Detail Diary, Vol #36

December: Haiku advent | Strasbourg | Moving

December 2025

Dear friend,

Last month I projected that this Detail Diary recap would come to you from drifted, frozen valleys. When I arrived in Idaho two weeks ago, it was almost 50 degrees Farenheit. It’s back to below freezing where it belongs, but most of the old snow melted. Now there is ice in the gutters and a new dusting of crystalline snow.

My December Detail Diary doubled as a Haiku Advent: a haiku a day until Christmas. I took inspiration from haiku like the ones in this collection, and my own sensibilities, looking for seasonal clues, moments of happening, and the daily rhythms I was preparing to leave behind. Half of this advent was in France, capturing my last few weeks of bare trees in the arboretum, rooks, goldfinches, and snowy Alps. Before I left France, I also visited Strasbourg for its famous Christmas markets and a final dose of charming architecture. And the second half was here in Idaho and Utah, in the bosom of my family, resting before the launch of my next career/life stage.

By way of excuses—despite the best of intentions, I was prevented by travel, moving¹, and the obligatory post-trans-Atlantic-travel illness from sending anything else out in December. More retrospectives on France, the arboretum, and my 2025 reading are still in the pipeline. Meanwhile, happy new year!

Read on for the details…

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Strasbourg weekend

Christmas markets and half-timbered houses, cathedral and Rhine, sparkles and crowds. I stayed across the border in a German village (Kork), spent two days in Strasbourg, a day in Colmar, and half a day poking around Kork and Kehl.

Colmar

Kork and Kehl

Last week in Grenoble

Moving home

My dad is a pianist by profession, and this year he acquired a lovely Dowd harpsichord (built in 1965 from historical patterns) and had it restored. Now it’s in our front room. By way of demonstration, in the below video you can hear me playing a bit of the prelude from Bach’s Prelude and Fugue #6 in D minor (until I mess up). The sound is sparkling and resonant and it’s fun to get a sense for how the music would have originally been played.

Strong sun in the dormant garden

And Haiku Advent is done!

1. Thanks to a generous moving stipend, I decided to ship a good proportion of my belongings from France, which I paid for in blood, sweat, and tears, i.e. tetrising books and plates and random stuff into six 25kg boxes and a couple of suitcases over the course of a week+. It was exhausting and I don’t know how anyone moves an entire household.