New Year's Resolutions

I make New Year's resolutions every year. I have always been a proponent of self-improvement, or at least attempts at self-improvement, and the beginning of a new year is a good time to set some goals. I read somewhere that specific goals are easier to achieve than vague goals, so I'll try to be specific when it makes sense.

1. Get my weight down to 175 lbs. I actually started this about 6 weeks ago, and have been making decent progress considering the holiday feasting and ubiquity of delicious treats. A lot of people advise against specific weight goals, and maybe they're right, but that's not how I roll. Maybe I will someday learn that 175 isn't an optimal weight for me, but for now, that's the target. I weigh myself every single morning after I pee and before I eat or drink anything. That's probably too often, but when I drop my vigilance, I tend to quickly gain 20 lbs. So I weigh-in daily to keep an eye on things. Right now I'm at a stubborn 200 lbs and having a hard time crossing into 199-territory, but it won't be long.

2. Make better use of my land. This is the year when I will grow a significant portion of the family food on my city lot. Later when it isn't so cold, I'm going to measure out the dimensions of different parts of the yard, and design a layout that will maximize the effectiveness of my gardening effort. I'm thinking square-foot gardening and things that grow upward. I also signed up for the CSA again. I'm thinking that we will eat from the CSA all summer and can/freeze what I manage to grow. I'm also going to convert a cool basement closet into a root cellar.

3. Eat wild plants. Last year I fooled around with edible wild plant ID (using a book on the subject), and carefully sampled some of the local flora for taste and toxicity. This year I'd like to make a more formal effort of harvesting and eating these things on a larger scale. So far, it looks like stinging nettles are going to be the major wild nutrition source. We'll see how that goes over with the wife. Whenever possible, I will also can/freeze these things for later use.

4. Ride more, of course. I tried to do an informal tally of my 2008 miles. I should point out that I absolutely do not track my miles in any formal way, but I can estimate based on my recollections of the longer and more regular rides I've done. My best estimate is around 2000 miles in 2008. It could have been more, but I don't think it was less. This year I am shooting for at least 4000 unrecorded miles. I'm already 1% of the way there.

5. Keep reading. I started reading regularly in the first quarter of 2008, and during that year I managed to read about 18 novels, some of which were pretty long. I also squeezed in some nonfiction and plenty of short stories. This has been a rewarding hobby for me, and I'm going to stick with it.

6. Improve my own writing and attempt to write some long fiction or short stories. I may take a writing class, but this is a low-priority item at the moment.