Happy New Year! It just occurred to me that this is the first time since 1999 that the year won’t have at least two zeros in it. Anyhow, it’s resolution time. Let’s see how my resolutions from all the way back in Twenty-Aught-Ten went:

1. I shall drink more water and milk, and less soda, pop, and sweet tea. Kept. Nowadays I rarely drink any soda aside from what goes in my rum and coke. I’ve switched to unsweet tea, but I’ll occasionally have a teensy bit of sweet mixed in.

2. I shall ride the exerbike for thirty minutes (or engage in the substantial equivalent of other exercise) at least three times per week. Kept, except for that part of the summer when I was on doctor’s orders not to exercise.

3. I shall put all the books I’ve bought but not yet read on a particular shelf, and I shall either read, sell or give away more than half of them. Kept! I’ve had some variation of this one for three or four years and never done it. Well, it is done. I loaded up the back seat of the car with books, headed for Chamblin Bookmine to sell what I could, contacted some folks to see if there were any particular titles they wanted, and donated the rest to libraries and goodwill. I also set several aside to put in my classroom mini-library.

4. I shall cook something I’ve never cooked before, and cook it at least three times to fine-tune the recipe. Kept. Cinnamon sourdough french toast and hamburgers with green peppers and garlic. Not all together. Neither is a major culinary achievement, but both beat nuked soup for dinner.

5. I shall write at least one journal entry each week. I will not go seven days without posting an entry. Kept. In fact, I think I wrote more entries in 2010 than in any other calendar year. Let me check…

Yep. Eighty-one entries, five more than back in Aught-Six. Homeric.

6. I shall load my archived entries from July 7, 2009 and earlier into the normal blog archives. Kept. Look for yerself.

7. If a task or chore will take less than one minute to accomplish and I have a minute to spare, I shall do it immediately. Kept as much as possible. This is a pretty good one, and worth renewing, and I urge as many folks as possible to adopt it.

8. On weekends and days off, I shall awaken and get out of bed before 9:30 AM. There were enough exceptions that I’ve got to call it unkept, to my great shame. I already used the medical excuse to give myself a pass on the exceptions to #2, I won’t do it again here.

9. I shall visit Chicagoland, and feast on real hot dogs, and real pizza, and real beef sammiches. And see friends and family along the way. Done and done. Great trip.

10. When I leave my classroom at the end of each day, my desktop will be clean, organized, and ready for the next day’s work. Kept, though I’ve left more things on my desktop than last year since I have less total desktop space available in the new room.

11. [Classified] As I wrote in an earlier post, this resolution “got blown up spectacularly. Smoke, fire, bodies and blood everywhere.” Those brief lines don’t fully capture how badly it went.

12. I shall replace the ‘Rolla, buy a new mattress, and get my shower fixed. One-third kept: I got the shower fixed. I’ve been slack about replacing the mattress, probably because I started sleeping more soundly the second half of the year. And the ‘Rolla must’ve read about my intentions, because it has performed admirably and honorably since I got back from Chicago. NinetyThe legal speed limit is no problem whatsoever. I should probably replace the mattress anyways, but I’ll postpone getting a new car for a while longer.

In total: nine and one-third resolutions kept, two and two-thirds resolutions unkept. 2010 was a huge improvement over 2009.

So now, here are my resolutions for 2011. I’ll use boldface to show I mean business. I’ll begin with the renewed resolutions, some modified slightly:

1. I shall ride the exerbike for thirty minutes (or engage in the substantial equivalent of other exercise) at least three times per week.

2. I shall cook something I’ve never cooked before, and cook it at least three times to fine-tune the recipe.

3. I shall write at least one journal entry each week. I shall not go seven days without posting an entry.

4. If a task or chore will take less than one minute to accomplish and I have a minute to spare, I shall do it immediately.

5. On weekends and days off, I shall awaken and get out of bed before 9:19 AM. Why 9:19? Because I’ll remember it.

6. When I leave my classroom at the end of each day, my desktop will be clean, organized, and ready for the next day’s work.

7. I shall replace my mattress and give careful consideration to replacing the ‘Rolla.

Two newbies:

8. I shall buy lunch no more than once per workweek. The economist in me wants to point out that since I don’t grow or hunt or fish my own food, then technically I buy all of my lunches. But you know what I mean. Either I’m packing my lunches or going without, with one permissible exception per week. This one’s going to be tough.

9. I shall, to the best of my ability, follow the “orders” in the one-goofy-instruction-a-day book my sister gave me years ago. I had completely forgotten about it until going through my unread books, and looks harmless enough. Day One was do a push-up. It was accomplished.

And some flex room:

10. I shall make a 10th resolution before February 28th, 2011.

11. I shall make an 11th resolution before April 30th, 2011.

12. I shall make a 12th resolution before June 30th, 2011.

I will gladly accept suggestions. This should be an awesome year, because 11 is my lucky number, and Veterans’ Day this year might just be the greatest day ever on both quantum and Newtonian scales. Here goes.