I have a hard time putting my feelings about what is going on in the world into words. I am still as heartbroken, disillusioned and deflated as I was 2025. I had to be offline for a while. Reading the news each day to find out what hellish thing the government is cooking up next was and still is a lot. The only other thing I kept holding on to was Instagram to have something easy and quick.
I tried to make and keep up with in person connection. On a personal level the year has been good to me. I still have my job what is a miracle in itself considering the turmoil the US academic research is in, my online book club is keeping me reading (stumbled on via Instagram and met in partly person for the first time last summer), the kids (both in high school now) are doing well, made some new friends, caught up with some old ones and managed to finish a couple of house projects including a complete rewire. We got to visit our families in Germany last summer, vacationed on Corfu, Greece and visited our friends in Las Vegas. So on we go, one step in front of the other. I know I am lucky and am thankful for it.
The local county has a winter walk challenge I joined. They send out an e-mail each week with prompts what to look for during your walk and you can submit a picture in order to win a price. The above is my submission for week 1’s “Watch Your Step”. I am going to start posting about this weekly from now on – maybe it helps me getting back to my online community that I neglected for way to long. I hope you can forgive me.
Something to look forward to: my friend’s birthday tea party
What are you looking forward to?
Home here and there 
What happiness to see your post pop up in my email! I’m glad you’re here, I look forward to reading your weekly posts about your walking challenge. It sounds like 2025 was a good year for you, personally. It’s complicated when it’s such a horrible year in so many ways for so many people, right? There’s such a cognitive dissonance sometimes, between the wider world and our personal lives.
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Yes, on the dissonance. I struggle with this but also want to keep a little sense of normalcy with all the turmoil in the world.
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I am so happy your blog popped up in my feed reader. I have missed your posts but I can totally understand that staying away from online and news and all was healthy. I am glad to hear you have had a good year despite what is going on in this world. I am hoping and praying that we will find a way to course correct. Because the way the leaders of the world are currently running things will end in disaster if we are not already there. But as you I try to stay away from the news because it is too much for me.
Here is to a better 2026 and the hope things will be more bright.
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Don’t get me wrong. I am still reading the news. I am mostly trying to stay away from the online chatter surrounding it. I also hope we will find a good way out of this. It’s scary.
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I have the entire next week off from work. Except that I have a student meeting I accidentally scheduled for Monday, I need to publish my classes in our online system, and I am presenting at a conference next month and need to do some work on that. So I’m just going to be at home working. And that’s good, right?
I can’t even with the news. I feel useless and helpless and like the third of the German population who was ignoring the news right until the end.
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I always get side tracked when I try to work from home but my husband does it all the time when he is off from work.
And yes, all of this regarding the news with the difference that we don’t have an excuse not to be informed.
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