matthewthornton.info

New Year’s Guidelines

Well, funny how life changes…

My brother gave a fantastic speech as my best man at my wedding.  In it, he mentions that they found a list of plans that I had made for my future back when I was 18, which included college, grad school, PhD, get a job, buy a house, then look to get married.  A friend of mine and my wife, Mara, says that whenever you make plans, God laughs.

Now that things have settled down, I’m in the rhythm of my job and my evenings are, more or less, free, I’m looking to come up with some plans for the future.  I figured I’d tie them into New Year’s resolutions, but I rarely stick to resolutions.  I don’t want to call them “plans” becauses God will laugh.  However, I figured some “guidelines” would be helpful in directing my free time and lifestyle in the coming year.

• Lose 15-20 lbs:  With the move, the wedding, traveling every other weekend for 4-6 months, etc. I’ve gained back some of the weight I had lost when I was in Grad School.  I’d like to be able to fit into 34’s by the end of the year.  I think it’s doable; the max amount of weight you’re supposed to lose is something like 2 lbs a week which would have me weighing what I weighed in 4th grade.  The 15-20 lbs I need to lose seems, to me to be more of just a rededication to walking/exercising once in a while and eating right.
• Pay off debt:  Jess and I have merged finances and we both had a little bit of debt leaving school, obviously.  We both “live within our means”, so we are not having to change our spending habits, just make a concerted efffort to pay things off.  With the economic downturn and deflation pressures, now would be a good time to pay off some of that expensive debt and just leave the student loans to pay off while we save for a house.
• Work independently on a software project.  This is something I’ve been threatening to do for ages; I even have a vacant separate blog on my development progress, which has been nonexistent.  I think I have a pretty good idea for an open-source project that may be beneficial to small groups, organizations, and governments, but I’ll have to flesh it out a little bit more and see how things go.  I’ve tried starting things up in the past and it has gotten killed by a lack of preparation, so I’m going to do my homework and then start writing code.  At best, I hope to have a framework that includes requirements, architecture, and some high-level design for what I want to do within 6 mo and maybe start writing code after that, if I don’t feel like taking a break from it for a while.  It’ll be a little while before I can start on it, though.  I have been voluntold to do some web design work for some friends first, so we’ll see how things go after that.
• Write a book.  I think that I have a good idea for a series of books.  I thought I might go the Issac Asimov’s Foundation route and start out with a couple of good short stories and then tie them into a novel.  If I could get the idea fully fleshed out in my mind and have 10 pages of something written just to say “I’m working on a book.”, that alone would be enough to satisfy me this year.
• Keep up with the blog more.  With the wedding, I have obviously been pretty swamped however, I’d like to write at least once a week on the blog and hopefully more.  Jess and I have discussed the possibility of continuing the wedding blog as a discussion of our married life.  We’ll have to think that one out a little more (The conversation was two sentences: Me: “Hey, maybe we could continue blogging about married life now that the wedding is over.”  Jess: “Hey, maybe we could!”) but it could be an interesting angle on creating a site we could actually monetize.
• Update:  Go “paperless”.  I’m going to do everything I can do to eliminate my mail.  It clutters the apartment and it’s a waste of paper.  I’m going to try to get to the point where I scan in documents (bills, not critical documents) and then just get rid of them.  I’m also going to try to get myself added to “do not mail” lists that are available.

So here’s the list.  Nothing extrordinary.  Just some things to guide my year.  No “climb Mt. Everest” goals or anything like that.  We’ll just run with it and see how things go.  As part of my writing, I’ll try and post periodic updates.