The flipping of the calendar page seems like a good reminder for a bit of reflection and planning. Last year, I made two primary goals for myself, which I am happy to say I achieved.
- Blog once a week. For this goal, I counted both blog posts here, as well as on my family site, fedibblety.com. You can see that I posted much more frequently there, but even here, I posted 18 times in 2021, which was a lot more than in recent years past.
- Not gain too much weight. I lost a fair amount of weight in 2020, and in 2021, I just wanted to keep it off, which I also did, though there were a couple times where I almost lost that bet. (Note that in 2020 I actually ended up losing a bit more weight than I had originally planned. I find that once I am losing weight, it is not that difficult to keep going, so that way I can give myself a little buffer. Unfortunately, keeping the weight off is more difficult than it should be in my opinion. I find that pretty much every time I go on vacation, I gain about 1 kilogram per week, so then I have to work to get that back off, and I did not really do that well about that in 2021. So I have my work cut out for me in 2022.)
I tracked both of these goals with beeminder.com , a great goal-tracking tool, which allows you to bet against yourself. If you get off track of your goal, you have to pay money. You can see that in 2020 that happened to me twice.
For 2022, I am planning to keep doing both of these goals. I considered maybe trying to blog twice per week, but I am not ready to make that commitment yet. I did decide to make a new goal for 2022, which I am calling sweat. New Year’s day was surprisingly nice weather here, so we took a family bike ride to a nearby park, and I played some basketball with my son. I would not call myself a total couch potato. I walk or bike to run errands several times a week usually, and try to get out for a brief walk most days when the sun is shining. But I don’t really do much strenuous exercise. My knees have been bothering me for awhile now, and they were hurting during basketball, but I played through the pain, because I was having so much fun, and I didn’t want to disappoint my son. At some point, I started sweating, and I realized that I rarely do that. The next day, my knees were sore, but they felt stronger. I decided that maybe my knees have been bothering me not due to over-use, but rather under-use. I think I need to actually run and jump and such more. So I am going to try to get some exercise at least once a week which will get me sweating. This will be a tough goal, especially in the winter, since it is pretty cold and rainy where I live typically. We do have an exercise bike, so I might resort to that some, but playing basketball with my son is a lot more fun. Hopefully we will find some more time to do that.