It’s New Year’s Day. Up here in northwest Wisconsin, it’s 3 degrees above zero. The snowstorm that hit us the other day dumped 7.5″ of the white stuff. I’m not complaining; we need a lot of snow up here, to help our businesses recover from the last couple of low-snow winters and also for our lakes, which desperately need a strong spring runoff.
Sue and I were just talking about our next trip. On January 19, we will join two other couples on a long flight from Minneapolis through Atlanta to Santiago, Chile. Total flight time: about 12 hours. After one night in the Chilean capital, we have a 3-hour flight to Puerto Natales, in the Patagonia region of the country’s extreme south. And, after four nights at an eco-camp, where we will hike and explore the countryside, we’ll be flying to a ship off the coast of Antarctica for a week-long cruise along the coast. It’ll be a memorable trip, to be sure, checking off the number-one item on Sue’s ever-shrinking bucket list of travel destinations. (My number one was Kilimanjaro, which we climbed–almost–in October 2024.)
It’s going to be a leisurely, stay-at-home day today. Sue is making lemon scones, and she’ll then brew some mocha drinks for us. On the TV in the living room, the Rose Parade is on, live from rainy Los Angeles. Later today I might take a look at the Rose Bowl game, to see if this unbeaten Indiana team is for real as it squares off with traditional powerhouse Alabama. I’ll wonder when–or even if–we’ll ever again see the Wisconsin Badgers in this game. My brother Brian and I attended the last one they played in, on New Year’s Day 2020, a devastating 28-27 loss to Oregon.
Resolved: that 2026 is a year of progress.
This year will be a lot more than just football, of course, for me and Sue and, well, everybody. How will we approach this year? Hopefully by now, each of us should have a pretty good idea about that. What will our priorities be?
One of mine is to make some adjustments in my social media use. I’m usually pretty good about staying out of contentious political discussions (are there any other kind these days?), but in the last few months I was distressed to find that a long-time writer friend of mine banned me from her Facebook friend list, evidently because I occasionally responded to her constant drumbeat of political posts by asking questions she and her similarly-inclined friends didn’t want to face. (I addressed one of the big ones in a previous post: How much money is enough?) One of the constants of life, it seems, is that people who get political online are not interested in hearing contrary opinions, or even entertaining questions about their own positions. Another friend of mine, a former radio colleague, has grown increasingly virulent in his online posts about his own views, and whenever I have the temerity to point out that all the online insults in the world aren’t going to change anything, that it takes people actually willing to roll up their sleeves and get the work done in order to get things accomplished, the responses are even more caustic and insulting. Well, I told him in a private message this morning, I’ve had enough of that. Although it appears that seeing a certain individual thrown out of office, or better yet die, is the most important thing in these folks’ lives, it certainly isn’t in mine.
In the past year, I’ve become increasingly more aware of the plight of homeless dogs and cats in our area. Sue and I have contributed to a pair of local shelters: Little Red Barn Dog Rescue and Community Cat Coalition. I was thinking about the many dogs and cats who are in those shelters on this New Year’s morning, all of them probably scared and maybe depressed, as they wait for someone to come and take them away to a forever home.
And then, I saw this Substack post by a writer I follow, Sean Dietrich. There was a drawing of an adorable puppy, which I’ve posted up at the top.
Then, Sean’s opening paragraph:
They left him in a dumpster. They just didn’t want him. Simple as that. So they threw him away. Like garbage.
If you want to read it, here’s the link: Dennis the Determined. It has a happy ending, trust me.
Reading about Dennis, who is now happily playing in his English home, living a life determined entirely by the senses of smell and touch, gave me pause. Our own dog, Maisie, and our cat, Jezabel, are healthy and happy and gloriously rambunctious. They’ll both turn age 5 this summer. We can’t imagine our home without them. One of my resolutions this year is to help some of those abandoned dogs and cats in our area find homes of their own.
Most people have other resolutions: lose weight, save some money, make that bucket-list trip. Yes, we’ll do those things, but I will add that bit about ignoring the negativity and hatred online, and especially I’ll be working on making the lives of some of our furry little friends better.
If you have room for one more resolution, why don’t you join me with that one?
A Strenuous Writer's Life 