An off the cuff New Year's Day post

 Another Saturday,  Gee, can you believe it?  These Saturdays sure come around awfully fast these days.  Not as fast as Mondays, certainly, but fast enough.

Sort of like January firsts; they come around pretty fast too.  Every once in awhile though they pop up with a curiosity that makes then stand out a little from the run of the mill New Year's Days.  This year is a case in point: 1-1-11.  4 1s, people, some people, I not being one of them, will take particular note of this numerical curiosity and try to attach some kind of significance or prophecy to it.  For me it's just a cool novelty.  Then again, I was never very good in math.  But the reason for that is that I was programed at an early age to believe that my numerating inability was a genetic deficiency passed down through generations of math dolts.  I now want to let you know that genetic short-comings can be over come.

New Year"s Day is a novelty in and of itself every year.  It acknowledges the passing of time; another 4 seasons have come and gone and more than that, it gives us an excuse to renew our determination to make a better life for ourselves.  Most frequently these thoughts of renewal and change are termed "resolutions", New Year's resolutions to be exact.  They are designed to let us present an aura of mindful behavioral changes.  We'll eat less and exercise more.  We'll read more, write more, argue less, smile more, go to church more often, watch less TV, stop using tobacco, and go on the wagon.  We make these promises to ourselves knowing, in the back of our mind, that come February, March at the latest,we'll fall back into our old habits and wait 'til next New Years to try again.

Would it be better, lets say, that every Monday, we'll renew our resolutions. Make the list small, reasonable and doable and by renewing our pledge every week, come next January first we will have something to celebrate rather than something to resolve.

Another thing that some folks do is to look back over the past year to recall just what they did do/accomplish and a few will even write them down in their blog/journal and say Gee, it was a pretty good year all in all, or say, man next year has got to be better than this past year.  Certainly the dark cloud that hovered over me will pass on this coming year.

Keeping a blog is one way to be able to review the year, especially if one has been faithful to keeping it up.  For those like me it's imperative, 'cause I forget from day to day what I've done let alone what I did 2 months ago.  So this year When I looked back over 2010's blog entries, I was chagrined to see so many empty days: I guess I didn't do much last year.  Well, I know that's not true.  How? Well I just have a feeling in my bones.  Some might call that arthritis, but I prefer to think it's a sign that I did do some thing last year.

This year I'm resolved to make an entry every day for the year.  And on veterans day this year: 11-11-11 I'll mark my progress, if only for novelty sake.

An off the cuff New Year's Day post