No crafting in this post, but if you’re interested in other things occupying my brain space in Q1, this is for you.

I am making slow but relatively steady progress filling out my Law of Fives bingo card. You can see the entire list on the dedicated page here. The new-to-me authors is just 1 book away from my five and I should also have the favorite subgenre set of five done this month as well. I am enjoying matching up books with prompts and while I’ve gotten a couple of the easier ones underway, I have several I’ll need to do some extra work to find matches for, which is, after all, part of the fun.

I have 1 more quarter left to finish prompts for the HRCYD 2.0 challenge and I will not be anywhere close to finishing that. It will be a stretch but I might make it to 50% for that one. I liked this challenge quite a bit but I think it’s unlikely I will continue it when it theoretically relaunches in July 2026 to run the next 12 months. I’ve got some other reading I’d like to do instead.

I have been intrigued for a while around the idea of a personal curriculum. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s a way to continue to learn things in a variety of niche areas that you’re interested in by creating your own learning module. There are oodles of great examples ones out on YouTube, ranging from reading the classics to very esoteric topics. I had thought to perhaps start one as 2026 began, but the beginning of this year was so chaotic for me, that didn’t happen. No time like the present tho, so I decided to start mine to begin in March.

I’m going to be choosing topics of interest to me, big and small, and spending 2 months on each of them. I am hopeful this will give me enough time to really immerse in a topic but short enough of a timespan that I won’t get bored with it. (And I figure if I come to the end of 2 months and still have some books I want to read, there’s no harm in reading them in another month.)

The first topic will run March/April 2026 and I’ve decided to focus on birds. (I’ve also got a separate page on the blog to document if you’re interested in specific titles or other things.) I plan to read books, listen to some podcasts, watch a movie, work on a crafting project, keep a daily bird ID list on eBird, and generally expand my bird knowledge in an immersive way. In March, I read a book on how we track bird migrations, one on the flight paths from North America into the Arctic for peregrine falcons moving to their summer breeding grounds, a completely bizarre story about a virtuoso flutist who stole almost 300 bird carcasses from a museum in the UK to fund his fly-fishing tying habit, and have thoroughly enjoyed two bird-centered podcasts. It’s also been great fun doing a daily bird list this time of year as we have migrants starting to move through. We had unseasonably warm weather earlier in March, so much so that I heard the first hummingbird of the season almost a month early. (He sensibly departed as the weather has cooled off again.)

Next month (May/June), I will be focusing on The Silk Road. I have a book about Marco Polo ready to go, but if you have any titles (fiction or nonfiction) to suggest, I would love to hear those! (Or any other themed activities for this one.)