Aspirations 2010

The following are my "resolutions" (yes I know, January is nearly over, but it's also nearly the one-year anniversary of the start of this blog, so consider this my New Blog Year resolutions). And no, you won't find anything here as altruistic or awe-inspiring as world peace, an end to world hunger, or a US-Soviet joint mission to Jupiter. These are a bit more personal than that. I've bullet-pointed them, rather than number them, because I couldn't really decide on a priority order, so I have purposefully shuffled them in random order. There probably aren't a whole lot of people out there who really care what my hopes are for the year, but supposedly, one of the first steps to achieving your goals is to state them publicly, so here goes:

• Blogged Down: I started blogging for the first time almost exactly a year ago (my first post was on Feb. 1, 2009) -- but have not done a good job of consistently making entries. My crazy wife has embarked on a mission to post at least one blog entry every day in 2010.
  I am certainly not going to go to that extreme, because I know I would not keep up with it, but I am going to set a goal of blogging at least once a week. This may result in more Techo-centric posts, especially since I have encountered a few SharePoint challenges over the past few months for which there was ZERO help on the web, so blogging about the eventual solution might just help some other poor sap with a similar issue.


• On the House: Back last February, we purchased a half acre lot in an older, established neighborhood. Since then, we've done some planning, created a couple of custom floor plans, and done some preliminary estimating -- but we had really hoped to have built and moved into a new house on this lot by now. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, like squeezing the whole thing into our budget, and finding a bank willing to provide a construction loan to a self-builder, but hopefully 2010 will be the year we make contact.


• Health Nuts: Seems like Everyone in our household has some health issue(s) that rear their ugly heads periodically, causing ER visits, hospital stays, specialist visits, and other medical expenses -- it's stressful, frustrating, and expensive. I want to strive to keep our whole family healthy this year. Since the health insurance provided my employer is a high deductible plan (was $5,000, but was increased to $6,000 for 2010), and our family has exceeded that deductible every year for the past several years, this hope is probably about finances as much as the general peace of mind that comes from the whole family being healthy.


• Ramming Speed: I have set some goals for my running in 2010, so I'll lump them into a single, but multi-pronged, resolution.
  
  
  
  • Qualify for the top-seeded starting group for the 500 mini-marathon: This was a goal for 2009 too, but I obviously fell short then (qualified for Coral B, the second-seeded group), so this is kind of carry over -- I already have produced a qualifying time for Coral B again.
  
  
  • Complete at least 3 Half-Marathons and at least 4 full Marathons: In 2009, I completed 2 Halves and 3 Fulls -- so I'm just taking an incremental step here.
  
  
  • Run a Half-Marathon in under 90 minutes: Last year I ran the 500 mini in 96 minutes, but as I built up my training miles to work toward multiple Full Marathons in the fall, my average pace dropped -- I am working on getting it back there for this spring.
  
  
  • Run a full Marathon in under 3.5 hours: I actually haven't quite managed to break the 4 hours block yet (best time was 4 hours and 21 seconds).