Thirst for the First (month of daily photos in 2026)

After 18 years of doing daily photos where many years they were not done daily, 2025 was a return to form with not only a self high-fiving it for going 365/365 (first time since 2018) but also 12/12 for monthly blogged recaps. The streak (as if it means anything) continues into 2026.

The usual resets are in place. A new flickr album 2026/365 is in play. I accept that many people look down their instagram noses at flickr, but my love runs deep. How about this? Where is the link to flickr collections (the meta concept of an album of albums)? There is none! You have to have the inner knowledge to tack on /collections to the end a flickr user/s URL to get there (if they have actually made any). So I have a flickr collection of the 19 albums of each year’s effort doing Daily photos since 2008.

And now I have gone off the deep end beyond any reader’s possible interest, but I have plotted the stats on a Google Sheet, indicating I have only had 4 perfect years, and years as low as 44% completion. So who cares about perfection? Haha.

Enough Stats How About January?

UPDATE: I was so eager I completely missed that January has 31 days, hah! I will not rewrite the post. I am human damnit, and publicly wrong shows that. Pfttttttt

Onto the first month, again 30/30 and hopefully setting the pace for 2026, and a new round of monthly recaps. Heck if anything, I will set the blog pace for at least 12 posts a year if I do nothing else. That puts me like in the top 1% of blogs, right? Who blogs anymore when we can have AI written newsletters?

Here are the first 30 photos for the brand new 2026/365 album

Last year I blogged by pulling out 5 samples, which yes I could do, but they are all they to see anyhow. If I had to synthesize January, it’s of course the Saskatchewan winte weather around our acreage, the textures and details of the land and always the sky, the sky, the sky plus always dogs, including Cori’s newly adopted feisty puppy Pimm.

But given the Shroud of AI Inevitability, what is really the deal with data / information of no factual consequence, and in the WTF spirit, I succumb. Just for this, I gave a screenshot of January’s daily photos to ChadGPT and asked the dude:

This screenshot of 30 photos represents one month of photos taken each day in January. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest.

The dude is fast with this:

January’s thirty frames read like a quiet prairie diary written in frost and light. The month circles the same motifs with affectionate persistence: snow-drowned fields, weathered barns and boards, rusted hardware, thistles and seed heads standing like punctuation against big skies, and sunsets that flare briefly before the cold resumes its grip. Dogs pad through several scenes, grounding the austerity with warmth and routine, while long roads and open horizons keep repeating the idea of distance and patience. Texture is the real protagonist here: peeling paint, ice-crusted grasses, rough wood, metal softened by time. What pops out from the wintry hymn is the occasional wink of the unexpected: a slice of toast presented like sculpture, a burst of orange safety fence, a found glove, a lone figure paused in the landscape, and a stark reminder of mortality on the ice. Together, the photos feel less like sightseeing and more like noticing, a month spent listening to winter breathe. ???

ChatGPT quasi poetically summarizing my month

I mean I would never write like this nor would I pass it off as me, but hey “Texture is the real protagonist here” Not bad, Chad. Of course ChatGPT knows not the significance of just one mention of “dogs” nor that the “lone figure paused in the landscape” is my wife Cori embracing said Felix and Pimm, and “mortality on the ice” is a 1980s Chrysler Lebaron abandoned in our field long before we got here.

But indeed this, if far from how I say things, is not bad “Together, the photos feel less like sightseeing and more like noticing, a month spent listening to winter breathe.”

And dum dum, that “slice of toast presented like sculpture” was my mocking (which it would not know as it had not titles and captions):

There is January of my 19th year of daily photos posted to flickr (in more of a weekly basis), a habit I cannot shake.

Hello February, watchya got?

Featured Image: Searching my own flickr photos for “thirst” landed 2010/365/212 Thirsty for Salsa flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

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