New Year's Checklist

It's not exactly resolutions--resolutions make you mad at yourself later. Just an omnibus grocery list of things that need doing.

• Make backups.
• Find time to write. Regularly. In fact, find a renewable incentive to make writing routine.
• Get something published.
• Spend time with the girls, make tea for them, and keep thanking them for the days.
• Finish As We Know It.
• Find twenty cool websites nobody I know was aware of.
• Make some Flash for its own sake.
• Get in touch with ten people I've been badly out of touch with.
• Intervene with bullies in public.
• Intervene with cell phone shouters in public.
• Sing.
• Hear and read obscure Miriam poetry.
• Learn more obscure poetry in general.
• Read about economics.
• Follow the news more. Especially foreign news, especially from foreign sources.
• Read Salman Rushdie.
• Write up some personal-history stories for the site.
• Make a sensible links page.
• Learn CSS.
• Learn a new instrument.
• Play a whole lot more guitar.
• Write a new song I'm entirely pleased with.
• Play frisbee.
• Play volleyball.
• Visit siblings.
• Get a good publishing-oriented job.
• Find a direction for Solace.
• Go canoeing.
• Get out of debt.
• Get some clothes that actually interest me.
• Write a pilot short story for my sci-fi project.
• Figure out the I Ching.
• See five plays.
• Learn to cook five good dishes without recourse to a recipe.
• Learn to eat--with equanimity if not pleasure--five foods I currently won't.
• Beat Greg Axel-Lute, Jeff Glasse, and Steve Beckta at chess.
• Have ten entirely Spanish conversations with the super.
• Remember people's birthdays.
• Learn twenty English words I don't know.
• Get familiar with the geography of five countries I currently know almost nothing about.
• Make decent recordings.
• Walk the circumference of Manhattan.
• Climb the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Set up the old Flash quiz game from Tonos on this site, with my own graphics, questions and answers.
• Talk to more children.
• Learn about ten more dog breeds.
• Write a new piano piece.
• Start Christmas shopping before midsummer.
• Read the Koran.
• Learn twenty string figures. Invent three.
• Read three unknown, unrecommended novels.
• Try three unknown, unrecommended albums.
• Memorize a Shakespearian soliloquy.
• Read the rest of Shakespeare.
• Learn about Relativity.
• Learn the mechanics of five minor governmental branches.
• Kayak.
• Draw. Draw fifty things.
• Spend time with Brendan and Valerie apart from shows.
• Plan a Halloween costume in advance.
• Get Hamish to New York.
• Visit the Gryphon Bookshop.
• Visit Bloomington.
• Make a stone skip twenty times.
• Bring lunch from home.
• Find common ground with ten people I can't seem to relate to.
• Buy nothing, or only durable things.
• Write a Hob Dobson story.
• Practice pitch memory.
• Do something on a volunteer basis.
• Be what somebody needs.
• Jump at any old excuse to add a page to my website. [Check!]

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