Reflect upon your present blessings – of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
Hello my friends, and welcome back from another lap around the sun. Been quite a year, hasn’t it? I don’t know about you, but Kanye making Alex Jones seem like the rational one wasn’t on my 2022 Bingo card. There’s so much I could bring up from looking back, but in the end that’s never really what this site has been about. So, instead, I’ll take a brief tour of how badly I failed those 11 goals I wrote about 11 weeks ago and then lay out my plans for the next year.
First, the damage:
- Hit 185lbs
- Hah. This was a cute one. Not only did I not hit this, I’m certainly heavier than I was then. Let’s just say I let the Holidays happen – my birthday, Thanksgiving, a cruise, and Christmas into New Years? Woof. Discipline wasn’t there, and this poor goal took two in the back of the head.
- 20 pull-ups without break.
- Done. In fact, I did this early enough to change it into something new. Having hit my 60push/20pull goal, I decided to push myself on what numbers I could hit following P90X3’s “The Challenge” program. That’s 8 rounds of pull ups interwoven with 8 rounds of pull ups (2 sets each of 4 different types for both things) in 30 minutes. Technically a little less than that – there’s a 3-ish minute burnout that’s all you can do of 1 pull and 3 push. The “challenge” of it is that you pick one pull number and one push number and use that number for all 8 rounds. I closed the year on 33push/10pull with 10 sets in the burnout, for a total of 294push/90pull in 30m. Pretty damn happy with that.
- Oh, an important point here – this was my max, before I let myself fall apart on the food end. I’m not there anymore.
- Weekly family night
- LEGO Masters and movie nights have been great. Looking forward to continuing and growing this next year – but more on that later.
- Eliminate some debt
- The windows are OURS now.
- Eliminate unnecessary things
- I said this wasn’t a quantifiable goal, and it certainly lived up to that. We did a good enough job of donating and eliminating things for me to consider this a win, but there’s so, so much more to go.
- Lector
- I’m on the roles, but unfortunately didn’t get on before the schedules for the end of the year were done. Still a win, and I’ll be in the rotation next year.
- Daily rosary
- Spotty at best. Definitely dropped the ball on this one.
- Quarterly confession
- I guess this was kind of cheating, given there was only one quarter to go, but a win is a win.
- Residuum v2.5
- Unfortunately, I didn’t get enough feedback to push this one through to completion. I’d like to take the easy way out and say that means this wasn’t really a failure, but I know I didn’t give the search for readers enough effort. That’s on me.
- Catalyst
- I’m not sure why I made this goal as large as I did (Finishing the entire outline and having several chapters done), but I failed to reach that mark by a long shot.
- Celestial
- Wooo, I managed to do something! Let’s ignore the fact that a new character came out and I climbed that last bit of rank off of people who were trying him out – a win is a win! [Insert Ric Flair Woo here]
7/11 ain’t bad, I suppose. The four I missed were some of if not the most important ones, but hey, that’s about par isn’t it? I’m actually alright with how that turned out for the most part, writing withstanding.
But enough about the past, 2023 looms large and I’ve got myself hyped up something fierce. Ready to get this kicked off with a bang. With a full year to look forward to instead of 11 weeks, I wanted to set some concrete yet broader goals. Ambitious, yes, but doable. I had my reservations about my 11 week setup. Not so, for these. I’m ready. This is going to be a hell of a year.
- Complete “75 Hard”
- A coworker / boss of mine mentioned this in chat earlier this month to see if anyone wanted to start with him. I had no idea what it was so I checked it out and decided, why yes, I am enough of a masochist for this sort of thing. But, uh… I also wanted to be a pig over the last half of the month, so I pushed it to start on the 1st. Seems like just the kind of New Year’s Resolution idea that most people would try and abandon, but that ain’t me. Not this year, chief.
- What is 75 Hard, exactly? Well, for the next 75 consecutive days I’ll need to do the following – 2 separate 45m workouts (one of which must be outdoors), read 10 pages of non-fiction, drink a gallon of water, follow a strict meal plan of my of my own choosing (No snacking outside that plan), and no alcohol. Oh, and if I fail to do any of the noted items, the timer starts over. No pressure. About to whip my ass back into shape.
