Today’s TTT is “goals for 2026”.  Hmm – well, I’m sure I won’t get to ten. But first, two teases from James Madison by Richard Brookhiser:

Madison showed intelligence and humor. One evening he proposed an experiment to see how many bottles of champagne it would take to induce hangovers the next day. (No result was recorded.)

“The wine,” wrote one dazzled Federalist senator, “was the best I ever drank, particularly the champagne, which was indeed delicious. I wish [Jefferson’s] French politics were as good as his French wines.”

(1) Finish my second Classics Club. It should not be difficult: only a couple of of the books on my current list are girthy challenges (The Shahnameh and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). The trick is getting started.

(2)  Do proper justice to my America @ 250 challenge for this year.

(3) Complete The Bible in a Year challenge following Fr. Mike Schmitz’s program.  I am currently on track. Fr. Schmitz’s approach isn’t a straight read through;  instead readers get different books concurrently (Genesis and Job, for instance) with a splash of Psalms or Proverbs at the end of the day for flavor.  It keeps one from getting bogged down in laws and “begats”.  I think there are also some liturgical calendar considerations at work: right around Easter, for instance, there’s an abrupt switch from the book of Judges for a “Messianic Checkpoint” week spent in John.

(4) Continue to avoid reddit. I’ve never been a compulsive user of social media — I use facebook and instagram very sparingly — but when I “stumbled on” reddit a few years back I found it had the same addictive and poisonous effect on me that other social media platforms have on others.  This year I decided to quit it cold turkey and am so far holding out. 

(5) More writing. Given how active this blog is, I realize that may sound like a strange goal, but I have a local history blog I created a few years ago and have done little with – including publicizing it, because  I haven’t been able to post there consistently enough to justify promoting it –  and last year I began to share a series of local-drama short stories I’d written. I don’t know that anything will come of the later, aside from my own joy, but I’d like to continue exploring that as ideas come to me.

(6) I’ve been wanting to expand my role as a local history expert for a couple of years now: to a degree, this is working insofar as I’m the go-to person for people writing books that touch on my town, but I’m wanting a more integrated expertise – one that incorporates our surrounding counties, since my town’s prominence came from having been an ‘in-gathering’ site for the region: we were the place everyone else sent crops to sell, and the place that received goods from outside for people to purchase.  Expanding this role would entail me attending historical societies meetings in those counties. I’ve begun networking with people in a couple of counties but have yet to attend a proper meeting, let alone establish myself as a regular, predictable presence there.

(7) Read Johnny Clegg’s autobiography – or rather, the first part of it. Unfortunately, we lost Johnny before he could properly finish it.  Clegg’s music was literally the first time I ever watched a movie’s credits because I wanted to find out who sang that song. (“Dela”, from George of the Jungle. Yes, I was in middle school – but I still love it.)

(8) Return to purposeful tech training. I used to be fairly intense about staying up to date with tech, but then near-death, dialysis, and transplants happened and I got thrown off — despite constantly studying during my transplant recovery. I just saw the CompTia A+ is doing 1201/1202 tests and I haven’t even reviewed all the new stuff on their 1101/1102- gen material. It wasn’t just medical issues, of course: COVID + bitcoin mining really disrupted tech prices and I don’t know that they’ve ever normalized.

(9) Re-reading. I began trying to make this a habit last year; there are books I’d like to revisit just to see how I respond to them 10-15 years later.

(10) Complete this list. Woo! I made ten!