Welcome to 2026.

So far I’m not impressed.

I wasn’t very happy with 2025 either, which is funny since outside of getting COVID for the second time there weren’t any real challenges. Financially it was a good year, and we moved a few steps closer toward getting Finale Farm dialed in, but overall I wouldn’t say I was happy living through it, although I am happy overall.

I love the new year as a concept. It is pretty much a made up point in time, there isn’t much difference between December 31st and January 1st, but I always look to it as a time to reflect, reset and work toward being a better person.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions as such. For the past several years I’ve joked that my goal is to simplify my life and that is also a goal for this year. I also want to work on getting healthier. Over a decade ago I adopted a vegan diet and lost a bunch of weight. I felt great but really missed the occasional taste of meat. Worse, I have a very strong sweet tooth, and in my vegan phase I also avoided sugar.

When I started eating meat again I did greatly cut back the portion size, making up the rest with veggies. But I also picked up on snacking and eating sugar and I think that has done more to bring my weight back up than anything. Moving forward I hope to both increase my exercise and watch my diet. Last night I made a tofu curry and tonight is my first crack at falafel.

I also have a bunch of stuff to do on the farm. We bought a greenhouse on sale last year but there is still a lot of work before we can assemble it. The wood has to be sealed and we need to dig out the base. I also have a couple of months to get the rototiller working again as we did set up a place for a garden.

I also expect to travel a lot again this year.

American Airlines says I flew 152 hours in 2025 but that doesn’t include the time spent on other airlines. My hope is to decrease that a bit, but I already have three trips planned in the next eight weeks.

I also turn 60 soon. When I turned 50 I threw a big party and it was a lot of fun, but I don’t plan to do that again. My bride bought me a new induction range which I’ve been enjoying, although I do have to replace three aluminum pots I liked to use that no longer work.

I am also going to work on bringing even more of my technology choices under my control. I am still deep into the Apple ecosystem and plan to be until I retire, but after reading about Apple deleting a man’s AppleID account for no real reason I am more driven to migrate as much as I can as soon as I can. I manage my photos with the Photos app on MacOS, but there is an app called osxphotos that lets you export them from the proprietary database on to the filesystem. I am also looking at setting up Home Assistant in place of Homekit, as my hub (an old AppleTV) is acting up and sometimes disconnecting. My beloved 27-inch iMac doesn’t support the latest operating system, so I probably have a year or so before it falls out of the security update window. My plan is to load Linux on it when that happens, probably my old friend Linux Mint with Cinnamon but I’m also looking at trying out KDE.

All I need is time (sigh).

I do plan to keep blogging. I managed a post every week or so between this one, which is my personal blog, my work blog, and my two hobby blogs (one for cocktails and one for my vintage car). As usual you can find the latest updates either by RSS feed or on my Planet page.

I hope that more people start blogging. I read an interesting post about how important personal websites are to the free web, and while I know my reach is minimal I enjoy building these sites and writing for them. This was a favorite quote from that article:

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

My hope is that 2026 is mellower than 2025. I hope that the start of the year is the worst of it, and things get better from here on out. And to my three blog readers, here’s a wish that the most you want is the least you receive.