- Complete “Exodus 90”
- Maybe 75 Hard isn’t as intimidating because I’ve already done a round of Exodus 90 in the past and am planning to do one again this year. This one here is a beast, but in a vastly different way. Where 75 Hard is about tuning your time to better yourself in a physical way, Exodus 90 is about doing the same in a spiritual way, often times with the denial of self. There’s certainly overlap between the two and (I didn’t think about this until right this moment) it would have been a lot easier to just do them both at the same time, but neither of these programs are about ease. In fact, 2023 isn’t about ease. It’s about results.
- Exodus 90 is a fully 90 days focused on growing faith and asceticism. It’s supposed to be done with a fraternity, so I’ll need to find / start one before I can begin, and after that I’ll have to do the following: An hour of prayer a day, only take cold showers, exercise daily, sleep at least 7 hours, no alcohol, no snacks, no desserts, no sweet drinks, no video games, no tv or movies, no non-essential purchases, only listen to music that lifts the soul to God, only use a computer for essential tasks, only use a phone for essential communication, fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, check in daily with your fraternity partner, and have a full fraternity weekly meeting. It’s a huge list and a monster to adhere to, but it certainly did its job to cut out parts of my life that needed cutting the last time. Every so often we need a re-trimming.
- A LEGO a week
- This might come out of left field after those last couple, but we have a metric load of LEGO in this house and most of it has been blown apart over the years and haphazardly reassembled, if at all. I want to build every plan we have to see what we’re missing. This works on both a “we need to better organize / eliminate things” basis and as a way to just spend more time with the kiddos.
- Follow a budget
- I have a lot of financial goals. A lot. Instead of listing them (And, well, as much as I love you guys, internet randos probably don’t need to know my every financial move) I figured I’d come up with something all-inclusive. We’ve picked up YNAB (YouNeedABudget) and, provided we actually stick to this, it’ll pretty much handle all of those financial goals in one fell swoop. YNAB turns your cards and accounts into imitations of debit accounts, so as long as you’re assigning things where they should be you’ll know you have that money to spend and if you can’t assign it, well, guess what, you can’t afford that thing right now. Simple enough concept. It’s not the most intuitive thing to use, but so far I love it and hope it’ll do the trick.
- Attend a Deaconate meeting
- Becoming a Deacon has been on the back of my mind for a while now. I figure the next rational step is to talk to one about what this entails and then attend one of the initial exploratory / discernment meetings. I’ll need to get a schedule for those and see when makes the most sense.
- Submit Residuum to agents
- As a single line this could easily be marked off, but that would be against the spirit of things. What this single goal stands in for is an entire process – receiving enough reviews of the alpha version, rewriting as necessary for the beta, sending and receiving enough beta reviews, doing one last edit pass, and then submitting. So, uh… again, anybody out there feels like giving a read and feedback, that’d be p.r.e.t.t.y. great.
- Complete first draft of Catalyst
- Pretty self explanatory here, but there are minor sub goals of finishing the outline in January, finding an as-we-go critique group like I had last time, and maybe getting it done with enough time to start the send-out-for-review process.
- Never miss a week of ThemeAttic posting
- That’s right, 52 whole-ass articles, rain or shine. I’ve already put together a document with 52 ideas to pull from when I sit down to write. If I was smart I’d take a day and write some out in the almost certain case where I’ll run into an issue and not have time some week, but… well, maybe another day. This has been long enough already and I’ve got things to prep for tonight.
- Turn the garage into a functional woodworking space
- I’ve been putting this off for too long. I love creating things, and I’ve got a ton of materials and equipment that I’ve inherited, so I need to start building (ha-ha) that skill set. It’d be icing on the cake if I could build some people presents this year.
So there we have it. Big goals for what is bound to be a big year. I hope each and every one of you join me in aiming high and practicing the discipline to follow through. Better yourselves to better the world, yeah?
Now if only I can figure out how I’m going to make the right sized header image when everything I used to do that was on the computer that died…
Themeattics 