The New Year's Resolutions Post 2013-2014 edition

It's that time of year. In a couple hours, I'll be having dinner with my wife and several friends, a couple hours after that I'll be at a party with another group of friends and an hour after that I'll be singing karaoke with another group of friends. And the next day, I'll be having lunch and playing boardgames with yet another group of friends. And in the course of all that, there will still be people I love that I don't get to see until the New Year. I'm spoiled rotten in terms of the number of friends and loved ones I've got surrounding me.

2013 was a really shitty year in some ways (surgical recovery is no fun, and involved many trips to the hospital where I started to wonder if I'd ever feel well again, and finding out that the cancer was still there after the surgery is a pretty giant bummer) and a really great one in others (finally did recover enough to feel more like myself, made new friends, saw a few friends get into great new relationships, had a really good year for the store, spent a lot of time with friends and family, played a lot of great games, read a lot of great comics, watched a lot of great TV and ate a lot of great food). On balance, even with cancer having sort of a heavy thumb on the negative side of the scale, I'd have to say this was a pretty good year.

Last year's resolutions:

1. Don't get any major diseases - Whoops. But the cancer is technically a resurgence, not a new disease, so maybe I get credit there?

2. Recover from the surgery - More or less. Still occasional pain, and parts of me just won't ever work the same or have been actually removed, but I'm in much better shape now than I was in January 2013.

So... resolutions to make 2014 even better? Here we go:

1. Don't die. It's clear that "not getting sick" isn't really in my wheelhouse now. So I'm gonna lower the bar a bit.

2. If I do die, regenerate as a ginger. Wait... that's actually from The Doctor's resolutions list. Scratch that.

3. Learn Spanish. This is the outlier, I'm not sure I actually have the inclination/time to pull this off, but I want to try maybe some sort of audiobook-in-car type program or something. One, because there's a fair amount of Spanish spoken in Texas and it could be handy. Two, because I'd like to visit Spain and it'd be a hell of a lot easier if I spoke Spanish. Three, if I can show my kids that even after forty you can learn a new language, maybe it'll encourage them... I sure wish I'd learned other languages when I was younger and it was theoretically easier.

4. Read at least 12 books. Book books, without pictures. One book a month. I can do that. It's kinda sad that I haven't been able to do it in the last couple years.

5. Be 10% less of an asshole. We all have our moments. I'll hope to have fewer of them.

6. Spend time with as many of my friends as possible, as much as possible. I've been doing this one, actually, but more of it. More lunches, more movie nights, more game nights, just more time with the people I love.

7. Play at least 12 new board/card games this year. For someone who owns a game store, I play woefully few new games each year. I think this year I tried out Legendary, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Carcassonne South Seas, the latter really being more of a variation on one I already played. One new game a month seems doable.

8. Stay under 200 lbs. Actually, if possible I'd like to get back down to 170 or so, but with my weight creeping up to 195 lbs., it's time to start seriously cutting back on snacks and exercising more. After how much weight I lost when I was sick, it's good to be back to something more normalish, but I don't want to have to buy bigger size shorts, jeans, t-shirts, etc.

9. Go bike riding with my kids. Both my kids got bikes for Christmas. I really need to get mine fixed up (or get a new one) and go out on rides with them.

10. Travel. I've been too sick to go anywhere for a couple years now. We've got a little money, and so I want to take a trip this year. Maybe for our 15th wedding anniversary in May, maybe to a comic convention I haven't attended, maybe out of the country, maybe all three. New Orleans, Denver, Disney, Spain, Italy, France, Heroes Con, Emerald City Con,one of the cons in Toronto, these are all possible destinations.

That's it. Happy New Year to everybody, I'll hopefully be checking in monthly on progress of the books/games resolutions and on the other ones as well.