Calendar

 

The holiday season is over.  Time to do start up tasks for the New Year:

• Replaced the calendars.  I bought them back in August but remembered exactly where I put them.  In Haven, the calendar for the year is wildlife by Charlie Harper.  At first I thought his work was Cubist but looked him up and it's called Minimal Realism.  Reminds me a lot of  the Lamanozov figures I collected so assume this is my preference when it comes to art.  There is also the white board calendar which has to be wiped clean and redone.   I write the name of the month at the top.  Last year, all months were written in German.  This year all of the months will be in Spanish.  A small thing but I figure this way sooner or later I'll know the months in both languages.
• Packed away the blatantly Christmas decorations: the hanging sock by the fireplace, the santa figurines, the creche.  Everything else like the red balls, candles, greenery, snowmen, etc. remain as decor until spring comes and they will be replaced w/ pink bunnies and flowers.
• Pulled up my 2025 on-line file of yearly stats and noted that last year the 'new' plants/creatures I found here were a yellow-legged millipede, a yellow parasol mushroom, a maple spanworm moth, and a river otter.  Not sure if I should count the otter since I didn't get a pic of it but fairly sure that's what I saw in Gorgeous Gorge.  Also noted I volunteered over 150 hours, had guests for 35 days, and did everything on my monthly-to-do list except install a new furnace filter.  Since I run the air conditioner probably no more than 10 days each year, not having a new furnace filter isn't too terrible.   I used the 2025 file to create a 2026 file.  I deleted all of the contents out of the new 2026 file and am ready to keep track of this year. 
• Printed out and pasted '2025' on the plastic bin I throw receipts and other info in for the year.  I'll keep it around until I submit my fed/state taxes, throw a copy of the form in, click the top shut, and it will take it's place in the garage w/ bins from other years.   I'd cleaned out another bin in the autumn so have a new one ready for this year's ephemera.