Happy New Year

 It is a new year here for the House of Howard; as it is all over the world.  We, any of us here, rarely make resolutions.  It is just another year to live and love.  I usually set a few goals; center my life around my faith more, write more, both on here and for my writing group, declutter some more, buy less.  That is pretty much it.

We do have a few plans for the new year.  Ellen will go back to uni here in a few days; I think her first day back is the 12th. I am going to concentrate, as I said, on writing, managing my alpha gal and histamine intolerance issues, and on gardening.  Last summer I pretty much failed at gardening for several different reasons, I just felt so awful from this syndrome. This year I am on a med for it, plus I am learning how to manage it.  I am also going to garden a bit differently...  But I digress.  Ellen and I are planning on going to California to visit family over Memorial Day weekend. We are hoping to stay there longer than just the 3 days, but that will depend on the schedules of other family members.  I am looking forward to that.

 Writing: I am going to concentrate on my children's series.  I think I have about 5 out of 26 little stories written.  At some point I need to look for an illustrator, or look into AI illustrating these books myself.  That just seems like cheating, to me, as well as potentially putting someone out of a job, so I am not sure about that.

 Gardening: The West Garden area out there where I do the bulk of the garden tends to stay quite boggy when we have a super wet Spring, as we have had the past couple of years. That makes it impossible to keep weeded down. Last year the weeds just took over the entire garden and it turned into a disaster from which I got few vegetables.  I want to try using some sort of weed barrier fabric.  I am getting too old to go grubbing out an acre of weeds from around all of my vegetables. I also have to find a safe source of ...um...farmstead poo to amend the soil with.  We can't use ours any more because of what we have to spray on the fields.  We hate spraying weeds, but there are so many invasive weeds nowadays it can't be helped.  

And that is it for now.  I'm not even going to give alpha gal syndrome its own paragraph here because I am going to attempt to make it a background issue that I just deal with, not have it control my life.

I wish you all a very wonderful New Year 2026! 

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