State of the resolution -- 2006

These were my New Year's resolutions from last year. On this, the last day of 2006, it seems only appropriate to take a look and see how I did.

1) Take lessons and learn to play the guitar.
Umm ... well, after a good bit of hunting, I have finally found a place that will do lessons during the day. I plan on starting once things get settled with a new house. Both are part of 2007's resolutions (coming soon).

2) Learn some Spanish (and maybe refresh a little on my French) -- do this using my Spanish phrase-a-day calendar and Spanish language tapes.
Never touched the Spanish language tapes, but I did use the calendar. The only word that seems to have really stuck in my memory is la bufanda, which means scarf. Not exactly useful, but it is fun to say. And I've gotten a lot better at pronouncing Spanish that I read. So that's something.

3) Be better about keeping in touch with people -- don't let any e-mails go unanswered for more than a week (maybe two). And if it's been a couple of months since I've heard from a friend, drop them a note.
Uh, yeah, I still have about a bazillion e-mails piled up and am not so great about this one.

4) Blog more often. It doesn't always have to be about some big event or something funny (although it doesn't hurt).
According to my archives, I blogged 105 times (this will be 106) in 2006, compared with 120 in 2005. So I guess that didn't work out too well.

5) Get back to going to the gym 5 days a week. If for some reason, I can't make it to the gym, stretch and jump rope.
Ahh ... the start of 2006 ... back when I was so idealistic and full of crazy dreams.

6) Start practicing tai chi again on a regular basis.
Tried one place to do this, but didn't like it; I have yet to try the class at the Y.

7) Floss at least every other day.
I'm pretty sure it happened more often, but it's still not the good habit it should be.

8) Cook more.
For a good chunk of the year, I'd say I did this, but cooking in the past few months has fallen off sharply.

9) Eat healthier -- keep track of what I eat everyday on www.mypyramid.gov/index.html to keep myself accountable.
I think I stopped doing this sometime in the spring; not really sure why.

10) Start the process for buying a house so that I can do that by the time my lease ends in February 2007.
YES. I have done this one. Finally.

11) Do more hiking, biking and other outdoor activities.
I did some outdoor activities, but not as often as I would have liked.

12) Get my Christmas cards from 2005 out. :-)
I haven't sent out this year's yet, but yes, I did send out last year's ... by mid-January. And compared to this year, that might be pretty early.

So overall, I think I did OK, but I'm not sure I'd say good. I had way too many freakin' resolutions to start with. And the unexpected craziness of work the past several months has not helped any of my personal life endeavors. All the same, I have to say 2006 was a pretty darned excellent year. I expect a lot of good things from 2007.

Happy New Year's, everyone!

A disturbing postscript

Ford's time of death was 6:45 p.m. Pacific time. Translate that to Eastern time and you get ... 9:45 p.m. The time I was having my foreboding conversation.

This can't be good.

I think I killed Gerald Ford

In the newspaper business, we have slightly morbid senses of humor; it comes with the territory of dealing with too much death and destruction on a daily basis. We also tend to be somewhat superstitious folk -- you never say the night is going smoothly lest some major news break. One of the biggest things that can happen is the death of someone famous. Some are easy to handle -- James Brown's death this week was early enough in the day that we could plan it right from the start of our night. But people who die late in the night (or at least whose deaths we are notified of late in the night) tend to cause a great deal more chaos, as pages have to be ripped up, stories replaced, layouts changed, etc. -- all on deadline.

I explain all of this so you can try to understand why it's sort of a running joke that whenever we figure big news will happen, we turn to Gerald Ford. He's a former president so it's obviously huge news and, until earlier tonight, he had been the longest-living one. He's also had a lot of health problems, so it seemed likely his time would come sooner, rather than later.

Consequently, you will often hear comments such as this:
"OK, well, I'm going home for the night. If Ford dies, call me."
or
"Not a lot of news out there, so keep an eye out for Ford."

You get the point. With this in mind, let me re-create the scene at work at about 9:45 earlier tonight:

I was getting some fresh air with a friend when I said:
"Our night's going really smoothly, knock on wood. So ... I expect Ford will die any moment now."

Fast forward to 11:50 p.m., 10 minutes before our deadline.

A news alert moves across the wires: Former President Ford has died.

Wacky hijinks ensue.

Now, I'm guessing it took some time after his death before the announcement was made public. This leads me to believe that it is entirely possible that moments after I uttered the words "I expect Ford will die any moment now" that Ford did, in fact, die.

