Happy New Year!

For the last 15+ years (I have been blogging since 2007!) I have written a New Year’s Day post; this is my 13th New Year’s Day post on Ann’s Entitled Life! I swear it was only yesterday when I started writing this website!

Every year I have the same New Year’s resolution; to remember to write the current year’s date on all correspondence and checks. I aim low and still cannot always meet expectations.

The 2026 blogging side is basically a repeat of the 2024 and 2025 blogging side: Google sucks.

My advice: move on from Google. Find a different search engine because Google is all in on scraping Reddit for AI generated search results.

As I wrote before:

You may have noticed your google search results now suck. There are a bunch of five-year-old Reddit posts amongst the first 10 returns when you search for anything on Google, and it is getting more difficult to find anything useful in search. That is because Google had a lot of updates last year, the biggest one being the “helpful content update” which was anything but helpful or useful for anyone. [Edited to add in 2025: They had three more major updates in 2024. The October update held a glimmer of hope, but then the one six weeks later killed that as they returned to poor search results.]

As a website owner, I only expect search returns to get worse as everything is copied by Bing and Google and stuffed into their AI. I strongly urge you to bookmark or follow your favorite bloggers and websites via social media or newsletter so you can find their content again, because Google ain’t gonna help you.

Nothing got better, everything got worse.

At this point, I am assuming there are websites you have been following that have disappeared. People have bills to pay, and with all the AI changes that have happened as well as the search degradation, people simply can no longer afford their websites.

I still consider this website to be my personal diary. I write it so that in five years, I can remember, “Oh yeah, we took THAT trip” or “Hubby made THAT recipe.” For those unfamiliar with this blog, my husband does most of the cooking. He is an excellent cook. I bake and make (and drink) cocktails, he cooks!

Now on to 2026 personal updates…

This past year was a lulu for me.

We began the year by traveling to Auckland, New Zealand, then boarding a cruise ship for more New Zealand. We then went on to Australia: Tasmania, Melbourne and several more stops through to Perth.

We then were in Southeast Asia traveling to Bali, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

It was a long trip and we were away from mid-January to mid-April.

In early October, I shared with those of you who receive my newsletter how sick I had been in August and September.

I couldn’t breathe after only walking a few steps. I “know” who I got it from (one of four people that were installing things in our spare bathroom, Hubby got ill, too. We hadn’t been out of the house for a week, so those four guys were my suspects). Finally, at the end of September I had to go to the doctor as we were leaving on another trip in mid-October. She gave me antibiotics to clear me up, things got a lot better, and 10 days after finishing those antibiotics we went off to Europe for seven weeks.

In Italy, I was having trouble keeping up with Hubby and on (small) group tours. I couldn’t walk ¼ of a mile without stopping. Both Hubby and I put this down to my two months of illness, and my having no stamina. We figured while the antibiotics cleared up what I had, I wasn’t back to my spring physical fitness level.

I told Hubby I couldn’t live this way, and asked him to buy me a treadmill so I could work back to five miles per day. We also are moving a TV out to the lanai to be able to do water aerobics via video in our pool.

Five days after we got back from Europe, I had my yearly doctor’s visit.

I told the nurse that my stamina wasn’t quite back. Explained how things started in Europe, but that by the end I was able to walk four miles in a day. Not my usual amount, but better than how I started. She took my pulse and it came up at 39.

The doctor came in, said that can’t be right as I am usually in the 70s or 80s (even when I went in sick as a dog it was 60). She decided to do an EKG on me, and that said a pulse of 38.

She sent me down for blood work (I have Graves disease and if my thyroid meds stopped working, it can (and did once 15 years ago), produce a slow heartbeat), and forwarded that EKG to the cardiologist connected with her practice.

About 10 minutes after I got home, I got a call from the cardiologist’s office, “Get to the ER.”

Well, as I have written about in the past, I do not like going to the doctor as they only find things wrong with me, and the hospital is even worse.

After a 10 minute back-and-forth where she kept saying, “Get to the ER” and I kept asking for an appointment, Hubby took me to the ER.

End result? I got a pacemaker.

From that doctor’s appointment to getting home from the hospital was a TOTAL of 26 hours! Crazy how fast things can move.

I went in and had blood pressure reading of 200/100 (or more) and my pulse was between 30-45. My normal blood pressure in in the 120s/60s, and my normal pulse is around 70. The high blood pressure was my body trying to compensate for the low pulse.

As soon as I was back in my hospital room I looked up at the numbers after surgery they were normal. Pulse showed 80, blood pressure showed 128/67. And, I could breathe easier. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t breathing well prior until that moment!

The surgery was about 40 minutes. Since it is a local anesthetic they took me right back to my room where the Abbot rep (the company that makes the pacemaker) explained the tracking (RF, the next generation will be blue tooth) and how long it should last (about 10 years). I had MANY people in before and after surgery to explain what was wrong with my heart, the wiring issue, and what I can/cannot do after surgery.

It was explained to me that a lot of people have the heart “misfiring” as they get older, and pacemakers are very common. In my case, it was not considered hereditary.

So, as I sit here recovering (I am now three weeks post opp), I thank goodness for having that yearly doctor appointment. Without it, who knows what would have happened as I had no pain and no real symptoms – although clearly I did have at least one symptom and was blaming that symptom on a two month illness for lack of stamina.

For 2026 travel plans? Nothing as intense as 2025. We are taking a cruise with my mother and aunt, and going to South America for a month. We also need to make a trip to Buffalo as we have not gone back for several years. And, that’s about it.

And, I finally am going to plant those trees I talked about years ago. I love gardening, and a rack of herbs and some tomatoes simply isn’t enough for me. So, “we” are expanding a bit in the lanai. Sweet banana peppers, Satsumac oranges, Meyer lemons, figs, (spineless) prickly pears, and maybe Persian limes are being contemplated. What we actually plant is gonna be dependent upon Hubby though as this is planned for inside the lanai and I am not dragging around pots and “we” need to get male/female plants in one, so that could limit what we grow.

That brings me up to date for life in Ann’s Entitled Life household.

This is the link for the Ann’s Entitled Life newsletter sign-up. You click it and then you get an email (check your spam folder) that asks, “Do you really want this newsletter?” If you do, click yes and you are in! I send out a newsletter once (sometimes twice) a month with updates and new posts. You always have the ability to unsubscribe at the bottom of every newsletter. Oh! One more thing… if you use Gmail, Google sends almost all newsletters to spam. Just another way Google is looking out for you (yes, that is sarcasm). Make sure you indicate the newsletters you receive are not spam.

My newsletter, contact me page and email are the best ways to reach me, or you can leave a comment on the website post you are reading! I love comments and will answer them all.

The only other platform I am active on is Pinterest and while that is wonderful for finding new ideas, it is not really a great way to communicate.

I hope you had a fantastic 2025 and wish you nothing but happiness, health, and wealth in 2026.

I want to thank you all for reading Ann’s Entitled Life. I would not mind if you all commented more. I love interacting with people who read this website and I would like to get to know you all, too. Please feel free to comment on the blog.

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