2008!

• January 1, 2008

I’m not big on resolutions or anything, but sometimes I feel it’s good to draw an arbitrary line in the sand in order to make changes you’d like to see in yourself, your life or whatever. So here’s a few thoughts on what I’m going to take a stab at doing in 2008. Maybe none of these will work out or maybe they all will, who can say. Some of them are just half-formed ideas afterall.

• I’d like to make this the year of green tea for me. I know this sounds silly, but having once been a near green tea junky, I’ve since slid back to being a devoted coffee drinker. Mind you, I don’t plan to stop drinking coffee or anything. I just hope to at least get back into the habit of starting my day with a small pot of the green stuff.

• My back is in awful shape. I regularly suffer from headaches and all sorts of other discomfort becuase of a bad back. Part of this is just a life long habit of poor posture, but it was made worse by a rather nasty car wreck I was in nearly 10 years ago. No permanent damage was done, so really it’s just a matter of training my muscles to do the right thing. I’ve done physical therapy and chiropractic and all that, but I’m now convinced that building core strength using some rather simple and well-tested approaches is the right thing to do. That leads me to…

• Re-establishing a regular exercise habit. I grew up as a weakling. I was never good at sports. However, I found out in the latter part of my twenties that not only can I do exercise, but I actually really enjoy it and my body type is such that I respond to it quickly. Who would have thunk it? I’ve been pretty lax about doing any real consistent excercise for a long while, but my goal is to get back into regular strength training and then add in a good bit of cardio over the next few months.

• Related to that, I need to spend a lot more time outside. It’s a dangerous trap when you’re a technical sort to get caught sitting in front of the computer for FAR too many hours a day. This isn’t itself a bad thing (well, one could argue about that), but the problem is when it takes away from doing other things. Like breathing fresh air, getting exercise, etc. My goal is to start taking a nice walk outside at least once a day. Of course, having dogs makes that a lot more likely and easy, but I’m talking a real serious walk. Something that gets the lungs pumping a bit and clears the head.

• Reading is something I love doing, so this one will be easy: I’m hoping to start reading a lot more regularly. I’d like to quantify this and say I’ll read a book a week or something like that. But it’s not easy since so much of what I read takes other forms (online, printed material, etc.). I’ll just leave this one be in terms of setting goals and promise myself that I’m going to read as much as possible.

• The next one is also pretty hard to put into specifics, so I’m going to leave it for another post. To sum it up, though, I have a plan for an autodidactic program I’ll be putting myself through. It’s not fully expanded, yet, but I’ll try and get it into more complete terms as I talk about it in my later posts.

• Again, something to be expanded up on later: the “career” plan. I’m not sure how much I’ll spell out here in terms of what I want to be doing, but I’ll definitely talk a bit more about what I’m going to do to get there. Expect more on the subject in the near future.

Ok, that’s quite a list. As I said, I don’t really expect all of these to be stunningly successful this year, but I also don’t think any of them are that far from the direction I’m already moving in. so it shouldn’t take huge leaps to make things happen.

Here’s to another great year. Happy 2008!