I rarely have nightmares but last night I woke screaming twice.  I was trapped, and the dark was consuming me.  And although Marty tried to calm me down I couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming.  I feared that I was still trapped in the dream.

I can still remember a nightmare I had when I was a child.  I dreamt that apes, the ones from “Planet of the Apes”,  had taken over Silverstream Road.  As an adult I find the idea quite amusing, but I was terrified during that dream.  The apes themselves didn’t scare me, it was the concept that the nightmare world is the very place you had thought was safe.  Silverstream Road was the place where my granny lived, somewhere I always felt safe.

Last night I watched “Inception”, a movie that blurs the lines between dreams and reality.  I have often wondered how we tell the difference between what is real and what is merely a dream.

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Zhuangzi

Lots of my friends and family live in the UK.  The weather there has been terrible this winter and it’s affected the post.  This has extended my Christmas, the gift receiving part of it anyway.  I had three presents arrive in the past week and Christmas cards have continued to arrive.

This morning I got a large box from M & S.  Last week I used some of the money I had been given for Christmas to buy myself some things in the M & S sale.  I love that they now ship to Japan and that I can indulge in January sales without having to leave my living room.  I had forgotten that I had bought a big fluffy dressing gown.  I was so excited when I pulled this out of the box.  It’s much too big for me, but that was a deliberate choice as I wanted something that I could wrap myself up in.  Marty tells me I feel like a build-a-bear and really I probably look like one as well, though maybe not as cute as a real one.  This outfit certainly isn’t flattering but it feels amazing.

I have been thinking about 2010 and the different things that happened in the Perl community.  I’m not a good writer, nor do I have a lot of time to write, so I’m going to create a list:  a list of the things in the Perl world that I thought were great in 2010.  The following are in the order that they came out of my brain:

1. The release of Perl 5.12

Jesse Vincent and the release managers gave us not only a new stable version of Perl but also a new time-based release cycle for future versions of Perl, so we will have Perl 5.14 to look forward to this year.

2. The release of Rakudo Star

Giving me hope for the future of Perl 6.

3. Dave Mitchell’s Perl 5 Bug Fixing Grant

Dave has been doing amazing work with this grant having spent just over 500 hours in 2010 to close 127 bugs.  I’m delighted that this grant has been extended and that Dave can continue this work into 2011.

4. GSoC and Google Code-In

Jonathan Leto and his team did a great job of getting The Perl Foundation and The Parrot Foundation involved in Google Summer of Code and the new Google Code-In.

5. Matt Trout’s State of the Velicoraptor Talk at YAPC

I really liked hearing Matt give this uplifting talk at YAPC::EU and YAPC::NA.  I enjoyed hearing about all the positive things that were happening in the Perl world and think that all our conferences need a positive keynote like this one.

6. CPAN Testers

I read just the other day that CPAN Testers has just passed 10 million test reports!

7. Events Group

A group of volunteers decided to set-up Perl booths at a number of non-Perl conferences including FOSDEM and CeBIT.

8. Modernisation of Perl Web Sites

This year many of the major Perl sites had a face lift, including perl.com, perl.org, and news.perlfoundation.org.

9. Send-A-Newbie program

The Enlightened Perl Organisation took over the send-a-newbie program that provides financial support to first time attendees of YAPC::EU.

10. Miyagawa

I know, it might seem like a strange thing to write, but when I think of Perl I think of people.  And I’m always astounded by the amount of work that Miyagawa does and I’m certainly looking forward to what will come out of his brain in 2011.

2010 was a great year for Perl, let’s hope that 2011 is just as excellent!

Given how often I write about food you won’t be surprised to learn that there are loads of things that I want to eat in Japan but can’t.  Ovid was writing today about things that he craves, and gives a recipe for something called rice-a-roni.  I have never eaten that, or even heard of it before I read his post, but I have certainly spent quite a bit of time this year learning to cook things that I crave and have learnt how to substitute food.  Only yesterday I made a Shepherd’s Pie with minced pork instead of minced lamb.  I think Marty called it a “pig herder’s pie”.

Sometimes though a substitution won’t do.  I wanted to have roast parsnips with our Christmas dinner.  I had managed to find a small turkey, ham, and frozen sprouts at an online butcher but I was craving parsnips.  I tried researching this online and came across tales of people growing their own but that wasn’t something I was going to be able to do before Christmas.  I thought that I might be able to find these at the Costco in Saitama.  So we hired a car and went on a parsnip hunting adventure, but there were no parsnips.  I did manage to buy baby carrots, a box of potatoes, and some Quaker’s Oats.  (Potatoes are normally sold in packets of 3 or 4 in Japan so being able to buy a box of them that weighed 7 pounds was fairly amazing.)

