The blog has been dormant for awhile, but the New Year is a fresh start for all kinds of things, and it might as well be a fresh start for Brothers 3 Are We as well.
Before I start looking at what's ahead, I want to consider 2014 for a minute and that requires a look back at my thoughts from a year ago.
Grace: One of my goals was to be a more gracious person - to be quick to forgive and not be a person who talks behind the backs of my coworkers. By no means am I as far as I would like to be in that arena, and yet I feel like I did improve. I let some things go and have tried to play the mediator at work to bring some issues to the forefront rather than letter them grow worse in the background.
Facebook: I'm not sure whether or not to call that one a success. I set a lofty goal of 15 minutes of FB twice a week. I don't think I managed that. It was easy when I was at sea, because internet EVERYTHING is limited out there I managed it with no problem. But when I'm home and hanging around the house with a lot of time off work (like the past month) I am looking at FB regularly. The good news is that HOW I use FB has changed in the past year, for the better I think. I hide people pretty quickly. In other words, if the posts I see only irritate me or get me riled up about something, I just hide the person so that I don't ever see it. I've also changed how I post. I've tried to reduce the number of posts, and I generally don't post OR comment on anything that could be considered controversial. No, I haven't totally avoided that, but I'm much better than I used to be. So I'll try (again) to reduce my time on FB this year. I do enjoy it (for the most part) but really is a total time waster.
Books: As I predicted I would (due to six months at sea), I exceeded my reading expectations this year. In 2013 I read 10 books - in 2014 I read 27! Some of my favorites were from the Hornblower series (I read four of them this year), Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman about his experiences dropping out of high school to hitchhike around the country birding, and Battle for Leyte Gulf, written in 1947, only three years after the actual battle took place. I'm shooting for 15 books this year, although I'm starting out with a nearly 600-page tome about the history of China. What was I thinking?
Fitness: Geez, it never ends. Fitness is so easy on a ship when you really don't have anything else to do. It feels good because it fills time in your day. At home it's a different story. 2014 was a decent fitness year, but I fizzled in the final month. Time to get back to it. Fitness is one of my least favorite things to talk about because there's no fun way for me to do it. I just have to force myself, no way around it. I hardly rode my bike last year, which I'm not very happy about. Hopefully having a riding partner again when I move back to Maryland will help with that.
Education: I had hoped to firm up some education plans, and although I looked at opportunities on a regular basis throughout the year, I still haven't made any decisions. I'm having a difficult time deciding if I want to physically attend classes at a local program or do another online degree. I'm a lot more wary now of "degree mills" so even if I do choose online I need to ensure that it's a reputable school. So that goal didn't fall off the table, but I didn't manage to solidify anything, so I'm basically in the same spot that I was a year ago.
So what's ahead for 2015? It's tough to make any plans this year, because so much will change for Jennifer and me. We'll head back to the East Coast in March, and there is a lot up in the air associated with that move. We have no idea where we'll be living. We intend to buy but it depends on what's available when we're looking. I don't know if I need to anticipate lots of home improvement time or not. Who knows where we'll end up!
I'm embracing my digital hobbies this year. I've got a good stack of cassette tapes, probably around 20 or 30 that I'd like to get digitized. I'm also still working on Mom and Dad's photo albums to get those scanned. I think I managed to finish Jennifer's and my photos this year, so I should be able to make good progress on Mom and Dad's, assuming I can get my hands on them. Brad, I might take you up on your offer of mailing them off to me if we get settled in Maryland. I've wanted to dabble in mixing music (DJing) for YEARS and this may be the year that I start. I received a stash of money from a few sources for Christmas so I'll probably look into getting some digital turntables this year. I have no intention of doing anything public, but just doing it for my own enjoyment - a "bedroom DJ" or something to that effect. I haven't made an attempt at digitizing some of our 8mm video tapes, but I'd like to figure that out at some point, too.
I've never managed to read through the Bible in a year. This is the year that I give it a go. I found a reading plan that covers 25 days a month so it has some flexibility for missed days. I think that will make it a lot more manageable.
Starting off the year with another long an boring blog post. But hey, my intentions for 2015 are in the books!
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