I finished the 2024 “Our Kahala Cats” calendar on Friday afternoon. I had managed to set up three other calendars and send them off for printing before we left for Portland nearly two weeks ago. These included two versions of the “Kahala Morning Dogs” for 2024, as there were too many favorites to fit into a single 12-month calendar. And then there’s a calendar featuring “Kahala at Dawn,” sunrise photos taken over the course of this year.

The hardest part of the process is winnowing down approximately 26,000 photos to the few dozen that get included in the calendars. That involves some very, very difficult decisions, as you can imagine.

I mainly make these to give away as gifts to friends, and to the people who are nice enough to share their dogs with us on our regular morning walks. But they are also available directly from Lulu.com, the on-demand printer I’ve used for years.

The calendars aren’t money makers. It’s a “labor of love.” Sometimes when I’m busy, it feels like too much labor. But distributing the gifts makes up for it. My actual cost at Lulu.com is $12.06 each, and I list them for $13. Most of the difference is taken up by Lulu’s cut of the proceeds. But I stick with them because their production is very good and they do an excellent job printing the photos.

If you’re interested, you can order any of the calendars directly from my project page at Lulu.

I’ve been making these calendars for more than 15 years. I know because I found a blog post announcing my cat calendar at the beginning of 2008. I have a vague memory that the first calendars, dogs or cats, date back another year to 2007, but I haven’t managed to find clear evidence to back up the memory.

The 2008 calendar featured our cats, of course. There were more of them then, while we were living in Kaaawa at the end of a dead-end street, with a vacant 4-acre state-owned parcel in front of us where they could hunt at will. And they did, for years.

In 2008, we had nine cats living with us. They were, by that time, in-and-out cats, with two cat doors available for their use.

Kili. Wally. Leo. Harry. Duke. Toby. Annie. Romeo. Silverman.

I remember them all so well, even the black and white kittens we briefly fostered and then helped to place with an adoptive family.

Anywhere, here are the photos from 2008.