Happy New Year

My phone rang at 8am this morning. One of my kids father's was looking for his kid and wanted to know if he was at our house. And while it's not unusual for this particular 19 year old to stay at our place, sometimes for days, he wasn't here this morning. After I relayed this fact to his dad and hung up the phone, I wondered why I don't ever tell his dad what I really want to say. Which is to quit treating his kid like a child. Anyway...

We spent the night at home. One of the neighbors had invited us to their NYE party, but neither of us felt like being patronized, so we stayed home and watched the South Park marathon. I actually did feel like partying, but I also wanted to be with my wife, so I didn't push things. I cracked open the home-made wine that my friend had given us, and Oh My God... that stuff is potent. I drank about half the bottle myself, played a little Hitman and NFS Underground II and hit the sack.

I'm never been into new years resolutions. My wife has laid these out for herself:

- Spend more time training her horse
- Make breakfast for the kids
- I can't remember the 3rd one

So I started to wonder; Are new years resolutions supposed to be statements about changing personal behaviour or can they include goals and objectives? I did a google search for "new years resolutions blog" which returned 473,000 hits. So my first resolution was to not read other peoples new years resolutions.

As I began to write this, the Fox News Channel had some talking head psycotherapist on to discuss how people can change their behaviours for the new year. After about 2 minutes of this ass munch, I decided that my second resolution would be to watch less of the Fox News Channel.

I do have some goals that I want to focus more on. These include:

- Stop smoking (of course)
- Lose weight ( why not get the default resolutions out of the way)
- visit my relatives
- Start doing some of the things that I used to love, but gave up when I got married (21 years ago), like playing the drums and guitar, playing sports (maybe join a softball or baseball league) and singing (church?)
- get involved in at least one organization, like the school board, or library board
- go fishing more
- start delegating more at work (ie. offload more of my responsibilities to my staff)
- buy some real estate. Maybe some land in Colorado.

I think that's a good start. It should be interesting to see which ones get done.

I know there are a few of you that lurk on this page regularly. Let me know what you've resolved to do this year.