work trip I took in December, which barely counts as I spent all five days either at the office or at the hotel next to the office), at the end of August the boys and I joined a party of around 30 climbing Mt Olympus. The boys were absolute champions about it, walking without complaint and carrying their share of the baggage, and we made it comfortably to the highest refuge (2760m) over two short walking days. On the second day M(12) and I joined the group going up the Louki (“the drainpipe”) to the peak Mytikas, but we decided halfway up that it was too challenging for us and came back down to the refuge. The third day was walking out again, and we returned to Katerini very tired (and in my case anticipating several days of muscle ache) but very proud of ourselves.

2025 in life changes

This school year (starting September) Olga started working reduced hours: in exchange for slightly reduced pay she gets enormously reduced stress, and is very happy with the adjustment. I’ve been through two changes in how my tax status and employment is structured over the past two years, with the final arrangement also giving me somewhat reduced income and somewhat reduced stress; I’m less enthusiastic about my change than Olga is about hers, but it was more or less forced on us by changes in employment law and I’m making the best of it I can.

One of the consequences of these changes is that we could no longer justify the cost of keeping the boys at Olga’s school (where her status as a teacher gets us a discount, but not a large one). So both boys are now in Greek state schools: Y(10) is at our local school in Triadi, and M(12) to our great relief scored highly enough in the entrance exam for the Thessaloniki Music School and is attending there. (There is only one music school serving the whole Thessaloniki area, so although the exam is not difficult there is no room whatsoever for error: the lowest grade that got admitted this year was 97.5%.)

Both boys are delighted with their new schools. M(12) enjoys the mixing of age levels (on the bus and in his chosen performance group, which also happens to be run by a friend of ours) and the constant background of music spilling over from adjacent rooms into his lessons. Y(10) enjoys our daily walks to school (and so do I – we’re both proud that after missing just one day early in the term we’ve kept an unbroken streak of walking every day it was physically possible, for the rest of the year) and having friends close enough that he can visit them casually during the week. We made this change as a deliberate experiment, with the backup plan (if this wasn’t successful) of leaving the country; we’re both very relieved that has turned out not to be necessary!

2025 in music

In August, while at the campground in Poseidi, we got the news that Patrick Riddett had passed away. Pat was a huge influence on me musically and an absolutely delightful man, kind and funny and an excellent musician with a nose for lovely tunes. Playing with him was always a highlight of our Golden Bay visits, and I’m glad I got another couple of busking sessions in with him at the Takaka Saturday market this last trip. We would swap tunes occasionally by mail: I have a couple that I won’t be able to share with him, and I know I didn’t get to hear anything like all the gems that he had filed away. I miss him.

In more cheerful musical news: Y(10) continues with piano, and is now playing pieces that he remembers from hearing M(12) playing in past years. M(12) is taking piano lessons this year from a jazz pianist (Philippos Kostavelis) and guitar from Thanos Gountanos: both are really excellent musicians and he’s getting a lot from lessons with them. Lately he’s been bringing home guitar pieces that we can play together (the Django Reinhardt piece Minor Swing and Dave Brubeck’s Take Five were recent hits) which is wonderful fun. And with Olga’s reduced hours we again occasionally have time to sit together and make music, which is a joy we’ve been missing for the last year or two.

The Irish sessions continue monthly, although my enthusiasm is somewhat on the wane. I would really like to tackle some of those tunes with an elevated level of musicianship (more mindful arrangements, especially of harmony and countermelody parts), but I don’t see much chance of that in the session format we have.

Early in the year I followed a course given by Dimitris Tasoudis, where we played modern music with an interesting mixture of composition, improvisation, and something more like free-variation-within-constraints. The course is paused while he finishes a PhD, but I hope we get back to it later this year.

2025 in health

Olga started the summer holiday in proper summer style: with pneumonia. That took a good three weeks to clear, and her recovery took even longer. And there was more to come.

Patrick’s passing wasn’t the only bad news we got at the campground. Olga went for a routine yearly checkup, found a cyst that needed removal, and ended up spending the second half of her summer holiday chasing gynecologists, surgeons, and hospital administration. She had the cyst removed in September and is now fully recovered, except for the damage to our wallet from the insurance refusing to cover the surgery (but not telling us this in advance, so that we went ahead on the assumption that they would). We have the luxury that this isn’t a financial disaster for us but it was a nasty shock.

