What's in Store for Me in 2012, Part 3: The Other Stuff

Okay, it's the final stretch of 2012 resolutions and forecasts.  Feel free to skip by this post if you're only here for the beagle haiku.  Mostly I'm writing it all down here so that I can go back at the end of the year to see how I did.  I usually come up with a list along these lines in my head at the beginning of each year.  It'll be interesting to see at year's end whether writing it down has made me more successful in getting some of this stuff done.

Village of Wolverine Lake - I realized that I didn't mention the village  in my "2012: Politics" post. That was just because I don't expect much to change in 2012. I intend to continue to do my best to be a good village president.  I'm sure we'll do a 2012 goals session this year, hopefully in our January work session, so perhaps I'll have more to pass along on that front then.

Diet and exercise - I haven't yet written the blog post I meant to about it, but as some of you know, I lopped sugar out of my diet last year after reading the Gary Taubes article Is Sugar Toxic? in the New York Times in April and taking a look at my own expanding waistline.

From just eliminating sugar I dropped about twenty or twenty-five pounds in about six months, though I packed a bit of that back on over the holidays. During the time I lost the weight I didn't hit the gym much, cut my portion sizes, or cut down the beer consumption -- all of which would have helped.  In truth, once I'd done it for a couple of weeks I found it easier than anything else I've ever tried as a diet.

Since a bit of physical reform is always a good way to start the new year, I'm back on the straight and narrow -- this time including the gym, portion-size, and beer parts of that equation.  That'll hold at least until we go down to Florida in late February, at which point I'll have to figure out how fruity tropical drinks figure into the equation.  After that, it'll be more of the sugar ban, and we'll see about the other stuff. I know I'll feel better and live longer if I shed some weight. So, I'll just keep plugging away at it until I'm at a reasonable long-term weight.

Travel - We have a really cool two-week vacation in the Florida Keys coming up in late February.  Monique and her sisters rented a house in Marathon, and we're going down there with her folks and the full French crew. I'll also be traveling out to San Diego in April for the American Society for Indexing conference, where I'll be hosting a "Publisher's Roundtable" panel discussion.  Hopefully I can manage to spend a few days beyond that outside the confines of the conference hotel. And 2012 is a "Christmas in Glens Falls" year, so we'll be back in Glens Falls at the end of the year, whatever else happens.

That's about all that's planned right now.  I hope we'll manage a couple more things, but I fear that vacation time will be in short supply this year between the Florida Keys and the days I'll need to burn on various village and 2012 election things.  One of my biggest regrets at the end of each year is that I haven't visited enough family and friends because I would love to spend more time with them all.  I'd like to squeeze a couple more visits into the schedule, but I'm not entirely optimistic.

Work - I'm going to try to improve my focus at work this year.  For the last year or two I've noticed that I'm more easily (or more frequently) distracted.  I think this has kept me from following through with genuine depth in some cases where more focus was demanded.  And a few things fell off my to-do lists that shouldn't have.  E-Mail tends to be my number one distraction, so step #1 is to occasionally turn off Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer when I'm working on things.  Fewer distractions = more effective work.  Or at least that's my theory.

Writing - As I mentioned in the previous post, I plan to submit a few poems for publication this year.  Once upon a time I used to publish poems here and there.  But for much of the last twenty years I've written little fragments of poems, but have done very little polishing or completing of them because they didn't have anywhere to go.  I just wrote stuff down because things would get in my head, and writing them down was the best way to set them free so that I could move along with my day.

Having this blog gave me a place to post those sorts of things, which encouraged me to finish up a few of the better fragments and post them here.  But that doesn't mean that they're quite as polished or finished as they could be. Submitting a few for publication would force me to put in that extra little bit of elbow grease to call a poem truly finished. I think I'd enjoy doing that again.

I doubt I'll see much or any genuine publication, but when I give up on publishing a particular poem I promise to put it up here with a list of the magazines that found it unworthy.

This initiative is at least in part Mary Campbell-Droze's fault.  As part of her work on LitFinder she occasionally comes across truly terrible poetry that somehow made it to publication. Then she sends some of those along in e-mails from the "Poetry Coroner."  Whenever I see one of those missives I think, "Wow, that poem's even worse than the stuff I write!"  It's an encouraging thought.

MGB - Last January's resolution to look into buying a fun toy one day rather quickly became the FUN MG in our garage. There's no lack of maintenance that needs doing when you have a 36-year-old British sports car, but I think a few projects will likely rise to the top of the list, mostly safety related:

1) Tires - he current low-profile wheels and tires result in a bit of tire rub when I hit bumps, especially when two people are in the car.  I'll need to sort that out before I get a cut tire.  It might be a matter of buying narrower wheel spacers that move the tires in a bit. (A spacer is a disk that connects the MGB's wheel hubs to the low-profile rims.)  Or I might swap back to the set of bolt-on wire wheels that came with the car.  It'll all take a bit of thought and investigation, hopefully before the MGB's back on the road this Spring.

2) Seat belts - The previous owner put in lap belts when he restored the interior. The car originally came with three-point shoulder belts, and putting a set back in seems like a good safety move to me.

3) Antisway bar - An antisway bar is a bar that transfers pressure from the inside corner of the car to the outside corner when a car goes around curves. That keeps the body from rolling towards the outside of the curve. It turns out that the cheap-o's at British Leyland didn't put a front antisway bar in the 1975 and 1976 models of the MGB because they thought it would be an easy and unnoticed cost-cutting measure.

The FUN MG still handles pretty well, but every now and then I can feel it pushing a bit when I go around a curve at speed. I think an antisway bar would improve that, and the basic underpinnings of the car are still designed to have one installed.  This would be my first real alteration to the car, so I'll want to think it through to be sure it's what I want to do and that I understand fully how it works with the suspension.  I'm sure I'll learn a lot if I proceed, which should be both fun and interesting.

Home improvement - Installing the living room floor in 2011 was a big step foward, but there's still no shortage of stuff that needs fixin', replacin', or improvin'. I plan to start with one my leftover from 2011, installing the two new toilets we bought last year.  If that goes well and I'm feeling my plumbing oats, I might just put in a new faucet in the kitchen.  And if that works out without a flood ... it might finally be time to put in a dishwasher.

Plumbing aside, there are a few other items that need doing sooner instead of later. The kitchen ceiling is a disaster, thank to our leaky skylight.  Now that I've fixed the skylight, I need to fix the ceiling. The lakeside porch continues to slowly crumble in place. Last year's temporary garage-door fix seems unlikely to be a long-term solution. Everything needs painting. The picket fence is in disrepair. The ... well, heck. This list could go on forever. As always, I'll try to pick a couple items off the list, fix 'em, and move on.

I have no illusions about home perfection. Mostly I'm just hoping to keep one step ahead of entropy.

That's about it.  And all that is more than enough. It's a bit funny that my job and the village got so little attention on this list, since I spend the bulk of my waking hours on those two things every week.  I guess what I'm mostly trying to do here is to figure out how to be reasonably productive with what time and energy I have leftover beyond that. It'll be interesting to look back at the end of the year to see how much -- if any -- of the stuff I outlined in these three posts gets done.

We shall see.