Best of 2025

Good morning, my friends. I hope y'all had a wonderful Christmas Day. Our son and daughter-in-law did the cooking for our family get-together, and it was delicious as always. (They are both excellent cooks.)

Before we headed over to their place, I took some time to bake Jumbo Breakfast Cookies for our trip. They're made with peanut butter, oatmeal, raisins and multi-grain Cheerios. We always carry Clif bars in the truck when we travel. They're filling enough to substitute for lunch on days when we don't want to stop. These are a nice alternative to Clif bars, and so we carry both.

Usually, I get 12 cookies from that recipe. For whatever reason, I eked out 14 this time around. It meant they were a little too crowded on the cookie sheets, and a few of them tried to unite into the jumbo-est of cookies. I just cut them apart with a spatula while they were still warm. They aren't beautiful, but they'll look even worse after we eat them.

With that finished, I took the first stitches on my newest embroidery project. I'm going to call this project "The Christmas Miracle." There's a lot of stitching here. It's going to take me a while.

Annoyingly to the kitties, they're confined to the indoors now. We don't want anyone to go missing right before we take off on a trip. This causes Sadie no end of consternation. It doesn't stop her from sitting by the door looking mad in her face.

So today is one of my favorite linky parties, hosted by Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs. This is the 11th year of this annual party. Thank you for hosting, Cheryl. It's a great opportunity to look over the highs and lows of the year. We're asked to highlight our "best" 5 posts from 2025. From year to year I use different criteria to make my choices. This year's list is mainly my favorite posts over the past year.

If you're a regular reader, then you know this was kind of a big year for us here at the Three Cats Ranch. We celebrated 50 years of marriage with a visit to Alaska that completed our mission to visit all 50 states. We called it the Fifty-Fifty Trip, and it was quite an adventure. Here's a picture of us as we crossed the border into Alaska and completed our quest.

So here's my list of the best days of 2025:

1. Before we headed north, the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon, welcomed an adorable baby elephant, named Tula-Tu. Coincidentally, an art quilt group I belong to chose "Circus" as our prompt. Well. How could I do anything else but make a quilt featuring Tula-Tu? 

Of course, she's a zoo elephant, but with the right fabrics and a little bit of creativity in the background, I could turn her into a circus elephant. Pictured above is my quilt, "Tula-Tu Goes to the Circus." You can read my reveal post right here.

2. Next, I had a marvelous birthday back in May. I'd finished reading this book about some of heroes and folklore related to America's westward expansion.

It was an interesting story, and it did a good job of separating fact from fiction related to these men who helped bring law and order to our wild west. It was made more interesting when I discovered that Wyatt Earp's brother, Virgil Earp, was buried right here in Portland, Oregon, at one of our historic cemeteries. Well. This I had to see. So my son, Matthew, joined me for a lovely birthday visit to find Virgil Earp's grave, pictured below.

You can read my post about our visit right here.

3. Okay, and so we were just a few weeks away from the beginning of our journey to Alaska. We were there for a little more than two months. Knowing it would probably be our one and only trip to Alaska, we made the most of it. I'm sure we missed some noteworthy destinations, but we had a fabulous trip. 

We are long-time RVers, and so we took our truck camper and towed our Jeep Wrangler. When we reached Valdez, Alaska, we took a boat tour of  Kenai Fjords National Park. It was a cold and drizzly day, but well worth it. Among the wildlife we saw that day were these adorable sea otters. If I were a person with less restraint, I might have grabbed one of them up and brought it home for a pet.

You can read my post about our boat tour right here.

4. On a different day, we visited several venues near Houston, Alaska. On a single day, we visited Matanuska Lakes Recreation Area, a garden at the Palmer, Alaska, visitor center, and a musk ox farm. While there, we learned that wild musk oxen were a disaster or two away from extinction during the 1940's and 50's. A gentleman by the name of John Teal started what came to be known as the Musk Ox Project in Alaska. Supported by funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, as well as assistance from the University of Alaska and countless volunteers, the Project started Alaska’s first domestic musk ox farm in Fairbanks in 1964. Here's one of the musk ox we saw during our visit.

Their fur is spun into beautiful and expensive yarn. This turned out to be an interesting place. You can read my post about it right here.

5. Finally, we weren't at all sure we were going to be able to reach this venue at Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark. We'd been warned that it would require a long drive over a notoriously bad road. This was one of the things I most wanted to see in Alaska. I was prepared to be disappointed, but the road was not nearly as treacherous as we'd been led to believe. Of the 62-mile stretch, about 20 miles were in chipseal. The remainder was gravel, but well-graded. In all but just a few stretches, we were able to drive the posted speed limit of 35 mph. We made it to the end of the road in about 2 hours. 

This turned out to be what is known as a "company town." I'd heard that term may times, but this historic landmark really gave us a feeling for what it meant to live and work in such a place. If you're my age, you can remember the song, "16 Tons," sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford. The refrain goes like this:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store.

(If you're curious, you can listen to the song at that link I've given you.) 

As we approached, it looked like this:

You can read my post about Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark right here.

So that was a wonderful trip, and it's been a good year all in all. We'll be heading out again in just a few days, this time to warmer and drier climes. We'll be visiting dear friends and doing some more sight-seeing. With so much going on over the next few days, I'm going to take a break from blogging after today. You can look for me down the road no later than December 29th. Thanks for visiting today.