Monday 16 February 2026: The Year of the Horse

Today’s post should have been a book review, but I didn’t have one ready. So it’s the Friday/weekend catchup instead. And as tomorrow’s blog title will be ‘Pancake Day’, I decided to make today’s title about the Chinese New Year, which is also tomorrow and which, I believe, is the Year of the Horse.

For my own sins, I was born during the Year of the Dragon. Do you know which year you were born in? (I definitely know one person will, so this question is not directed at you! 😉)

So, Friday…We had snow forecast Thursday night into Friday. I think we had a flurry during the evening on the Thursday, but that was it. For that particular forecast. It was bitter cold and the rain was a bit thick. But no snow to speak of.

I didn’t have a hospital appointment to go out for, so the morning yawned and I had plenty to fill it. Starting with a proper play time with the dogs. (After my dirty cuppa/quiet hour.) The poet was up really, really early as he had to be in the midlands for about 9am. The dogs don’t really like it when he gets up goes out and leaves us all here, and they want to get up as well. So no lie-in for me…

I’d finished my dates work the day before, for February, and I was supposed to leave that to percolate for a few days and start posting them from this Wednesday. But as it was all already done, and as I’d already selected 5 for me and 40 throwaways, I thought I may as well write the February writing prompts article and try and get ahead on next month’s dates work.

So I wrote the article, chose the image, posted it to Patreon, and submitted it to Writers’ Blokke on Medium. It was approved on Medium really quickly, but the editor scheduled it to post on Saturday. I guess he knows his readers better than I do and when they’re more likely to be online.

I watched the next pop-up video from WMG Books (they seem to have changed their own reference to themselves from WMG Publishing to WMG Books, so I will too, although they also use WMG Workshops), this one on how to get automatic depth into your writing. I made a note of the assignment, which is 3,000 – 7,000 words this time, but again didn’t have time to start it. 

When that was done, I turned to the next proofreading job on Upwork. I read through the editor and, I assume, beta reader comments and deleted any that were just comments or any where the changes were already done, and I printed off the hard copy so I can work on that this week. 

I did my weekly finance work and my weekly backup, and closed down for the weekend, completely forgetting today’s blog post. 

The snow still didn’t come and on Saturday we just did our weekly shop. On Sunday we woke to a bit of a covering, but the rain soon washed it away. We didn’t go out, other than a quick dog walk around the block, and I made an apricot pudding while the poet made this week’s ice cream. 

Both of our football (soccer) teams had drawn against each other in the FA Cup, at my team’s home ground. So we listened to that on the radio and we watched the Olympic games on the telly. His team beat my team on penalties, which means we’re out of the cup. But by all accounts it was a good game and my team didn’t show themselves up. Apparently my team was ‘all over’ his team in the first half.

Leeds United (his team) apparently played their second team in the first half, but replaced several players for the second half as Birmingham City (my team) obviously surprised them. When the highlights were on the telly later Sunday evening, they all showed a 2-minute applause in appreciation of our club CEO, who suffered a stroke last week. Both sides, and the away fans were very respectful. Our CEO is apparently ‘recovering well’. 

For the first time in very many weeks, we had sunshine and blue skies. Temperatures were still very low, and Sunday’s snow didn’t reach us at all, but it did completely cross the bottom half of the country, from west to east. 

I have a full and uninterrupted week ahead of me this week. Let’s hope I manage to get lots of lovely work done.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.