The 8-Month Year – 2026

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Hiya!

Mysteriously, my calendar, doubtlessly inspired by¹Or perhaps acting against. the productivity sphere’s innovation, The 12-Week Year, has developed its own variant: The 8-Month Year.

How does the 8-Month Year work, I hear you ask?

The system is simple. January, with its simultaneous regrets and resolute promises of reform, is permitted to start said year. February makes a brave, if brief, showing. Then, without warning and with no ransom note, March, April, May, and June vanish as though they never existed. July briskly follows, giving no notice to the missing months and expecting everyone to, likewise, avert their eyes and carry on.

In fairness to the calendar and its missing months, like every year this decade, 2026 hasn’t been an entirely uneventful year. At the end of January, an aging surfer-surgeon disassembled and rebuilt my left ankle, then gave me the happy news that I was down two tendons and needed a great deal of bed rest with said ankle higher than my heart for at least 5 weeks, followed by months of physical therapy. He also introduced me to the wonders of Aleve, which I’ve since adopted as Gen X’s Vitamin A.

For a month after surgery, I was trapped inside like a Dalek, unable even to step down onto my own porch.

At the same time, Southern California had what we call “rain.” This is misleading. “Rain” suggests a level of moderation, a reasonable dampening of surfaces, water falling from the sky in individual drops. What we have are monsoons. In February it poured down in buckets, proving, as Mr. Hammond’s song so wisely warns, that it never rains in Southern California. The garden’s weeds took this as written permission to annex the premises.

Although I had to skip the February Oasis party, by mid-March, I was  deemed well enough for a Spring Break trip to England. By then the garden had its own plans.

Last summer’s trip was a gadding-about version of a holiday: London, Swansea, Mumbles, Cardiff, Dublin, Limerick, the Lake District, Newcastle, Whitby, and other points of geographical ambition. This March was different, quieter. We were (mostly) in Northumberland, staying in a cottage in Alnwick village, living out my quieter and more dangerous fantasy of living near Barter Books.

I emerged from this holiday with a revised new life goal: Retire to a cottage with a garden as close to Barter Books as circumstances, finances, and immigration law will permit.

Paul and I also returned to North Gare, where Sutti ran with such joy that the whole day probably deserves its own post. Plus, a true miracle happened at another beach near Alnwick, but that’s also another story. ²That’s probably not a sentence to tuck into a paragraph about calendars and weeds while trying to solve The Case of the Missing Months.

By the time my plane touched down at LAX, the garden had staged what I can only describe as a coup. Fed by February’s storms, the weeds were knee-high in some places and waist-high in others. For added fun, the ground had hardened into something with diplomatic ties to concrete. The weed barrier fabric gave them something to bolt their roots to. Not helpful.

So spring 2026 was a season of recovery in several senses. I did four to six hours a week of in-person physical therapy sessions until mid-June. I also gardened three or more hours a day, almost every day: cutting back, digging out, hauling, watering, coaxing, arguing gently, and not so gently, with roots, and trying to get new little plants in before they died.

Beginning in the second week of May, my next-door neighbour and I also tore down Cherry House’s old front fence and built a new one, finishing it (well, nearly) today. It was a race against the termites (not a sentence one wants to write about one’s own house but nevertheless accurate).³Having a good front fence is especially important because I live on a busy street populated by bratty squirrels and have a Small Dog who is half terrier. The build (my design, my neighbor’s carpentry) made for quite a job, and IMO it looks great.⁴Lots of people walking have stopped to say it looks great too. As a result of those stops we may have been invited to join a local queer carpentry collective. A win all-round. The driveway gate is now a sliding one, which also means more parking. Because good neighbors make good fences, or at least they do if you mangle Robert Frost sufficiently and both neighbors agree that this is not merely a proverb but a project.

[insert fence images here]

And then there’s the World Cup…

All this to say: despite appearances, I didn’t exactly vanish. I cocooned. Or convalesced. While the weeds plotted their take-over.

The blog, meanwhile, went quiet.

My writing didn’t.⁵In fact I wrote two book proposals, among other things!

A few people very kindly worried something had happened and wrote to check in on my physical and mental health. That was kind, and I was touched. What happened was the ordinary extraordinary business of having a body that’s 58, almost 59 (at the end of July), recovering from surgery, traveling, researching, reading, writing, doing physical therapy, coming home, and trying to persuade some deeply rooted weeds they were not, in fact, the sole legal owners of the property.

Also, Mija’s Room turned two at the end of June. I missed putting up a retrospective on the actual day because, as the attached calendar clearly demonstrates, 2026 appears to have misplaced several months.

This is a personal blog, and, like people, personal blogs have seasons. Some are abundant. Some are quiet. Some are apparently spent inside a chrysalis with a heating pad, driving to physical therapy appointments, and with gardening gloves waiting accusingly by the door. Which is a long way of saying I’ve been writing all along, and have drafts, fragments, notes, garden cuttings, Saint Clare bits, Sutti observations, archive finds, travel memories, and several other unruly things waiting for daylight.

I can safely say July will be livelier than spring 2026 since by posting this today I have already succeeded. One is infinitely more than zero, at least for the purposes of blog arithmetic. ⁶I like to set my bars low so as to avoid tripping and breaking my ankle, knee, and/or wrist.

This month will have more posts. Not necessarily tidy. Not necessarily polished. Possibly not even sensible. But more open-window than closed-door, which seems like a good enough plan for a month that arrived without consulting anyone.

So here we are: Mija’s 2026 Calendar, The 8-Month Year. July has arrived and me with it.

• 1
  Or perhaps acting against.
• 2
  That’s probably not a sentence to tuck into a paragraph about calendars and weeds while trying to solve The Case of the Missing Months.
• 3
  Having a good front fence is especially important because I live on a busy street populated by bratty squirrels and have a Small Dog who is half terrier.
• 4
  Lots of people walking have stopped to say it looks great too. As a result of those stops we may have been invited to join a local queer carpentry collective. A win all-round.
• 5
  In fact I wrote two book proposals, among other things!
• 6
  I like to set my bars low so as to avoid tripping and breaking my ankle, knee, and/or wrist.