I’ve never believed in New Year’s resolutions. If something needed to be changed, just do it. No need to wait for a particular day.

For example, I decided in November 2011 to change my diet to what I considered more healthy. Sure I could have binged for another month and a half through the holidays….but what better test of dietary willpower than Thanksgiving and Christmas?

Then there are several little things that the New Year makes for a good reminder. New calendars are a prime example, of course. But then so are things like changing the smoke detector batteries, go through your food and check for expiration dates, keeping in mind that food is still good long last those posted dates). Similarly, expired medications should be gone through as well.

Resolutions are a great thing, but tying them to one day a year is silly. Life changing choices should be acted upon the moment you’ve made your decision. A good paraphrasing would be “Strike While the Iron is Hot”. Again, if you want to change something in your life, do it right then.

Now, having said that, I’ve had a few things happen over the last week or two that have altered my reality enough for me to make some life altering changes, though these are NOT New Years Resolutions.

The first has taken far longer than a few weeks, but all came to a head Sunday night. I was cruising through YouTube, and came across a documentary called “American Hollow“. This is the tale of a large family in rural Kentucky that have changed and moved very little in the last 100 years. It shows much of what I lived in and around, as far as lifestyle goes, back in West Virginia.

With the last year of blogging about adapting to Florida, knowing I’d probably not be moving back, watching this documentary was an emotional turning point for me. I stayed up til almost 5am watching it, researching, and ultimately realizing I need to move on with my life. So resolution number one is “Live in the now and focus on what I have currently, though always looking forward“. Yes, its rather broad, and mostly what I’ve already come up with in my writing. I realize that based on my current life with a woman that would be unhappy elsewhere,  and I actually DO have it better here in most ways than I would living back there. I’ve said it before, “Happy Wife, Happy Life”. It works. Deal with it better by changing my perspective.

The second life change involves one of our daughters. We are about 99% sure that when school starts back on Jan 7, our nine year old will not be going back. We have been talking with several other parents already involved with homeschooling, as well as listening to a great pair of podcasts at IntheRabbitHole.com. (If you are interested in learning more about homeschooling, this is a straightforward podcast about the subject, and covers most of the questions that the wife and I had. )

There are various reasons we want to do this, oddly none of them having anything to do with the shooting in Connecticut. One of the running jokes I tell my wife (that pisses her off every time) is that I moved to Martin county so that my West Virginia education would seem superior. It’s a joke, and I do believe we have a fine group of educators here, for the most part. However, the system they are tied to is screwed up. My two main reasons are the standardized FCAT test that the school basically teaches to test for, and the fact that I don’t believe my 9 year old should be learning social skills from other 9 year olds. And ultimately, we are hoping to pull the thirteen year old out of middle school at the end of this school year, once we adjust to the teaching process for the younger daughter.

And the teacher to student ratio gets a LOT better if we homeschool.

So now homeschooling will now become a regular part of my writing, not so much as an expert, as much as a participant.

I won’t call these resolutions. And the fact that they happened right at the end of the year IS mostly coincidence.

Now, having been long-winded and preachy about New Years resolutions, let me say I will go over my list of things to accomplish this year, see how I did, and make a new list of things. I actually have a list sitting above my monitors, and I look at it every day. It has 11 items, and I’ve accomplished 8 of the 11. None are life-changing, more like a personal honey-do list rather than goals. But by making the list, I’ve held myself accountable for things I want to accomplish.

So, IF I were to say I had a resolution, I’d say it was to update my list of things to do. It really did help. The things I failed to accomplish weren’t actually feasible for one reason or another.

Bleh. That’s enough about me. What do YOU want to accomplish this year?

Peace,
db