Managing "Maycember"

This blog is now old enough to legally drink.  I don't know what that means and, frankly, neither do you, so maybe anthropomorphizing a website wasn't the best idea after all?  Oh well, too late now.  I wonder how Bloggy feels about its own sesquiquattuordecennial?

It's always tough to think of what to write here.  Last year, I noted that May gets "deceptively busy", and this year, it's no exception — but now I know there's a name for the phenomenon: "Maycember".  Even for those who aren't parents, a lot of events line up around the end of the school year and the ramp-up to summer, just like in December, but they're not accompanied by the same "slowdown" in other responsibilities as the winter holidays, so it feels even busier.

Despite busy days, I wish I could say more has happened of note.  There is some positive, to be sure, but a strong undercurrent of malaise, and in recent weeks the accumulated stressors have started causing some physical symptoms I haven't experienced since the worst of grad school.  It's also just unclear how much of that is exacerbated by just the normal seasonal weather changes.  So that's not really any fun.

But I have to find my fun somewhere!  And finding time to find suitable organic bloggy cake mix was its own task, so I guess my goal is to keep the process short and sweet so I can rest.  Thankfully search tools remain reasonably effective when wielded well, so there wasn't a ton of digital slop to wade through.  May that continue to last as long as it can.

2026

Twenty-twenty-six.  Truly a wild number.

There's not really much to be said here that hasn't been said already, to be honest.  Mostly yesterday, but also, in a way, similar to the start of 2025 and 2024 as well.  I have goals, sure, but at this point they're so numerous and multifaceted that, if I even end up achieving a few of them — ideally, from among a key few — I'll be satisfied.

At times, it's a bit overwhelming, though.  Having so many irons in the fire sometimes seems like it may contribute to a lack of direction, but everything kind of interplays into one overarching trend toward the new phase of life I'm building.  So I guess, to the extent I'm inclined to set any sort of renewed intention for the year ahead, it's to stay directional with everything I set out to do… even if there are, in fact, many, many directions at once.  ;)

After all: Things change, and we can only move forward.  Things evolve, and we must evolve with them.

It's the second quarter of the century, after all.

Random tangent: In addition to the traditional Eastern Time countdown and their now-usual Atlantic Time and Central Time countdowns, ABC introduced a live Pacific Time countdown for the first time last night!  And yet… they didn't actually broadcast it live coast-to-coast and still delayed the entire proceedings for western time zones.  Methinks this was a bit of a tiptoe experiment in evolving the broadcast for a more modern age, and I think it went well.