2011 Goals

Creativity

365 – the concept: take a photo every day. Why? Because the best way to learn is to do it every day. Get in the habit of looking for photo ops, practice and improve workflow ideas, learn my cameras, deal with crappy lighting, no ideas, etc. Learn my tools – Aperture, Flickr, Picasa, social support, file organization and strategy. Be more committed. This is the ultimate in commitment. You will see these in my 365 Project photostream (more to come on that)

Keep blogging. Keep adding drawings to the blog. Write more creatively – styles, topics, stories, poems. Friday Fiction? There’s an idea. Maybe add some readers, re-engage some others.

Do some house redecorating. Imagine what we want. Go find it. Make it so.

Try new places, new beers, new vacations, new parties, new concerts, cook new recipes, learn new techniques. Discover.

Be courageous.

Financial

Save, save, save! And get around to investing what we save. That’s not very measurable. Let’s say “overdouble what we did last year”. That should cover it.

Fitness

This is it! The year I do a half Ironman. 70.3 miles, all in one shot: 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride, and a half marathon. Yikes and YAY!

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot. Run faster. Reach that next target, PR some races.

Home related

Hardwoods – we’ve been dreaming about this for years. We were about to do it just before the economy tanked and my company quit paying bonuses. Now, we can!

Closet clean-out – why? Because closets can always be cleaned out and improved. We’ll improve the Boy’s closet for sure, clean out stuff from the other ones, too.

Kitchen upgrades – sink, garbage disposal, dishwasher…

Garage revamp – I never thought we’d be a 3 car family, but here we are. The least we can do is get all the cars in our allotted parking spots: 2 in the garage and one in the driveway. It means cleaning out the garage, reorganizing, maybe painting and treating the floor, and getting another car in there.

Redecorate – yeah yeah, I know I’m double dipping on this one, but it does count under both, and for valid reasons!

Miscellany

There are some goals I’m neglecting…you may notice (if you’ve been reading a while) that I don’t have my “reading” goal and that I’m a lot less specific. I’ll say – I’m focusing on a few areas. I feel almost obligated to have some of these, but even now, as I write this, my heart’s not in it. My heart is in my dreaming goals, my 365, my creativity. I think this will breathe life into everything and force me to keep that focus, even when breathing is hard, as we all know it can be at certain times.

My 3 weeks of time off really gave me that opportunity to unwind, and be left to my own devices. They went creative on me, and I have to take a hint from that. Sure enough, back to work, and I start doubting all my urges, all my passion (especially since it was the “off season” for racing). I can’t live this way. That is what these goals are about this year.