Welcome to 2026! Isn’t it nice not knowing what is in store for us this year? It’s like cracking open a new novel!

I woke up dehydrated with a whopper of a headache. No, not hungover! We just hit that critical point of winter where the bowl of water with cinnamon sticks and cloves on the wood stove just isn’t keeping us hydrated enough. It was down to 13% humidity in here this morning and my brain is getting crispy dry!

Now we have the humidifier going and wet towels on the drying rack. It’s getting better in here already!

Leftover muffins

I’ve got my leftover muffins in the oven. I told ChatGPT what I had left over from the holidays and it made a recipe that used up the leftover canned pumpkin and bit of buttermilk. Fingers crossed, I hope they are tasty! I even threw in a few raisins.

Update: They are pretty good!

New, and free, laptop!

I’m typing this from my new laptop!

My company uses Wealthsimple for our RRSP contributions. I really like this bank. All online, great returns, perks, and no nonsense. (If you want a referral to Wealthsimple, here you go!)

They had a promo this fall to lure you into moving your savings and investments over to their bank for a free gift. I moved my retirement savings from my last two jobs over and they sent me a free Macbook Air, 13″, M4, 16 gig, 256 GB of RAM, with 18 hours of battery life, in a pretty sky blue! It is the cutest, lightest little laptop! I don’t really *need* it, but I’ve noticed over the last couple of years how completely adverse I am to doing anything on my work laptop in the evening or weekends because I like my job too much and I’ll just get sucked back in to working if I open it up after hours. Now I have a personal laptop with no access to anything work related on it. It isn’t meant to store anything, because the hard drive isn’t huge. But I can blog from it, access my photos, and even use it from my recliner in the evenings. If my work laptop was this light and small, it sure would make travel easier! I think I just convinced myself to order a smaller form work laptop next time!

This will also help me keep my Mom’s cousin Gerry happy. Word got back to me recently that he said,

“Tell her not to be so long between blogs we are thirsty out here for her content.”

I may just blog more with this new toy!

Puzzle update

Not a single one of the missing 4 pieces has surfaced. That seems super odd. We’ve looked pretty thoroughly all over the house. I don’t think Hank took them. They weren’t spread out. I kept most of them in the box and organized them in piles as needed. I also can’t believe they’d box up a puzzle with such poor quality control that 4 of the 1000 pieces would be lost. So it is a mystery. I boxed it up and chunked it, because what good is a puzzle without a happy ending!

Happy New Year to you all! We’re heading back to the -40’s for the weekend. I hope you’re enjoying that lake effect snow Ontario!