Welcoming a new Year

Another year is beginning, I write this as Violet finally get’s back to sleep after our New Years Eve celebration. I knew when she woke up that I was in for a long night, but I really hopped that I would get to bed before 2. Now it looks like I’ll be lucky to get to bed before 4. Of course you wont be reading this till probably after lunch as I’ll probably want to check it in the light of day before I press publish, between being tired and the wine I’ve had tonight I think it would be best if I look over everything I write before sharing it.

Looking Back:

So once again I start a new year by first looking to the past and the goals that I set for myself to see how well I have done. So I start by looking back at the goals I set for myself for 2012. I expected to find a post early in the year were I reviewed 2011 and talked about my goals for 2012. I remember working on one, but as I look through my posts from the month of January I can’t seem to find it. Whether it’s that I never got it around to publishing it, or that I’m just not up to finding it right now, I’m not sure. What I do know is that it’s been a mixed year for my personal goals. My POD project has continued with great success, the only odd thing is that in my Picasa Web Gallery there are only 364 pictures, not the 365 that should be there. Which means that either I missed a day, or that I just forgot to add one day’s photo to my gallery. I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss a day so I must have posted on to my blog without adding it to the gallery. I started reviewing it this afternoon, but only got as far as march. I’m hoping to find the time to do it properly over the next few days.

Where I feel that I’ve failed the most over the past year is my personal health and running. I went through spurts of great focus and progress with my running, but I didn’t keep it up for more than a few weeks at a time. What’s worse is that my eating has been terrible and I find I’m starting this year with a weight that I’m really disappointed by. I’m also starting to think that I’ve let my goal of running a full marathon on my birthday become unrealistic. So I’m trying to decide if I want to go for the full Marathon or focus on doing the Half-Marathon in under 2 Hours. I don’t know which is the better goal. Do I go for time or distance?

I also find myself struggling to feel that I accomplished much on my professional development. Much like my running there were times were I really focused on learning new programming languages or frameworks, only to have them sputter to a halt. I’ve been working on trying to improve my focus when working on my personal projects, but so far it hasn’t help. I’m hoping to make that

So where do I go from here. Do I make concrete proclamations of what I intend to do for 2013 or do I write wishy-washy goals or do I press the delete button on this post. These are the questions wandering through my cloudy mind. that I think I’ll leave it till morning to answer.

Looking Forward:

Morning has come and gone, and even with the surprise of  both our children sleeping in I’m still working out what goals I want to set for the coming year. I’ve thought about skipping it this year, like I seem to have done last year. I would do that except much like my picture of the day, being able to look back and see what I planned is a handy thing. The memory can fail me, but if it’s on my blog I can look it up. I have three goals for 2013:

Getting Healthy:
My first goal for the new year is to get healthy, that means bring my weight down. For that I will look to eating healthier, cut out junk food and late night snacking. Though the biggest tool for me and weight lose is running. I will get back  to running 3 or 4 times a week with the goal of running both a spring and fall marathon. I’m not sure if I will be doing Half or Whole Marathons yet but that will be determined by how well my body handles the running. Look for a post on my running plans before January is through.

Expressing Myself:
Ever since I started blogging I’ve struggled with writing consistently, with my Picture of the Day I’m posting daily but I want to do more. So going into the new year I hope to continue with my increased posting I started back in November. I’m hoping to do more than just my Mobile Monday and Fatherhood Friday posts. But I’m trying to be realistic. I’ve taken a bit of a holiday for the holiday;s but that will change now that we’re into the new year.

Professional Development:
For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to write a program that I use every day. I want a tool that I find indispensable to be something I created. I’ve done this for clients before, but this year I hope to do it for myself. I’m not sure what tool I will create, or how much of it I’ll share with others that will take time. I’ve got a few idea’s of where I will start, but most of them are back-end tools for developing applications for clients. Depending on how I write them and what they are you might be seeing posts about some of them in the coming months.

So there you have it, there are my goals for the coming year. They aren’t much but they are what I have.

 

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