Man, I hope this isn't the superpower I was waiting to have manifest this year.

And I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight ...

First, one of my favorite Christmas songs, with a claymation twist:


And because it's Christmas, a bonus cool clip because it's just so freakin' cool. (It's the house of an electrical engineer in Ohio; you can read more here if you click on the "more" link where the clip info is.)


Merry Christmas to all ... and to all, a good night.

A few happenings from the week

Well, I've decided to revamp the blog a bit. New year coming up, time for a new look, I suppose. The lists of links have been updated, and the weekly cool clips are just going to have to be separate posts -- it was futzing up the design too much being in the rail. But you can still find old clips in the sidebar. There's also an RSS feed for Gig Matrix, so you can see when we add new articles. Woohoo.

One thing I didn't do was get my Christmas cards out this week. So those are gonna be late, in case you were eagerly waiting by your mailbox. Sorry about that. I didn't even get a lot of the gift buying done until late, although I'm almost finished with that now.

I also had a birthday earlier in the week. I'm hoping that 28 will be the year my superpowers finally manifest themselves, but no sign of them yet.

While this wasn't in the past week, Wal-Mart started saying "Merry Christmas" to customers, leading Fox News to declare the War on Christmas as being over. Even the National Catholic Register is declaring the Christmas insurgency to be in its last throes. But just remember, you read who the winner would be on this blog first.

Catching you up

So I said I'd tell you about my trip to D.C., although I clearly lied about the "soon" part. Sorry about that.

Last week, I went up to D.C. to meet the Mighty, Mighty Bostonian. We went to Mount Vernon on Saturday afternoon, though not before getting lost trying to find it. We had to call The Sandwich and have him serve as our personal OnStar guide, which he graciously and helpfully did.

He was not so gracious or helpful when we prank called him later and asked how to get from the visitors center to the actual house.

After touring George and Martha's abode, we strolled the grounds and MMB, a city girl, found the farm animals, which I'm pretty sure she found more fascinating than Mount Vernon.

We went ice skating that night, and I discovered that I have freakishly weak ankles or something. My endurance for ice skating was about three laps of unsteadily sliding around the rink before I yearned for the sweet, sweet comfort of the wall. Luckily, MMB was willing to go it alone for frequent periods. She did have some advice from this little kid who was the total MacDaddy of the ice rink. He was explaining to her how simple it is to ice skate -- "It's just like walking," he said.

Lying little bastard.

At any rate, when he was done hitting on MMB, he could frequently be seen skating around the rink holding the hands of two little girls -- one on either side.

Ah ... reminds me of a young me.

If I had had the ability to skate.

Or get girls to hold my hand.

Anyhow, the next day, we had brunch at the Corcoran Museum with several friends, which was really cool. They set up a big spread in the lobby area and had gospel singers. Good times. Then we headed to the National Gallery of Art, where they had a choir singing in the entry area. Gotta love D.C. around the holidays.

That night, after dropping MMB off at the airport, it was video game time -- we kicked it old school with the DreamCast and other consoles of Christmases past. And Rob bought some really crappy candy at a BaskinRobbins/Dunkin Donuts and because NO ONE was crazy enough to buy that candy that day, the people behind the register rewarded his bravery with a free doughnut, which turned into FIVE free doughnuts simply because the bag could hold that many. It was ridiculously awesome.

Since then, I've started looking at some houses, which has been interesting. I went to a surprise farewell party for a co-worker last night but left at apparently the right time, as I missed what was later described as a no-pants-hug between two very, very drunk guys.
Yikes.

Anyhow, I apologize in advance for not blogging much in the next couple of weeks probably. I'm still trying to get my Christmas cards out among other tasks. They're supposed to be in the mail by tomorrow to get to people before Christmas. And that's just not going to happen. But I'm still shooting for sometime before 2007. We'll see how that goes ...

Time for a shower

Sorry the Cool Clip is late this week, and I'll catch you all up on my weekend in D.C. soon, but first a public service announcement: If you get a chance to catch the Geminid meteor shower, you really should. It peaks on Wednesday night and you'll see it best before the moon rises about 1 or 2 a.m. Thursday. For more information, go here.

This week's cool clips

The YouTube version of this is hard to read, so we're going straight to source this week for a two-parter from Atom Films:

Animator vs. Animation

and it's totally awesome sequel,

Animator vs. Animation II.

Just click on the "watch film" icon on the left. Trust me, they're worth it.