Another New Year has begun

Welcome to 2026! I had a good end to 2025 and start to 2026. But that sort of annual transition is so ordinary that it barely seems worthy of mention—which is rather unfortunate for a blogger. Still, there;s always something to mention,

I went out for pizza with my brother-in-law and his partner, and even had a glass of whine, since I wasn’t driving. I was home by early evening, and carried on with my typical New Year’s Eve.

I’ve mentioned several times that I’ve almost always been the only one in my household to stay up to midnight on New Year’s Eve, and that it’s something I’ve done for many, many decades. Nigel almost never stayed up to midnight, but when it arrived he’d call out to me to come so we could share our first kiss of the New Year, mainly because he knew it was important to me.

I found that memory painful for the first few years after Nigel died, and while I still think of it every year, it’s not the source of pain that it once was. Memories like that can evolve alongside us, eventually becoming warm and fuzzy again.

I saw in the New Year, but I was watching the countdown and Auckland fireworks on TVNZ+, their streaming service, becauce the bad weather was causing disruption in the UHF signal. That was fine, but I knew the stream is delayed by around ten seconds, so I was using my iPad to watch the actual time so that I knew when 2026 actually arrived, said “Happy New Year!” to no one in particular, though Leo looked over at me, so I wished him a happy new year—not that he seemed to get what that meant. A few seconds later, I saw the countdown and fireworks on my TV as I took the selfie up top, my first photo of the year. Delayed or not, I was just glad that TVNZ did that that again this year, because there have been years when they did nothing at all.

After the fireworks (a five minute broadcast), I went back to watching TV, fell asleep in my chair for awhile, and headed off to bed. And that was my start to 2026.

2025 was, as I expected, my worst-ever full year of blogging. Part of that is because there were a lot of posts I never got around to last year. I still want to get to those, and, of course, I have all my projects that will be ending this year, so there will be a lot to talk about this year. I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, as I’ve explained several times, but I do have have annual goals, and this year that includes doing more blog posts. To be clear, I doubt there’ll be a return to my old one-post-a-day average, but I have a goal of an average of one every other day—roughly 15.21 posts per month. I think that’s a reasonable goal—I’ve done more than that every full year except for 2022, 2024, and, of course, 2025. We’ll see.

New Year provides an opportunity for a reset. Whether that happens or not will be the overall story of 2026. I’m really interested to see what happens.