New Year's Resolutions: 2015 Edition

It’s that time of year again. Time to pull yourself out from under the tree, apologize for your horrible behavior the night before, vow that this year will be different from the last and then go about living your life exactly the same as before other than writing a different date on your checks except that you don’t even write checks anymore so the entire concept of a year is effectively irrelevant. Anyway, as always I have put together my list of resolutions for the year and since I have my own website I figured that I would post them in an effort of personal accountability and public ridicule. Here we go…

1)      Weigh less than 180 pounds and maintain that weight: I’ve actually gotten my weight under 180 several times over the past few years, which is great given that I maxed out at about 215 back in 2009. But, I can never seem to maintain the weight and over the past few months, which have been extremely stressful personally with the added addition of people continuing to put holiday cookies in front of me, I’ve fallen back to 195. So, back on the weight loss program, back to DDP Yoga (I swear it works. I don’t know how or why but it really does work.), and back to fixing my diet. This time I’ll keep the weight off.

2)      Take Landen for one long walk daily: Of our two dogs Landen, our black lab / border collie mix, has taken to following his daddy’s example and gained weight as well. So, in addition to my weight loss efforts Landen will join in the action as we will have scheduled daddy – doggie bonding walks around the neighborhood. He’ll love it because he will get to be outside more, I’ll love it because I will get away from looking at a computer screen for every hour, and hopefully we will both be healthier for it. If you’re wondering our other black lab Katie has seniority over me in the household and I can in no way tell her what to do. If she wants to go for a long walk I will take her. Hell, if she wants to go for a ride she’ll grab the car keys and bring them to me.

3)      Get Lasik surgery: This has been a point of contention between Kim and me for years and between myself and everyone else I know since third grade. As most people know I have worn glasses since I was nine years old and have absolutely horrible vision without my glasses on. However, unless most people who get glasses as a kid I did not convert to contacts as I grew older event though I looked much better without glasses and the glasses that I wore made me look like I was intentionally trying to get the role of “third guy in the computer lab” in every college movie ever made. The idea of contacts and touching my eye just goes entirely against my internal programming. I’ve discussed Lasik for years but have always pushed it off in that it was a new procedure. Well, twenty years has passed and Kim personally knows one of the best doctors in the country so I really don’t have an excuse anymore. Plus, finally I would be able to wake up in the middle of the night and get to see what is causing that noise.

4)      Write one blog post a week: Yes, this resolution has been scaled back over the years. I’ve had this blog for more than a decade now and have gone from a five day a week posting schedule for years to a more sporadic schedule to the current, “let’s try to start writing again only to quit after two weeks.” But I was thinking about some writing advice I heard last year from Philip Margolin, who I met at a book fair. When he started writing he was a criminal defense attorney and I could not imagine just how he found the time to write. He explained to me that he set up an agreement with his wife where he had four hours on Saturday morning and four hours on Sunday morning where he could close the door in his office and spend that time writing. He figured that gave him a full day’s work every week and it was done in a way that he could work it in with his personal and professional life. My old method of writing five nights a week means finding a half hour every night and I just can’t do that anymore. But an hour or two once a week is doable so I will go at that pace. Plus, I hope that less content will equate to more quality but who knows. I’ll just be happy to be writing again.

5)      Listen to a different album every day: Ok, this one may seem odd. I have a massive music collection but I have discovered three important facts over the past few years 1) I only listen to a few albums, 2) I am really, really out of touch with the current music scene and 3) I feel a lot better when I am listening to new and different music. So, I am bringing back the random CD project, which because I am running it involves spreadsheets, random number generators and surprisingly complex algorithms just to pick a CD. Hopefully this will bring me back into music and help me to fill in the gaps in my collection. I’ll be posting the random album daily to Facebook so if you read my Facebook feed expect the spam and consider it revenge on all the people who continue to send me Farmville notices as if Farmville is still a thing.

6)      Read forty books in the year with at least ten different female authors: Forty books is for some reason a difficult threshold for me to break. I have been keeping track of every book that I have read since 1998 (no, I am not OCD, why do you ask?) and only once have I ever broken that milestone. Last year I read 38 books, 37 the year before so you get the picture. More embarrassingly, of the 38 books I read last year only four were written by women and the year before that the total was five. If you ever wanted quantifiable data that I am a sexist pig there you are. Thus, time to at least get the number of books I read written by women up to a quarter of my total.

7)      Listen to everything Kim is saying before acting on the first request: Like all husbands I am flawed and in my case probably more flawed than most. Sometimes they are sins of omission, sometimes they are sins of commission and sometimes they are things that may be completely out of your control. But, I feel that I should at least try to address one of the things that I do that drives Kim insane. She will be talking to me and say, “Put the sheet in the dryer,….” and before she can finish pausing for the comma I am immediately walking away with the sheet in my hand because I am a robot and will perform the first task given to me regardless of the fact that she hasn’t even finished her sentence yet. I do this all the time. I’ll walk away in mid-conversation because somewhere in there was an action I was told to make and it’s as if I operate on a one task at a time, complete immediately basis. It’s annoying and rude as hell and it is a habit that I need to break.

8)      Kim’s choice: As always, I feel that one of your resolutions should be to do something that someone else tells you to work on so Kim gets her choice here. Keeps a bit of mystery to the process as well.

9)      Update five year plan and note cards: Roughly eleven years ago this week I sat down and on a set of note cards wrote down the goals that I had for the next five years of my life. I then folded them up, put them in my wallet and whenever I needed to remind myself what I should be doing with my time I would look at them and see how I was progressing. The amazing thing is that, for the most part, I’ve accomplished everything I put on those cards. Sometimes it took longer than five years, sometimes they took on different forms but those note cards with my overall goals were always with me and it worked. But it is time to update them and figure out what I want to do in the next five years and redo the note cards.

10)  Take Kim on a work free vacation: I cannot recall the last time I went on a vacation and did not work. I’ve taken conference calls in Disney World, Las Vegas and the French Quarter. Kim has had it even worse and has emailed clients from Iceland and called people from the emergency room in which she was the one who had been taken to the emergency room. We need to get away and spend some time away from work, email, phones, computer screens and everything else that we cannot escape. Not sure how we are going to do this but it is a necessity.

There you go. Should be an interesting 2015 even if I still don’t have my freaking hoverboard yet.