Happy New Year!

For the last 10+ years (I have been blogging since 2007!) I have written a New Year’s Day post; this is my 11th 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 – remember to write the current year’s date on all correspondence and checks. I aim low and still cannot always meet expectations. Sheesh

On the blogging side of 2023… 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.

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.

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 isn’t really a great way to communicate.

Blogging has become a commercial business in no way resembling a written diary for most “bloggers” or websites. I am going to be very interested in how all these search updates shake out. Most people cannot afford to write and create for free. And, Google controls about 90% of all ad revenue on the internet. They aren’t sending traffic to commercial sites, and they need those sites for revenue. Quite the conundrum.

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 personal updates…

In 2023 we did some updates to our house in Florida. New landscaping was the big project for the year. I could write a book on everything I did wrong with this project, and yet, I am happy with most of the changes.

We purchased our house almost two years ago from an 80+-year-old woman whose husband had died about 15 years prior. Together, they built this house about 30 years ago and the husband maintained it well (we got the scoop from our next door neighbors). After he passed away, I swear the only maintenance she did was to get a new roof, have the grass cut, and replace the pool liner. We had weirdo stuff to repair with the fireplace, overgrown and ugly landscaping to take care of, and a master bath to redo (which will be its own post as it is quite the undertaking).

This past year, I spent a lot of money on new landscaping and hardscaping. There was pulling out the landscaping around the lanai (rose bushes… what is with people and rosebushes around pools!?), and pulling out the side landscaping, replacing the front landscaping, fixing drainage issues, and putting down two cobblestone walkways.

I started google-ing and checking references for several landscapers. The problem with Florida is there is building everywhere, and for contractors, builders are not only easier to deal with than homeowners, but builders are a steady income source versus a one-and-done homeowner. The added bonus for contractors to work with builders over homeowners is that builders are less picky than someone living in their own home.

I was able to get three bids, two landscape designs (which I needed to submit to the HOA for the front yard), and had to choose from those, and those alone. It is amazing to me how many landscape designers were eight months out (we were not planting in the summer in Florida) or did not return my call at all.

I thought I picked a good landscape designer based on reviews, design, and our interactions, but in the end? He was meh.

Turns out his foreman had left him and opened up his own landscaping business. And that forman was the business.

We were fortunate enough that the former foreman’s company was hired as a subcontractor and did the tear out, drainage repair, and planting (he did a magnificent job), but the negative was the guy I hired as the landscape designer was now basically a GC having no crews of his own. Even better? He didn’t give the approved design to the landscaper who did the planting!! I had specifically asked for shades of green, no flowers, and three fruit tress (two in the lanai, one in the backyard) – which were all in the design – and got almost none of it.

We had gone away while most of the planting was done, otherwise I’d have stopped it and asked where the design was. The former-foremen-subcontractor did offer to dig it all up and replant, but I am a sucker. What we ended up with is truly lovely, but much more work than I personally wanted. *sigh*

We didn’t get the fruit trees in the lanai as the GC disappeared before that happened (fortunately, I did not pay him for those). In the end, that turned out to be a good thing as they’d have died when we were on vacation (many of my herbs died), but shesh. We also did not get the orange tree we wanted (I had not paid for that either), but our regular landscaper/lawn guy is willing to plant one for us this spring if Hubby still wants it. And, I think he does.

We did get the work done on our drainage issues, and it is fantastic and done very well. The rain water from the gutters now runs under ground and then there are pop-ups where the water comes out in the grass. This is a huge upgrade to the drains that poured water over the sidewalks.

There was a dirt island in the middle of the backyard, and that is now gone. And, we no longer have ponding in the grass when the big rains come through.

The azaleas that were on the side of the house that were pulled out were very woody and half dead. The workers that installed the cobblestone were mediocre at best. The walkways look fantastic at first glace, but there are small cuts and slices that never should have been made. Still, it is holding well, looks pretty good if you aren’t inspecting it closely, and has a slope for drainage, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

While I don’t think it was a waste of money (I had the landscaping done three times up in New York State and never paid less than what I paid here any one of those times), and the final results were better than they had any right to be based on the GC. All the good that happened on this project was due to the former foremen’s expertise. I wish I had hired him directly.

That was our big project in 2023, along with new window coverings (not a big deal or intrustive, just a lot of $$), and the sofa deliveries (after nearly a year!), although the master bath reno is in full swing.

As far as trips? We went on a Caribbean cruise with my mother and my aunt last February/March. I had presented the idea to my mother that we all go to Scandanavia for her 80th birthday this year. My mother had knee replacement surgery in 2022 and was not certain she’d be up to a trip. That vacation was to see if she could do it, and my aunt came along as her friend and to stay in the same room and offer any help.

My mother did beautifully and my aunt had a good time, and so in August Hubby, my mother, aunt, and I are off to England from where we will sail to Sweden (someone help me! I am going to the ABBA museum with them!!), Denmark and Norway. We then return to England where we will all spend a few more days together sightseeing (my mother has been there a lot, Hubby once, my aunt and I never), and then they will fly home. At that point, Hubby and I are taking a cruise around Scotland and Ireland, and then a transatlantic home.

We enjoyed our transatlantic cruise so much last year, that we decided to take one not only home from England, but to Spain in the spring.

Hubby is finally going to get the end of that trip to Spain that was cut short when the world shut down in 2020!!

The other vacations we took in 2023 was one up to Buffalo to visit friends and family, and then we spent some time in Asheville, NC on the way home (thanks to all of you who subscribe to my newsletter for suggesting it!). And, most of December was spent in the Caribbean cruising.

There were many Caribbean island ports we have been to numerous times, and sometimes we no longer get off the ship in those ports, but there were actually two ports we had never been to before December! Considering all the Caribbean cruising we had done in the past (I don’t write them up because frankly they are not very exotic trips), that was amazing.

We now call our Caribbean cruises ‘coffee runs’ as we pick up some great coffee beans in Columbia, Costa Rica, Jamaica (the best!), and Mexico.

We went on two cruises in December, one was Mexico-centric, the other the eastern Caribbean. These were not back-to-back, but two different ships. We got off one ship one day, and onto the other ship the next day.

Those are Mayan ruins in Belize. The day was rainy and dreary. We did not walk the ruins (I can go up, but I’d never have gotten down). We sat under a shelter and it started to rain heavily as the members of our group that did walk the stairs came down. Our tour guide joked, “water falls.” Yikes! Fortunately, no one slipped on the way down even though the stairs were very slick.

Hubby and I have been pretty loyal to Celebrity for cruising. Well, Celebrity made some ill advised cuts this year and so we are on a search for a new “favorite.” We went back to Princess after quite some time, first sailing on the Sky (terrible trip) and Caribbean (old ship, tired, but the staff was fabulous). We have two more cruises planned on Princess in 2024, along with an Oceania cruise and a Celebrity cruise, so we will definitely be able to make a value-for-the-money comparison.

That brings me up to date for life in Ann’s Entitled Life household. We are still working our way through this house to make it our home, and we took some smaller trips in 2023 with much bigger vacations planned in 2024.

I hope you had a fantastic 2023 and wish you nothing but happiness, health, and wealth in 2024.

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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