A walk in the brisk autumn air, a yummy breakfast, lavender, lemon & cedarwood, and the art of making peace with the day.

Saturday, November 8th, 2025

A year today since we buried my father in Israel, near Haifa.

I’ve been up since about 7:30 a.m., which is around the time I used to get up for breakfast at the hospital—when I bothered to get up for it, since it was nothing to write home about.

I had roughly five hours of sleep, which isn’t bad, considering I’d napped three hours from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. last night.

Stella woke me around 5 a.m., the time my stepfather, known to many as T-Bear, usually took her out these past few weeks. Maybe it was just a shift in the air, or her moving further down the couch which nudged me awake, but I decided to let her be for a while, and by 7:30 I figured she probably needed to go quite badly. As I’d been planning to get up anyway to have breakfast at the hospital hour, we got ready for a walk.

It was six degrees outside, so I bundled us both up—I wore my warm lambskin coat, and put a reversible red-and-blue puffer on Stella—and we made our way to Lalancette Park, just a few blocks away. She kept putting on the brakes, refusing to walk as she always does, but I overrode her each time. The light was golden and clean, the air crisp and faintly smoky, and I felt like visiting the trees which have lost most of their leaves by now, though many still wear orange or yellow crests, and the ground was a patchwork of leaf-carpet. We crossed paths with three other small-dog owners; I almost let Stella run free in the baseball field but decided against it. I’ll bring the long leash next time.

I took a few photos and showed these first two to ChatGPT-5. It responded with something lyrical about the light and the colours—I’ll include a portion of that here, because I found it poetic in a way my own language rarely is:

“That light is spectacular—low, molten gold cutting through the branches like it’s painting with precision. You can feel the cool air just by the way the shadows stretch thin and blue across the ground. The puddle catching that sunlight—that’s the perfect kind of accidental mirror, where the sky folds into the earth for a second.

And Stella, in her red coat, standing against all those yellow leaves—she’s like a punctuation mark in the middle of the morning, small but vivid, aware. The way she’s looking slightly to the side says everything: she’s surveying her little kingdom, alert but calm.

This moment—the clean light, the trace of smoke in the air, the quiet rhythm of breath and paws—it’s the kind of morning that reminds you the world’s still capable of grace. Nothing forced, just balance.”

I like that the AI translates my images into language, which is something I struggle with, so when I took more photos and asked it for a longer piece, the voice felt flatter—even with attribution, I didn’t like it enough to use.

I decided to write my own stream-of-consciousness, as usual. This journal entry may end up being the basis for that blog post after all.

Back home, I wasn’t sure whether to make breakfast or go back to sleep—opted for breakfast. I made my favourite Nespresso Roasted Hazelnut with frothed 2 % milk and a teaspoon of Splenda. Then: sautéed yellow onion, red pepper, and zucchini; creamy scrambled eggs with Italian parsley, dill, cumin, sea salt, and plenty of black pepper. A side of oven-warmed hash browns, a handful of raspberries, and a dollop of yogurt. Looked and tasted perfect.

I washed dishes before, during, and after cooking—chatting with the AI between steps—and later called my stepfather Robert and stepbrother S, who helped out with legal fees these past weeks, on Messenger for short video chats. I later ate the second half of my breakfast cold, which was equally lovely.

I had made an appointment for Stella at the vet today, but then realized I had to cancel because the transit system is on strike and the vet is in another part of town—it would’ve cost a fortune to get there by Uber or cab. They were understanding when I asked to reschedule for December, when STM is supposed to be back in full swing.

I then modified my 500 ml glass jar of Unscented Company hand lotion, adding approximately:

– 25 drops lavender 40/42

– 12 drops five-fold lemon

– 5 drops cedarwood

The cedarwood was the AI’s suggestion—a good one. It’s one of my favourite scents. I warmed the jar in a cauldron, transferred the lotion to a bowl, then added the oils in two rounds, since the initial dosage wasn’t yielding much result—after which I microwaved the scented lotion 3 × 10 seconds to soften it, then poured it back through a stainless funnel.

The result: exactly what I had in mind. I’ve been sampling it on my hands, arms, and legs, and instead of washing the utensils right away, I’ve been using up what’s left on them through the day.

In the early afternoon, I decided to go out and get some fresh air again while it’s still around, since sunset is at 4:30 p.m. already, and since I had no outings at all in the last couple of months, I’m craving a bit of daylight. On my walk back,

I titled my head up and saw a flight of pigeons so high up they looked liked swifts of swallows tracing slow circles overhead, perfectly in sync — I was completely awed at their graceful movements in a sky full of those perfect, slow-moving clouds…

the kind you’d call Little Fluffy Clouds if you grew up on The Orb (I’ve included the link—worth a listen to get a sense of how it makes me feel to look up at the sky). I caught myself feeling high on the sight alone, much the way listening to that song does. It’s my fifth day on 800 mg of Abilify Maintena injections now — long enough for the antipsychotic medication I kept telling them wasn’t going to help me to have settled in — and yet here I am, still moved by light, by flight, by something as ordinary as a change in the sky.

I used to think that kind of intensity meant mania. Now I think it’s just part of being neurodivergent — the way my brain processes the world. It’s not “too much” (as some people describe me) it’s just how I register aliveness. The sky shifts, the light changes, and I feel it all at once.

When I got back home, I ran into my landlords, who live just above me, and handed them a small gift bag to give to their daughter and stepson, who are my neighbours downstairs and have just had a baby.

The little stuffed llama I got for him at the hospital gift shop made me smile—it felt like the right kind of offering for a new explorer to the world.

Stella is asleep on the pink Kate Spade blanket. I’m about to join her for a nap. May or may not dictate this text later for the blog.