Happy New Year!
I must say that I feel relieved to close the book on 2025. It was a difficult year, and I sense that held true for many people.

While I am not into traditional New Year's resolutions, the turn of the year does offer a nice "starting point" for change, and for starting new habits and routines.
Most of what I am hoping to "improve" in 2026 relates to my creative processes and to the time I set aside for things creative. I really value writing and working on my art, but I seldom give it much time, and it invariably ends up being an afterthought, once everything else has been taken care of... by which time I am often too tired to care.
While I don't like making hard guarantees, my intention is to make a conscious effort to do at least one creative thing every day. That doesn’t seem like a completely unreasonable ambition, but we'll see how it goes.

Not setting any Steemit goals for the year, either... save for the standard "keeping up with my blog at least twice a week" plan I have had since I started here. It's a soft goal, at the best of times, given that I really do enjoy writing... when I can find the time for it.
I guess crypto could hardly go much worse but it's probably wise to not say too much about that. Our beleaguered Steem token lost about 75% of its value in 2025... and now sits near its all-time low, where it also was not long after I first joined this community. Sometimes I'm just really grateful that I didn't sink a bunch of money into Steem when the price was $2.00!
Otherwise, I'm creeping up on my 9th anniversary of being here, coming up later this month. Things certainly have changed a lot since those early days, some for the better, some for the worse. I just hope that some day we will see more real human-generated content, and not so much AI-driven garbage and filler.

On a more general level, one of my plans is to get better sleep. Much as I might like to think otherwise, I really don't get enough sleep, and I keep strange and irregular hours. And I often end up feeling really sleepy by mid-afternoon.
Anyway, this was just a quick catch-up post before I start anything more serious!
Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!
How about YOU? Do you have any goals and plans for 2026? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)
Created at 2026.01.04 01:15 PST
x1024/2258