Resolutions...

Although it's not quite a month into the new year, my resolutions are going well so far, knock on wood. I'm typically not one for adamantly making New Year's Resolutions, but I decided to commit to changing/creating four habits to better my life.

There's the always popular, lose weight. I'm more focused on being healthy than losing a specific amount of weight, though I could certainly use to trim the solar-plexis some. I'm eating better and jogging two and a half miles four days a week. The fifth day, I've only been doing a mile and a half, and take two days off. At least it's a start, and I'm thinkinf of adding a caveat...prepare to run in a marathon (at least a small one).

Then there's, simplify my life. Who couldn't go for a streamlined lifestyle? Well, when you have three kids, you quickly decide that much of what you've been keeping around is junk. So I did some spring cleaning in January, and I can already tell a difference.

The next one's more personal in nature, but since I've already written a post on it before I may as well spell it out. I just decided to put my foot down (with myself) and am forcing myself to get to know my father better. We used to rarely talk, even though we weren't really at odds, we just never made the effort. I've complained in the past how I need effort from him, which is partly true, but if I want this so badly, I've got to be the one putting in 170%. So far, calling him once a week is working out well. I'm trying to "teach him", and really teach myself too, that our conversations don't have to be so loaded like our previous conversations were. When you talk only one to three times a year, the conversations are all about catching up. I want him, as well as myself, to know that a 3-minute call just to say hi and find out about his day is perfectly acceptable.

And finally, there's reading. This is the one resolution I can remember making last year (I could have made more, but I don't think so). As I've said before, I've heard somewhere that reading three different books on a particular subject makes you an expert. Additionally, I've heard that millionaires, on average, read at least one non-fiction book a month. So my resolution last year was to do just that, read one book a month. I failed. This year's resolution is the same, and so far I'm doing better. I've decided not to restrict it to non-fiction, and that seems to help. I will make sure to read some non-fiction books...but the only ones I have now are related to politics, and can get boring at times. Sure the two books I've read so far have been fiction and rather small, but if for no other reason that getting myself in the habit of reading regularly it has helped tremendously.

So, so-far-so-good. With any luck I can keep up the trends.