Checking in on my Guidelines
I thought it’d be a good time to check in on my New Year’s guidelines.
- Lose 15-20 pounds: Well, good news. I’m down 5 pounds so far. Got a somewhat late start in changing diet/workout habits but in only about 2 1/2 weeks, I’m down roughly 5 pounds. Bad news: I have more to lose than I thought. Jess and I bought the Wii Fit and when I weighed in, I was about 10 pounds heavier than I thought. No matter. We’ll keep heading towards that 20 pounds and, depending on how I look and feel, we’ll move to losing another 20 pounds. If you are in a need to lose weight, the best advice I could ever give is get someone to compete against. Jess and I are in a healthy competition with each other to see who can best stick with our weight loss plan. Jess has me beat with working out (she works out religously every day). I think I have better eating habits (I have a spinach salad and an apple at lunch every day.)
- Pay off Debt: Check. With variations on the original plan, we have already paid one thing off and are on target to pay the next goal off. I checked my credit reports recently and everything is in tip-top shape. Barring tragedy or something else unforseen, we’re on target to pay everything off and will be able to get a top-rate mortgage when we’re ready to get a house.
- Work Independently on a Software Project: If you haven’t seen BensVirtues, check it out. I’m basically using this as a way of playing around with some of the newfangled web technologies. It’s by no means what my final goal is. I have a couple of ideas for large scale open source projects that could be useful but I’m torturing myself thinking it needs to be perfect, so I’m still very much in the idea phase on my other projects.
- Write a Book: I have an idea for a non-fiction book and a fictional series of books. The non-fiction book would be something about personal finance or productivity. The fictional series would be an alternate history/science fiction series where nations employ hoardes of peacekeepers that have to solve regional conflicts peacefully while still having to cope with the powers that be desire to wage war. At the moment, that’s as far as I’ve gotten but I think any of the ideas would be cool.
- Keep up with the blog more: Epic Fail.
- Go “Paperless”: I can’t claim success with this yet, either but I’m still focusing on it.
So my overall grade appears to be a D+ at the moment, but hopefully I’ll be able to improve the score with at least pushing through some of my plans to go paperless. I emptied out some of our closet 2 weekends ago and my next goal is to begin going through papers. That’ll get me up to a B and if I can manage to post at least once a week I’ll be able to get my gold star.