Some Good in '26 in Planting Trees

I’m going to recap some of the more interesting or good things that have happened this year. I’m glad I took pictures of most of it, because it’s been a complete blur and I can’t believe it’s a hundred degrees outside already.

January

• It actually snowed once this year and Moose was pretty icked out by it. My little covid baby is six now! When he was young in like ‘21 he had his first snow and loved it but he’s hated every instance since.
• A friend introduced my partner and I to the Monster Hunter series and we went hardcore into it for awhile. I haven’t played a AAA action-type game in a long time. It’s about to have an expansion, and I am so stoked.
• I lost my insurance at the end of last year and I lost my psychiatrist, but I discovered that my new insurance has a co-pay of like four bucks. My therapy and (new) psychiatry appts. will go down from $35 each to about $4. My physical therapy and specialist appts. (I was going twice a week for much of last year and need to go back) are down from a $70 copay to $4. It’s insane. I really feel like I am saving so much money that it replaces what I lost on each paycheck from dropping to part time.
• I started a discord server for documenting the name, picture, and species information of every creature I encounter on No Man’s Sky. It’s sorted like a taxonomy and would look like homework to everyone else but I’m having a blast filling it in when I’m playing. An example:

…Variable Alpha Snork was named based on my name for its species type, it’s gender being Alpha, and because of how variable its head shape and coat patterns are. I haven’t played in a few months, but my desktop background is the portal code to my own little patch of fictional universe, where I go when I need to kick back and chill out.

February

• I found this absolute banger of a comment making fun of people that were leaving rage comments about who played Helen of Troy in the latest Odyssey movie:

• I turned 35 on Feb. 9th and the family celebrated by playing Drawful 2 on the Switch. I was going through a hyperfixation on mixology and had been drinking for my birthday, so the game was even more enjoyable than usual. At some point, though, I almost died because I’d gotten the prompt “cotton candy hair” to draw and at the end, my phone did that delayed scribble that touch screens do when they read your finger wrong, and the paintbrush swirled a perfect dong on the stick figure person. …the game does not let you erase.

…so that popped up in front of my whole family. Amazing.

• I cooked some mean meals and started making simple syrups for cocktails, which lead to making italian cream sodas as well. I need to do this again tomorrow.
• I built a somewhat scale model of an ancient greek Oikos (middle/upperclass athenian family housing) on our Minecraft friend server. I’d hear a few months later that a friend’s little daughter, who was learning to play Minecraft, was completely enamored with it and my other builds. She’s since used mine and my partner’s builds as inspiration for her own first builds. <3 What a wonderful baton to have passed without knowing.

March

• I was able to swap the doom and gloom with some fresh spring blooms. Mom and I went on flower walks and went to the river to dig in the boat ramp mud for shells. Although I felt zombielike from dissociation, the sun and air really did help, even if posting everything to iNaturalist felt like a slog (I usually enjoy it.)
• (Somewhere in late March or early April) My partner and I went to an event at a historic cabin right in the middle of town. The tree board had set up to give away native tree saplings, four per household, and a lot more people showed up than they expected. We stood in line, inching down the street and then across the cabin’s front yard toward the booth on the right side of the porch. On the left side of the porch, a completely unrelated bluegrass ensemble had set up camp and kicked into song. We are almost to the front of the line and someone walks by us to say something to one of the musicians, and I overhear that the ensemble had no idea the tree people were going to be there. We make it to the booth to find a very exhausted/dissociated man taking tree orders, and in that moment, it was clear the tree people didn’t know about the ensemble, either. I’m still laughing about it.

April

• We took in a little lost dog in our neighborhood and kept it safe until my nana found who it belonged to. It was so gentle and friendly, that kind of overly trusting dog that’s never met someone it didn’t love. Our cats were less than impressed.

May
* Mom and I went to Woolly Hollow and the river to scout for galls to post during 2026 Spring Gall Week. Despite doing several very fruitful walks, I only got around to uploading one batch of them. My heart just wasn’t in it.
* At Woolly Hollow, I had a sidequest: a coworker had to get pictures of a mushroom, a moss, and a few other things for a biology or botany college class, but was too anxious to use the busy park she had access to for fear of people finding her weird. My partner found what he could in the backyard and took pictures with a little slip of paper that had her name on it and the year in marker. I took the paper with me to Woolly Hollow for the rest, and we finished her pictures and found IDs for each of them. She thanked me for contributing a few days later and I managed to say “anytime!” instead of begging her for more assignments because hunting for wild samples is such a rush.
* We did a lot of gardening and built a “leaf mold bin” out of a bamboo pole and leftover chicken wire. My snapdragons that came back in a pot from last year bloomed, along with a wildflower mix that’s been holding on for a few years now.
* I opened my emojis to find that I had accidentally set this egg as a favorite somehow. The eggmoji stares back at me every time I open the menu and the absurdity of it having happened slays me every time.

…I am easily amused.

• At Cadron Settlement, mom spotted a patch of wild cacti (eastern north america’s only native cactus species, I think, in Opuntia genus) growing down a slope above the Arkansas River. I did a reckless thing as carefully as I could, climbing down the slope for some closer pictures. It was worth it.

• We got to see this duck family cross the road after therapy.

• My partner and I clocked out early one shift because we spotted kittens playing under someone’s car. We were able to get all four into a carrier with an hour or two of patience and teamwork. Here are the precious babies. I’m so glad the owner of the car took them (she owned the mama cat that had carried them into the car’s undercarriage) because I had kitten fever immediately.

• A friend that comes over to play boardgames is dating someone and he brought her over for game night. She seems awesome. She speaks in memes, also struggles to take her ADHD medicine consistantly, plays Palia (4/5 people in our household love this game,) and loves Eurovision. I’m usually too shy to engage or joke openly with people when meeting them, but I guess she instantly passed the vibe check.

• The program we use to do our job sometimes gives people bad suggestions to substitute when the item they ordered is out. Sometimes bad is an understatement; once, the program wanted a shopper to replace the bacon the customer had ordered with a piggy bank. I’ve never seen one quite THAT absurd, but this one is pretty ridiculous. Someone had ordered a bag of ice and it seriously wanted me to give them some gum. Picture proof:

June

• I was bringing a cart of mulch around the garden center when I saw a Great Tailed Grackle standing near the curb and it didn’t flee when I got close. I was able to hold him and take him to the curb nearby just to get him out of the road. A bit under two hours later, our shift was over, so we checked to find the little guy still there. We took him home and had him in a jumbo zipper tent for containing pets in the backseat of your car, which was large enough for him to walk around and twice his height, following advice on how to keep him from going into shock while we found a rehabber. Sadly, he passed a few hours later, and our best guess is that he had gotten into poison or eaten something else that had been poisoned. You don’t win them all, but us having taken him in kept him from being caught in a downpour so he could die in peace.

• We have new gutters with leaf guards that are designed to work with our metal roof and they look nice.
• We’ve done a lot of yardwork and built a garden whose tomatos, peppers, and squash are doing well and starting to yeild. I’ve saved a few native volunteer plants in the yard and have quite a few maple saplings starting up from seeds found here or there. Our trees from the tree event have abundant, healthy leaves and are also doing very well.
• The catio got an upgrade and the babies are obsessed with it, although Callisto has gotten quite bratty about coming inside for the night. The problem child in question:

• …and I’ve taken the dumbest picture of Moose imaginable. He looks like George Rodriguez’s Blue Dog:

I’ll probably think of something I missed. I was just going back through my photo cloud for reminders.