Like many people on the internet my thoughts turn to the next year and what I would like to accomplish. I have long thought New Years resolution were somehow flawed. Yes I know it works for some people but for me it’s not sustainable as the answer is in the title, resolution not change. More important is the change of a habit, routine or the behaviour that will lead to achieving a goal and thinking that you can change possibly decades of behaviour in the first few months of the new year is somewhat optimistic. For me the idea of small change fits much better for my character and seems much easier to get a result for any given change. It maybe something like not leaving the dishes till the next day or making sure to put things back where they came from. This one I pretty much have fought all my life only to find that when I did embrace it it made life so much easier, who knew. In fact I find that the older I get the more I like order. So, the idea of small change is not new and can be seen all over the interwebs but for me I learned about it over a decade ago via a colleague who had worked in the automotive industry. So how does this equate to reaching goals or making change? well for me instead of saying I’m going to stop drinking in January, I’ll look at it from the point of view I won’t have a drink today and then before I know it a month has gone by. This leads me nicely onto my list of challenges and opportunities for 2019.

Health and fitness This is something I have wrestled with all my life but after a sudden life event five years ago that changed the pace of life completely for me I have been attempting to get on top of the whole fitness thing. Life is bound up with physical well being and having spent the best part of my years in a sedentary and on the whole unhealthy career I definitely didn’t actually do anything about it not least because I was embarrassed to join a gym or group activity. I had the occasional fling with exercise equipment but that rapidly dwindled off to the pages of eBay or freecycle . Now however is a different matter. Having seen I can do it and disappointed that I allowed myself to falter I am now ready to recommit. Due to a knee injury (sustained in the days long before health and safety) I’m going to have to start off slowly, very slowly and the activity that is the most satisfying to me is walking which you can’t go wrong at. It doesn’t cost anything and you don’t need anything to do it and something I have learn over the last couple of years an excellent way to meditate. For me traditional meditation was something I could never get my head round but when I am out walking I can very quickly get into ‘that’ mental state and miles can go by. I have also used the excellent app Pedometer ++ to help motivate me to keep going and it really helps, once you see those green progress bars you really don’t want to see the red ones! For the moment I am going to start with two miles which is nothing compared to last year but never the less consistency pays off and I have also realised that trying to do to much at the beginning will lead to setbacks. But I’m crossing my fingers that the pain will decrease over the course of time as my fitness increases and my weight drops.

Another important factor to getting out the door is for my mental state, since the events of five years ago I have been on some pretty extended “lows” thankfully now things are way better than they were and one of the prescribed medicines was go outside. At the time it was the last thing I wanted to do but being of a stubborn, bloody minded persuasion I wasn’t going to give in easily so took the suggestion up with a vengeance and made myself go outside no matter what. Funnily enough or maybe that’s the wrong word, but summertime was the time when I seemed to let it slip so now I am putting in place tools to help me focus on the longer game, I’ll not bore you with the details as really all that matters is progress and one should be able carry this out without any aids. I’m not going to be posting progress as motivation or to seek validation but maybe there’ll be a bit of celebration when and if I reach my goal. I maybe post if I find something interesting to post about. However I am really looking forward to getting fit in 2019

Art on iPad Since getting this iPad Pro 10.5” earlier this year I have been smitten with the pencil and the drawing possibilities of it. I am not artist, just see my doodlings here in micro.blog but the one thing I think is that I would really like to take out the iPad into the wild and try and make some pics. I have to say I really like taking pics of architecture and love city vistas so I thought about maybe trying out some ideas in 2019. I have no idea what will come from it or whether I will in fact be able to produce anything. But if you don’t try..

Start what I finish This has been one of my major character flaws and in 2019 I am going to attempt to address this. Not part of this goal but related is the desire to finish books I start reading. I am not a prolific reader in fact far from it and I might read maybe one or two books a year as I prefer to disappear down the Toob and podcasts for content but I plan to try and read more this coming year and to finish reading them.