I spent that same month on antibiotics for a prostate infection. Apparently the prostate is particularly hard to get medicine to, so the course ran for a full four weeks and utterly destroyed the, ahem, regular functioning of my digestive system: four months later it’s not back to its previous state, which may mean it never will be. In more positive news, a month on antibiotics meant a month with absolutely no alcohol, and I found that comfortable enough that I’ve cut back my consumption to much less than before the summer. I’m not 100% teetotal but I’m defaulting to not drinking, which is a significant change for the better.

2025 in boardgames

That’s not a category I would have predicted to be significant, but here we are. In 2024 we became family fans of the modern-classic boardgame Settlers of Catan: we played it in Katerini with the extended family, and we took it to the campground and played it sweating in the August heat. In 2025 we visited Marieke & Niels in Amsterdam, and got the benefit of their extensive boardgame knoweldge. As a result, 2025’s summer included Senjutsu (a great hit with the boys) and Root (a great hit with me, and a slightly lesser hit with the boys). Olga and I have rediscovered the fabulous game Tantrix, at which (unlike dominos) we are roughly evenly matched. And Amanita Design (creators of many video games that we’ve collectively enjoyed: Samorost, Botanicula, Machinarium, and Creaks) this year released a boardgame Pilgrims: Curious Adventures which has quickly become a family favourite.

2025 in creativity

Olga has taken up pottery, and is producing (besides the awkward, lumpy stuff which all pottery students have to go through) some genuinely beautiful pieces and also some pleasantly characterful ones.

Both boys continue to draw in sporadic flurries of intense creativity. They’re also both sometimes using their iPad cameras and the built-in photo-editing tools to make odd artworks, mostly either creepy or hilarious. They’ve got some solid animation skills which occasionally get turned to storytelling, mostly with lego figures and much hilarity.

I’ve produced almost nothing of note this year. A very small piece of woodworking (a portable railing for the boys to use their toy skateboards on) and some unfinished programming projects are about all. I’ve taken a few macro photos, but nothing particularly of note as photography.

2025 in beetles

This year felt like a much slower year for iNaturalist observations, and the statistics agree. But there were a few jolly good ones: I’ll make a separate post for those.

2025 in books

I read around 80 books this year (I’ll be making an overview post about those at some point). Many of them were simply turn-my-brain-off comfort (re)reading, but a few had a bit more substance to them. Some standouts:

  • Inventing the Renaissance (Ada Palmer) and The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper (Roland Allen) gave both historical/cultural knowledge and an unbundance of quirky detail. I also enjoyed Sea People (Christina Thompson), on what we know about the Polynesian voyaging tradition and, equally interestingly, how we know it; and Blue Machine (Helen Czerski), about the ocean.
  • Gone Bush (Paul Kilgour) is a memoir of a lifetime of tramping in New Zealand’s back country. It’s written by a friend so I’m biased, but I enjoyed it very much.
  • I’ve become a solid fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers series, despite only a lukewarm appreciation for the first in the series: as long as he keeps writing these I expect I’ll keep reading them.
  • I read to the boys in the evenings, and this year I particularly enjoyed The Pushcart War (Jean Merrill) and A Green and Ancient Light (Frederic S. Durbin).
  • The Spear Cuts Through Water (Simon Jimenez), a fantasy novel largely told in the form of dance, and just as odd as that makes it sound.
  • Saving the best for last: Beyond Weird (Philip Ball), which summarises our current knowledge about quantum physics. This one should get its own post at some point, but for now let me say that it was a profound joy to engage my intellect with this subject again (the last time being, gulp, more than 25 years ago): I read it twice and I’m not done with it yet.

2025 in programming

This was the year I experimented properly with LLM tools and techniques, and the year I got convinced that this is what my professional expertise needs to turn into. I’ve used agentive tools (Claude Code, amp, and the copilot integration in VS Code) to do programming work that I could not have done otherwise, whether because of lack of specific knowledge, lack of time, or the return-on-effort ratio not being high enough for me to get over the first initial exploration of a possibility. At the same time I’m deeply concerned about the effects both long-term and short-term on the industry I work in, and about the massive potential for misuse of these technologies.

2025 in tools

I’m now using, and enjoying, Obsidian quite heavily. I still don’t have a good handle on my to-read article list and simple bookmarks, but I’m fairly happy with how I’m doing more contentful note-taking.

I decided to stop buying cheap mechanical pencils and being irritated when they stop working, and now own a GraphGear 1000. Which gets almost no use, just like the cheap ones didn’t, but at least when the “almost” of “almost no” strikes I know it’ll still be functional and will feel nice in my hand.

2025 in anxiety

Yeah, the Western world is not looking so great at the moment, is it? 2025 was a bad year, I’m afraid 2026 may not be much better.