New Year, Cassette Repairs, and Cats Living Together – Thoughts from January 5, 2026

This is my first entry for 2026. After screwing up and writing 2025, I wrote 2026 for the first time this year. I thought about it the other day and figured out I don’t have many opportunities to write the year anywhere. These entries are one of the last places I write out the whole date. My job only requires that I know the day and time. The year only comes up when I’m signing something, and I have signed zero things yet. Patti and I celebrated New Year’s Eve, but I’ll talk about that in the next paragraph.

Early in the evening of December 31, I decided to fix an ADAT cassette tape that had broken the last time I tried to play it. As a reminder, the cassette tapes are basically high-quality VHS tapes that I have 8-tracks of digital audio of my songs from about the mid-90s. The tape had snapped and was only inside the cassette tape. To fix it, I would need to take the cassette apart and tape digital tape back together. I knew I had to unscrew the tape, but I didn’t realize the sticker with the label was also holding it together. Cutting the label with a knife, I took the top and bottom parts apart from one another. As I did so, I realized the hard part was going to be putting it back together again.

I found that the digital tape inside the cassette had melted to itself. Removing the melted sections, I got to the good parts of the digital tape and taped them together with clear tape. The tape was wider than the digital tape, so I had to trim it before I applied it. Before I ruin this article with too much nerd talk (yes, I hear you saying “too late”), I will just say that I put the cassette completely back together twice before I figured out where the tape needed to be with all the tiny parts inside it. By the time I finished with the cassette, Patti declared that I was done working in my office. Playing the songs from the mid-90s into my computer would have to wait for another day.

Patti and I rang in the New Year in our typical way. We watched our usual videos until about 11:00 pm. Then we switched to regular TV and tried to find a good channel to take in the New Year without having to be surrounded by tons of cold people outside. I tried to find something live on YouTube or Hulu, but you must pay for the live feeds. We’re old people so we still have cable. Searching the usual channels, we could only find people lip sinking to songs we didn’t know or didn’t care about.

Eventually, Patti mentioned New Year’s Eve Live with Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen. She didn’t really mention that title by name, but we found recent clips on YouTube. Anderson had been drinking throughout the night and had a fit of laughter much of the time. When we finished watching the clips of them with puppets of themselves, it finally dawned on me they were live on CNN. Patti is a regular watcher of that channel, so I knew where to find it. There was only about 10 minutes until midnight.

Broadcasters filled most of the broadcasts leading up to midnight with commercials. I think it only came back as the countdown started. Patti had champagne to toast the New Year, as we do every year. Luckily, she let me have red wine because I don’t like champagne. We kissed and toasted the New Year. Illegal fireworks had been going off near enough to our house that I had to keep my keys with me to stop my car alarm from going off. As usual, the cats were freaking out. I can only hope that many of the people shooting off illegal fireworks would lose their limbs. If karma existed, that is how it would work.

We checked on Archie, our outside cat, but he was nowhere to be found. All the noise was too much for him. We still see him daily. He still screams if he hears us and we’re not petting him. Sometimes in the middle of petting him, he meow-screams at us. With the recent rains, we felt sorry for him being outside, but those rains also prevented us from getting the kitchen and rest of the house finished. I’ve tested Archie several times to see if he’s ready to get along with the girls inside. He seems used to them, and they seem used to him, but that’s not the same thing as living in the same house together.