Learn to code This is something that I have thought about doing since last year but Is based on an interest started as a kid by my grandfather who brought us a Sinclair ZX computer along with a tiny little monitor that was a TV too unbeknownst to our parents. After we had finished typing laboriously an text based adventure game only to find that it didn’t work due to some bug we would switch over the the telly. Mum only found out about this years after! I then moved onto a Amstrad PCW which had Basic on it which I self taught from books and magazine articles to the point that I sold a database to our local newsagents. Imagine that now with YouTube and stackoverflow.. Returning to the current day I was given a Raspberry Pi 2 this year and have some ideas and projects I would like to have a go at and Python seems to be the language to learn. So we’ll see how that turns out but I do remember the joy in getting things to work.

More woodwork This is something that through my working life I never either had the time or the space to enjoy my hobby of woodworking. Now I have some space I really need to get it into shape so that I can start making some things for both myself and maybe to sell. I particularly like the Shaker style furniture and plan to make some furniture in this style. I also need to get my tools organised and invest in some better ones but that will take time.

So for now that’s what I am going to be putting my energies into in 2019. I’m looking forward to seeing micro.blog grow and the connections from it. Hopefully you will have or have had a peaceful New Year, as tomorrow it starts in earnest.

I am in the process of preparing a post for my plans for 2019 but before I get that to the finishing line I though I would share an idea I shamelessly took from sketchbookb called fav8. I just love you can read the longhand of peoples thoughts and lives and not just a hyper condensed formula of the information super highway, and I also like his use of green :) I have never used Instagram nor any of the other photo library platforms in seriousness because all of my imagery is held in my exclusively iWorld. Partly due to laziness I have never looked at sharing pics across the globe as it’s not something I have wanted to do added to that the fact that most of my pictures tend to be of similar locations throughout the year, I just don’t get about that much and I really don’t have an insta-life. There can only be so many variations of one view of that people would be interested in seeing although I have thought about doing a project on taking a picture once a day for year in the same location and then creating a stop motion animation but that rather ties down one to doing the same thing over and over again to the detriment of other things. Maybe it could just show the passing seasons.

I have got family and friends who have Instagram accounts that I look at occasionally but on the whole I rather linked it in with the Facebook principal and didn’t feel that I really wanted to keep up with the Joneses. As I have said elsewhere I have been retreating various forms of social media platforms until now. In finding micro.blog from I feel that there is a place for posting pictures where the premise of rating has been removed and imagery can just be enjoyed and or discussed with the creator rather than drive by click liking.

So that brings me back to the fav8 of which in could have picked 80. But narrow it down I did and I present a span across the year. I could get side tracked and start rambling along about this, but for the sake of brevity I’ll finish by saying it’s been an interesting task to not only go back and look at all the pictures from last year ( and I rarely go back and look through the complete library) but to tease out a small selection the kind of encompasses the passing of time. If you haven’t looked back at your library maybe take a peek before the year is out.

With the big day starting to recede into the distance thoughts turn to the new year and contemplating its direction. I am thinking of doing my drawn diary on a weekly basis, but I really enjoy the process of drawing it so am wrestling with the decision. However I’m aware that the time taken is distracting me from other probably more important things. Until now I haven’t really used blog(s) for anything serious but my intention is to record a bit more of thoughts and detail than just the pictures. Yes there are a virtual galaxy of writings out there in the webiverse and sometimes I think it feels like looking up on a clear and crisp autumnal evening at an ocean of stars, each one with a voice, each one with memories. How do we compete with that? Well I have found that more happiness is gained from not doing so and hence my withdrawal from other social platforms over the last year. Looking back at it there were a few interactions that made genuine connections even amongst my close friends and family but on the whole I always felt that there was a need to impress, keep up with or opine subjects I really wasn’t interested in or found draining. I realised that I and others were constructing virtual social networks rather than go out and cultivate real ones. Now I’m not saying all these platforms are evil but I personally feel that I would like to spend more of my time experiencing life rather than talking about it.

This leads me back to the webdiary, what reason am I doing it for, is it to record my time or is it to present it to the web? Who else would be interested in seeing the minutiae, maybe not even my family! But then I know I am doing this just for me and in the same way I can go back over the year in pictures on my phone I like the fact that I can pick out moments that are not captured by the camera and will add further colour to my memories of that time. Anyway this is all rather a long winded way of thinking about how I progress with it in 2019. But I think I will write something else for that.