Belated 2025 Kickoff Post

Obviously, making the shift from almost-daily posts on Facebook to maintaining an even halfway interesting website is going to take a little getting used to. We're still sorting out what we plan to do in this space, but for now we're going to at least commit to two monthly posts– one that looks forward, and one that recaps and photodumps.

January's looking forward post is, of course, late. This is partly because 2025 started off very early in the morning on Jan. 1 when we set off for a quick trip home to celebrate a belated Christmas with Jeremy's family. We squeezed in a ton of cousin time for Oscar, family pictures for the first time in eight years, and a morning full of less-than-healthy breakfast foods and presents. Then we made the drive home just in time for snow to hit and cancel the first day of school.

Anyway. School started eventually; we have all started getting back into our normal routine; I sometimes remember that the date ends in 25.

I don't really do new years' resolutions, but I have decided to set some general goals and intentions for the year, and this seems like as good a place to put them as any.

1. Read more. That's vague on purpose, because I don't want to just aim for a higher number of books than last year. I want to check out genres I don't always read and authors whose work I've never read. My two book clubs are already helping with that, but I'm also trying to pick stuff for myself that is outside of my normal comfort zone.
2. Try more local places. We do a pretty good job of eating at local restaurants already, but we also get into ruts pretty easily. I'd like to aim for at least one new place a month. (We just got reservations for my birthday dinner at a new-to-us place next week.)
3. Make more meals we've never tried from the many cookbooks I've acquired over the years. Bonus points if the dishes don't include rice, potatoes, or cooked carrots, which are automatic dealbreakers for the kid. (He is very good at making his own sandwiches or bowls of oatmeal when he objects to what I've cooked.) Different bonus points if the dishes include both rice AND potatoes, because why not.
4. Finish more projects before starting new ones. I'm already failing at this in the realm of cross stitch, but I think I have a good reason: This year, I'm doing a temperature stitch, an unaccountably popular trend among fiber arts people. (Here's a crochet version; the article includes a section called "So, the Internet Actually Hates Temperature Blankets...," so maybe their moment has passed.) Basically, the colors in the stitch correspond to each day's high and low temperatures, which means I have an Excel spreadsheet and dozens of colors to keep track of. Here's how January is looking so far (through about day eight).

I like the idea of keeping track of 2025, as a quarter century feels like a worthwhile moment for something like this. I may go back and do one for the year 2000, if I can decide what city, Irving or Baltimore, to use for the temperatures. Anyway. Check back in at the end of the month to see, ideally, a whole row of flowers recording what is likely to be a lot of cold weather.