The new year is 1/12 of the way over…have I been making the most of it?

I mean, I have tried, and I feel like I’ve been pretty occupied with lots of meaningful things, but looking back at it and I can see that I completed precious few of them.

For instance, I started working again on the finishing touches of a film called, ironically, Finishing Touches, which my guys and I shot back in 2022.

One thing or another has led to it achieving long-delayed status, which of course if frustrating to myself and probably also to the local actors who volunteered their time to be in the project, primarily the promise that they’d have the film to use in their reels, etc.

The movie, which is about a filmmaker who finds that his character starts “speaking” to him about going the extra mile to make the movie he’s working on better, is certainly closer to being finished than it was before, but is not quite there. Hopefully in February, but we will see!

Outside of that I’ve also been working a script, primarily for my own personal practice and development, whose title has flipped around between Warning Sign and Cautionary Tale and Foreshadowing, which as I’m writing this I have “called as done” and sent out to some of my friends for testing and feedback. But I didn’t get there until February, so still not a fulfilled January accomplishment.

And then in the world of viewing, there are a bunch of shows that I’ve watched–like the most recent seasons if All Creatures Great and Small, Slow Horses, Severance and Silo, and Superman and Lois, but I haven’t finished any of them yet. I also started watching the first season of the 1970s The Bionic Woman, which is both earnest and cool but sometimes ridiculous–but again I haven’t finished the season.

I also haven’t finished reading my mammoth Superman: The Triangle Years volume 1 omnibus, but have only reached about the halfway mark.

There is one thing I can think of that I did finish, from a viewing perspective, which sadly provided a pretty underwhelming experience:

Star Trek: Section 31

Sadly underwhelming, but not surprisingly. There was nothing about this project that made me hopeful about it. “Section 31”–the idea of off-the-books black ops–is one of my less favorite parts of Star Trek Deep Space Nine (a show I generally liked), and Michelle Yeoh’s Empress Georgiou is one of my least favorite parts of Star Trek Discovery (a show I generally dislike). And then there was a trailer a little while back that just looked terrible.

But at least it looked accurate, because it was a pretty terrible movie. It has flat characterization and an uninspired plot, and feels more like a failed TV pilot than an actual movie. The movie starts with an extended flashback of how Georgiou became the Empress of the Terran Empire over in the Mirror Universe (it’s a Star Trek thing–if you don’t already know about it, there’s no reason you’d care) which involved her murdering her own family, a sequence which just cements the fact that I’m not interested in this character as a hero or lead protagonist.

Beyond that, the movie doesn’t have anything to say about the character, or the legitimacy of something like Section 31 in the Star Trek universe, or about anything at all, actually. It’s just a tepid, by-the-numbers, science fiction action runaround whose greatest quality is simply that it’s trying to do something a bit different than other Star Trek shows. It can be praised for that, I suppose, but it’s pretty faint praise because “doing something different” is not, in itself, much of an accomplishment.

Beyond that, I also read some books!

Long-time readers who actually remember and pay attention to these posts know that I don’t often mention the books that I’ve read, and that’s because I don’t read very many of them. That’s not a deliberate choice–I used to consider myself a bit of an avid reader–but in the last however-many years it’s a habit that has fallen way off the wayside. As 2025 rolled into view, I made a…well, not resolution, precisely, but a a goal that I would read more this year. So far this has involved me going to my bookshelf, which is full of books that I have not read (mostly because they were my wife’s) and picking one off. I try to hit a chapter or two a day–nothing too ambitious–just to keep up the practice. I’m not certain of this yet but I think it might also be functioning as a bit of an emotional-stress regulator for myself. In other words, a bit of time reading each day might be helping me to manage the challenges and responsibilities of the rest of my life.

Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper

I’m a Christian involved in a missions community, so a lot of my unread books are “Christian” books.

Don’t Waste Your Life is a short but punchy reflection on the idea of where Christians should be seeking to find joy and fulfilment. It offers a pretty challenging argument against just seeking to get by and live a pleasant existence, rather than living a life that values the glory of God above all things. The directness makes it a challenge to read (even though it’s short and simple) but it’s a good challenge.

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

I’m a lover of detective stories so there is also a bunch of these sorts of novels on my shelf, including a bunch of Agatha Christie’s that we inherited from a friend of ours who was moving. The tricky thing is that it’s hard to remember always which of Christie’s books I have read before. Fortunately, I remembered accurately that I had not read this one before.

This is a Hercule Poirot novel, but Poirot doesn’t actually appear until about 2/3 of the way through the book. Most of it is set a private girls’ school in England that finds itself involved in a case of international intrigue when some precious jewels disappear from a Middle Eastern country during a revolution, and just might have wound up hidden at the school somewhere. A series of murders ensues with a typically clever mix of suspects, clues, motives and solutions. It was engaging and fun to read, but the ultimate denouement lacked the level of zing that I recall from a lot of my prior experiences with the author.

Or maybe it’s just been a long time since I’ve read one of her books and my tastes have changed since then. I picked another one of her novels off my shelf after I finished (“Sparkling Cyanide”), which I’m currently working through, so I guess I’ll soon see.

On a bit of a different track, I went out for breakfast with my friend Rod this month and ended up ordering “okonomikyai”, which is a Japanese savory pancake. It was delicious! I didn’t take a picture of it, but I did take a shot of the menu item so I could see if I could figure out how to make it. It turned out to be a little less keto than I wanted it to be (I have a serious diabetes risk, so I try to eat as low-carb as possible), but I did find a keto recipe, so I tried to make that. It was a bit of a mess–it took me forever to make (I know, because my kids watched the entirety of Alien as I was making it) and it came out a bit weird, but it was a good initial learning experience. Hopefully it’s something I can get better at in the future. (Actually, I have tried a second time, but that was in February–it was still strange, but different).

Here are some pictures of the same dish that I found on Facebook. Mine didn’t look like any of these.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Have a good month all!