Merry Christmas all! I hope the year has been kind to you. My husband and I could sum up 2025 as The Year of Home Improvement Projects. Also The Year of Diminishing Bank Accounts.
For one thing, we had a sprinkler system installed so that we wouldn’t have to water our lawn anymore. Or rather, so that we wouldn’t have to feel guilty for not watering our lawn. Truly we would rather pour green concrete all over our yard than drag hoses around it. Now that we have the sprinkler system I’m glad we didn’t go that route.
We also had a new shower put in. I like it but as you know if you travel, there’s always a learning curve with showerheads you’re not used to. At least there is for me. And our new showerhead has more settings than a blender. They aren’t labeled like the ones on our blender are but they seem to range from “gentle mist” to “rainy afternoon” to “day at the car wash.”
There’s another downside I hadn’t anticipated. Our old shower had a full-length mirror on the door. And I’d made it a point to check it regularly ever since that time I went to work with my shirt buttoned wrong.
Our new shower wasn’t equipped with a mirror so my husband hung one in the only spot it fits in our bathroom. Unfortunately now whenever I wash my hands, I see the back of my head reflected back at me in the mirror above our sink. It’s made me acutely aware of something I was only vaguely conscious of before: the cowlick on the back of my head.
I’m embarrassed to admit how preoccupied I’ve become with it. I comb it, tease it and douse it with hairspray. I catch myself studying the backs of heads in church, comparing other people’s cowlicks to mine. And I frequently ask my husband how my cowlick looks at that moment. When it’s behaving, he says “fine.” When it’s not, he says, “just be glad you have hair.”
Speaking of hair, my cat has a lot of it. No cowlick though. But his hair was a contributing factor in two smaller household projects. We finally had our ducts cleaned and by finally I mean after 30 years of owning our home. If you go online, you’ll find varying opinions of how often you should have this done. But you won’t find anyone advising you to wait as long as we did, especially if you have a pet. And I suspect a cat might be one of the worst. The duct cleaners had a camera for viewing the bowels of our home and our ducts looked positively fur lined. I can’t see that happening with an iguana.
According to the refrigerator repairman we could also blame our cat for the fact that our icemaker quit working. To be fair, I think we should probably blame us since we’ve never taught our cat to vacuum.
Apparently the coils under our fridge were warm and cozy and wearing little fur coats. That somehow affected our icemaker. We do clean the coils more often than our ducts but neither of us had any recollection of the last time we did it. I’m guessing it was around five years ago but we had a different refrigerator then.
So now you see why I call 2025 The Year of Home Improvement Projects and The Year of Diminishing Bank Accounts. I suppose I could also call it The Year of the Cat…Hair.
That’s it for now. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours. May 2026 be The Year of Something Good for Us All.
Dorothy Rosby is the author of ’Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate; Holidays, Special Occasions and Other Times Our Celebrations Get Out of Hand and other books. Contact her at www.dorothyrosby.com/contact.