Belated New Years Resolutions

When we started this blog - spun off from a Google blogger page - spun off earlier from my own private blog, we wanted to chronicle our adventures in more sustainable and interesting lifestyle. This week I took the time to write some blog entries offline, with the idea of transferring them here. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace said analog entries. That said, the first one (and very belated) one attempted to formalize my goals for the new year.

After finding myself looking back at last year and realizing I hadn’t managed to take any real time off for myself, I decided to schedule out all of my vacation for this year up front in January. The idea was that if I simply planned vacation time, I might better use the time over the year. My day job offers a “use it or lose it” yearly plan with an above average amount for most organizations. I generally want to “save” my vacation for some grandiose imagined plan which never materilizes while whittling away with an hour here and there when I’m simply not feeling the office. The result is several weeks of poorly spent vacation time.

I’m writing this on a Sunday after taking my first planned week off. We didn’t manage to build any travel plans in time, and the end result was the greatly feared “time around the house”. However, this week we also decided - while I’d have a lot of free time - to cut out all forms of media and screen time. Today is the first day in several that I’ve spent any real amount of time on my laptop.

So, with 2 months already gone, here comes my attempt at setting some goals for 2025:

• Revive Blogging for me Personally: I’ve had an internet presence / blog since the late 90s. That’s over 25 years of writing content. My earliest blog actually held the most useful stuff. Things that other folk found useful enough to archive and share. I’d like to see my writing flourish again, especially now, when it seems like social media has taken over the internet. One thing different here - no comments. I’m going to attempt to connect and revive my reader with what remains of other bloggers out there. I plan on adding links to active (defined at least 1 post within the past year) blogs out there. I hope to average at least 1 post a month here.

• Move to Linux for all my daily driver non-work computing: Gaming here might be difficult, but truth be told, I’m not much of a gamer. I’m hoping to drop Windows and it’s more active attempts to scrape information and feed ads with something I have a bit more control over. This doesn’t mean eschewing the growing trend of AI assistants: Linux has amazing options for self-hosted AI that can be tailored to work more for you instead of training data for the continued destruction of our society.

• Build nerd project from source to completion: I’ve got a couple things that I’ve started, but nothing that I’ve moved all the way through from ideation to done. The goal here is to simply do something cool that scratches my nerd itch and actually write about it and enjoy the thing. One thing I’ve realized with a media free week is how much I used to do versus do now.

• Build more and renewed connections IRL: This might mean being more actively involved in local politics, finding some sort of faith community (despite my strong trend toward agnostic atheism), or maybe a musicians group. I’m not certain what, but I desparately need to get out and talk to some non-online people.

• Find ways to stay in touch with Social Media contacts: There are a handful of people that I only talk to on social media that I’d like to talk to otherwise. This will be an interesting project, but one that I think more people need to consider. We used to talk to each other prior to Facebook and Tiktok, now we just talk at each other.

• End the year with a sustainable excercise schedule: Us nerds don’t often appreciate the need to excercise our non-mental muscles as we sit atrophying in office chairs. As Fin and I have been doing a lot of things around the property, I’ve realized just how out of shape I am! One suggestion I’ve seen is scheduling out excercise time, and so I’m going to set the goal of simply having a weekly schedule at the end of the year, that I’ve hit at least 2/4 weeks for the prior couple months

• Release another recording: I’ve made 2 recordings available (and that get some degree of playtime); I’d like to release another recording of piano - some piece I get to a performance level, and then maybe even go crazy and get some studio time for it. I’ve really let my playing languish since I started/finished my Master’s degree.

• Make E-Mail useful again: At the end of the year, I’d like to have my email actually organized enough that it doesn’t take an AI assistant to find anything and I can actually respond / see messages that come across. I’d love it if I got a handful of messages through this blog, but that’s not even remotely possible right now with just how shitty my email hygiene is.

• Complete Marie Kondo method for the house: This is something I’ll porbably be covering more of as time goes on, but Fin and I have started the process of “tidying” the homestead using Marie Kondo’s method. I think there are a lot of positives to write about here, and we’re not even 25% of the way there. We spent the past week doing a lot of this, and there’s a lot more worth doing.

• Read 4 non-fiction and 4 fiction books: I’m shooting for 8 total books this year. Maybe I write about each one as they are done. We’ll see.

I doubt that there’s anyone really paying attention to this blog these days, and that’s OK. If someone finds this small corner of the internet, I’d be happy. If not, this will continue to exist for me. When I first started blogging, it wasn’t to see an audience. I’ve turned off comments here - and even my ability to look at view counts and metrics. RSS will stay, and I’ll be working to restore old entries to the new format. Stay sane out there, it’s an increasingly mad world.