Then, whilst at a housewarming party, someone else started to talk about parsnips.  They claimed that I could buy them at Nissin World Delicatessen in Azabu-juban.  I have shopped there before and have never seen a parsnip but fruit and vegetables are seasonal and it’s certainly the right type of shop to buy something like a parsnip.  Alas, there were no parsnips. The shopping trip wasn’t wasted as I bought sweet mince, caster sugar, and Walker’s shortbread.

I had to give up on having roasted parsnips as part of my Christmas dinner but I was happy enough as this was the first time we managed to cook a turkey in Japan.  2010 might officially be the year of the tiger but for me it was undoubtedly the year of the oven.

Christmas is strange in Japan.  It’s not a holiday and it’s not celebrated in any religious way but it’s still well known.  It reminds me a bit of Valentine’s Day only with Christmas symbols and elevator music.  I found it difficult walking around the local supermarket as it sounded as if a tribe of smurfs had been let loose to sing bad Christmas music.  It may not have been so bad if they had only played one song at a time but they have a fondness for placing CD players in different parts of the store so each section can have its own competing music.

Christmas food exists, though it’s not turkey and ham.  There is a Japanese Christmas cake, which is a light sponge covered in cream and strawberries.  And then there is Christmas fast food.  Mos Burger runs an X-mos burger campaign but this pales compared to KFC’s Christmas food.  KFC has its own version of Christmas dinner with party buckets and roast chicken.  We had friends staying for Christmas and thought it would be fun to have KFC on Christmas Eve.  We had to book this weeks in advance and even then there was only one free time slot.  Over Christmas KFC doesn’t sell its usual food in the evenings but opens for collections of pre-ordered Christmas dinner.

We ordered an eight piece party bucket and a roast chicken.  The chicken was surprisingly good though the gravy was a little strange.

I decided to get out my list of 101 things to do in 1001 days as it’s nearly the end of 2010.  I have many ongoing items that involve me doing things on a monthly or weekly basis.  Most of these, especially the cooking ones, are going well.  But I have fallen way behind in my writing in both English and Japanese.  Of the 57 one-off tasks I have managed to complete 14 in the past year.  Maybe 2011 is the year I’ll manage to complete the task that says, “be able to do 100 consecutive push-ups”.  Then again, maybe not.

Even though I found it time consuming making festive biscuits I decided last night that it might be fun to make gingerbread men.   Actually I decided I could teach Marty how to make them.  Once I taught him how to rub butter into the flour he was able to make the dough and was successful baking his first batch.  It’s much easier making biscuits when you get someone else to do it for you.

After my success with baking cakes I thought I would try making festive biscuits.  That may have been a mistake.  It could just be the recipe I picked but I found the dough incredibly hard to work with.  It was made with almonds, sugar, butter, and flour.  The thing this most reminded me of was crumble mix and my dough was certainly crumbly.  So crumbly that the stupid thing wouldn’t roll out without falling apart.

The biscuits also involved two layers of stars that needed sealed with a filling.  Seriously, after all the messing about with them my back aches from  leaning over the table.  Now that they are out of the oven and have cooled down I know that they taste great, but I’m not sure having 14 biscuits was worth all that effort.

I have always said that winter is my favourite season.  When summer comes, bringing heat and humidity, I wonder what it would be like to be the White Witch and always have winter with me.  But last winter I encountered a problem as thyroid disease doesn’t like the winter at all.  It’s nearly winter in Tokyo and instead of looking forward to the cold, bright days, I have begun to dread the decline in my health.  I already need to sleep more and my joints ache.

I have been told that in some countries they increase thyroid medication over the winter to cope with the natural seasonal decline but they don’t appear to do that in Japan.  Well, they didn’t do it last year.  Maybe they will surprise me when I go to the hospital tomorrow.

I’m finally back home.  I was hoping that December would be the month when I managed to get back into a routine for blogging but that hasn’t worked out so far.  I spent the first 30 hours of December making my way back to Tokyo.  And with the changing of time zones I lost the 13 hours I had gained in November.  This does mean that the start of the month was a bit of a blur and I’m really surprised that it’s the 7th December already.

December is going to be a busy month with visitors and holidays.  I’m hoping that at some point things get back to normal, but I’ll admit that I no longer have any clue what normal is.