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 12th 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 2025 blogging side is basically a repeat of the 2024 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 last year:

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.

And not only did nothing change, things got worse. I know many bloggers and commercial content websites that have closed up shop or stopped posting. When you run your website as a business, you need to make money to not only live, but to pay the website bills. Many people held out for a year, but have made (and are making) the decision to close up as blogging as a career is increasingly becoming impossible.

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 2025 personal updates…

New Years 2024 I shared our 2023 some updates to our house. In 2024, we did a few more updates including finishing the plantation shutters, a new pool liner (I would have liked to have made that a post, but it was done when we were out of the country), and renovated our master bathroom (those posts are coming up soon).

For 2024 the plans are to update the half bath with a new floor and light (there isn’t much more to do there, the fixtures are fine), and give the other full bath a facelift (new cabinetry, flooring, lighting, etc.). At that point we should be done with the house (we decided against redoing the kitchen after living through the master bath reno) and will only be renovating as I go looking for stuff to do. < smile > The driveway will need to be redone at some point, but we are not quite there yet.

We traveled to Spain early in the year and Hubby got his make-up trip from when we were kicked out in 2020.

We also took my mother on an 80th birthday trip to Scandinavia. In addition, Hubby and I spent some time in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Brussels. All those trip posts are coming soon!

Our travel schedule in 2025 is not quite complete. We have a major trip planned that starts in New Zealand (we loved it last time) and ends in Japan (we have never been there!).

We have a second trip planned that starts in Italy (we have not been since 2022) and ends in Miami. Yes, another transatlantic cruise, this time via Greece, Turkey, and more!

I have never been to Greece and always wanted to go. We had it planned for 2021, and well, we all know what happened there. Had to cancel. Sonny-boy and his wife were in Athens and visited one of the islands for a week in November and they loved it even more than Rome! And since Rome is my favorite big city, I am really looking forward to visiting.

A lot of our travel this year will be done via boat. Hubby and I have been pretty loyal to Celebrity for cruising. Celebrity made some ill advised cuts early in 2023 and rolled many of them back (the Scandinavian cruise was on Celebrity), so we do have one cruise planned with them. We are also scheduled to go on Silver Sea which is a big step-up from the other cruise lines we have traveled with. It is our first time sailing with them, so that should be interesting.

We also have a cruise planned on Oceania. We learned our lesson on the small room stateroom and moved up to a larger room for the next trip. Let’s hope that one is large enough! We also have to watch what we eat on Oceania as the food is fantastic.

One a personal-personal level – I had a fall in February (it was the dumbest thing, I tripped on nothing (must have been the door tract) and fell into an empty closet) that really set me back physically. We cleared it with my doctor for me to go to on the transatlantic and trip to Spain and that trip really forced my recovery. Basically, it forced me outside my comfort zone. I either did stuff or wasted money. Those of you that know me know I hate to waste money, so the trip was basically my rehab.

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

I hope you had a fantastic 2024 and wish you nothing but happiness, health, and wealth in 2025.

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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