Annus Elapsus

CWs: mental health, holidays

It’s always interesting to make it through another year, another revolution around the sun. It doesn’t mean a whole lot more than that unless we give it meaning. 2025 has not been a great year for the world at large. It was pretty OK for us, but not much changed. We got a new car at the tail end of last year (2024), so we’ve had that for about a year. Still love it. My sister visited us, although I hope the next trip is better (she was sick for a large chunk of the trip and that was a bummer for her!). My parents visited, that was also very nice. We spent good times with friends. Took trips within Colorado and saw more of this beautiful state.

I’m not super hopeful that next year will be any better. But as my mom said tonight, hopefully it’s no worse at least than this year. And honestly, personally, it was fine. I am just always concerned about others and making sure they’re OK and thriving as much as possible in the bizarro world we live in. I don’t love New Year’s resolutions because they’re made to be broken IMHO. I would rather set up goals that may or may not happen, but are aspirations. I have a perennial goal to read more Greek and Latin. Read more in general. I do my best; I am a very slow reader these days (well, depends on the book), but I love it and always will. My spouse said I should check out StoryGraph and while I love that they use it and enjoy it, it’s too fancy for me. I log my reading in a little post on here. I keep it simple and I’m OK with that. I would love to travel more, but I don’t think that’s in the cards for a little while. That’s OK. I don’t know, I don’t have any specific goals coming up and that’s OK. I need to find a therapist, though; that is a worthy goal.

We had a 5-day weekend over Christmas. That was really, really nice. And then another 4-day weekend starting now. I am feeling very burnt out and overwhelmed and really feel like I need it, so this will be nice. We’re seeing the Stranger Things season 5 finale tomorrow in theatres; I am excited about that. Otherwise I am hoping it will be a chill long weekend, more time with the kitties.

I recently listened to You’re Wrong About’s end-of-year/holiday episode and it was a listener-supplied one where the prompt was to tell about what you love about your hometown. I thought about contributing but ultimately didn’t. But listening to it made me all warm and fuzzy and happy and I thought about how much I love being from Eugene (Oregon). So I’ll probably write something about that soon. I would write about where I live now, but I really don’t want to dox myself, so yeah. Just know it’s a pretty nice place.

In any case, Happy New Year to everyone, wishing y’all all the best for 2026 and trying to keep hope alive. <3