What could I do less of? Hmm.
The first thing that comes to mind is “overthink.”
And actually, that was probably one of the biggest distractors when I was learning how to be effective at any form of divination—runes, tarot, anything. It makes us question what we’re doing. Once you overthink, you lose the intuitive flow.
Sometimes it hits me when I’m writing, too. Instead of actually writing a thing, I get lost thinking about ways to write a thing. Structure. Additional context. Sources. Transitions. Formatting. I do well once there are words on a page… I can edit, revise, and rearrange. And at the end of the day, even if I don’t finish, there has at least still been progress.
But if I overthink? Well, at the end of the day… it’s just a lonely, blinking text cursor on a screen.
Good morning and happy Monday, friends!
At the beginning of the week, I had quite an adventure retrieving our ChristmaYule tree from storage. In the few months that have passed since my last visit there, the keys to the lock somehow removed themselves from my key ring. Unfortunately, this was not brought to my attention until after I arrived. After a brief inquiry with the facility manager, I was told that the only course of action was to hire someone, who would come on a later date, to cut the lock off.
Well, that didn’t sound very appealing to me, so I improvised. I returned home to grab a set of lock picks.
I spent a few years studying lock picking as a hobby. I have never used it for anything nefarious, but I have also never had the opportunity to use it for anything practical. I was very excited to finally have a real world application for my studies.
After about 30 seconds, I was in.
And I can confidently say, partially due to my success, that this was a very poor lock design.
The tree now stands happily in our living room, sans ornaments. The ornaments will come later.
On Friday night, we had a late-night full moon ritual with the coven. We did some magickal work for cleansing the end of this year so that we can start fresh in 2026, bringing in new and happy things.
On Saturday morning, Selene and I woke up extra early and ventured off to prison for a volunteer visit. The facility had been under several lockdowns for the past couple of months, so it had been a while since we were able to actually go. Since it is the only visit we can schedule this month, we went ahead and celebrated an early Yule with the inmates.
The drive was incredibly foggy. In fact, I’ve never seen such dense fog in South Florida. The prison was on high alert because they couldn’t keep visual contact on people as they were walking through the yard.
We came home and took a nap. Back-to-back rituals are pretty taxing, especially when one is late at night and the other is early in the morning.
For the rest of the day, we decided to give ourselves a little break. We went to downtown West Palm Beach and had dinner at a French restaurant. Charcuterie, coq au vin, mussels, ratatouille… a plethora of dishes that were perhaps chosen by their difficulty to spell.
The cheese in the middle of the board is Tête de Moine. It tasted like running through the woods with your mouth open, falling on your face in the dirt, licking the bark of a tree, and then eating a handful of salted peanuts.
We walked to see Sandi, the giant tree sculpted from sand.
And then we decided to go check out the grand opening of Eataly in hope of getting a dessert. And you know what? They tried to turn us away! Admittedly, they were ridiculously packed. No more walk-ins, not even any seating at the bar for the rest of the night.
Oh well. As we moved toward the exit, I noticed online that someone had just cancelled a reservation online. I snatched it, then returned triumphantly to the hostess. It was the last one for the night (and they were totally booked the next day as well) so I think we got pretty luck.
Yeah, we got our dessert.
This month is going to be crazy because I have to figure out a way to do my normal amount of writing output alongside holiday events and activities. So I’d probably better get back to that.
Stay tuned for more soon!
Aerik Arkadian 
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