*White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War, Then Rewrote the History by Ann Bausum *American Spirits: The Famous Fox Sisters and the Mysterious Fad that Haunted a Nation by Barb Rosenstock
Grownup Fiction
Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand The Matchmaker by Elin Hilderbrand The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 4 by by Beth Brower The Island by Elin Hilderbrand Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand
I’ve been “starting” my new side hustle since last May, right after Antares died. It’s called Kenton Cat Homestay, and it’s a different kind of cat boarding. Rather than your cat going to stay in a cage, or a room, they will have the run of my house. That way, my house can become a visitor cat’s home away from home.
The starting is slow-going, as you might have guessed from the quotes deployed in the previous paragraph. For 2026, I’m aiming to work two hours a week on getting things ready. It’s moving things along quite well.
So much so, that I have choices for the logo! Check them out!
Pretty fun, eh?
I showed these to many people to get their opinion. I found that people who had been to my house and met the cats chose the logos that depicted the house and the cats. While people who had not chose the other logos.
What turned out to be the final result? Have a look on the website.
I went through a big phase of reading about bullet journals in autumn 2024, and really liked the idea of making “quilts” using the dotted pages as reference. I made one for my energy levels, and one for my training status. Here are the final quilts:
The energy was a pain to track. I’m not one to get out the markers very often, so I was often coloring in a month-plus at a time. And at some point, I started questioning what “average” even meant. If my sleep got better near the end of the year (it did) and that was my new average, what even was “best ever”?
And filling out the training quilt became difficult because, well, training became difficult near the end of the year. (Ironically at the same time my sleep got better.) Eagle eyes will note that I didn’t finish December. At least that information is kept on my Garmin app, making it easier to access when I finally sit down to “quilt.”
I’m bringing these back next year. Energy will have categories that are: getting things done, maintaining, resting, under the weather, not tracked, and I have a system built now to track those and update the calendars more frequently.
One mistake I made for 2026 was assigning the same colors to both quilts. I like the visual difference of the 2025 quilts using different colors.
I would prefer to buy my DMC floss from my locally owned embroidery shop, but I haven’t yet found one near me. So I try to do a big order of embroidery thread from Maydel, which is a shop based in Chicago. If I ever go to Chicago, I will visit their store, but in the meantime, look at this bounty!
There was a time, when I would have made an attempt to frame this, but that’s not the photography stage I’m in now. These guys sitting on the counter, staring at their phones struck a chord in me, so I had to get even a subpar image.
It seems our December results will be our final results. I’m hoping all is okay with Quizmaster Mark, as we had tickets to the January show, so it was a late cancellation.
