Something changed about three months ago though; I lost my enthusiasm, I cut back on my Twittering, wrote Facebook off, and as anyone who used to read this blog knows pretty much stopped blogging. What caused this change? I really don’t know. Many things changed, some events kind of messed with my head. I launched a couple different projects that sucked up my attention for a while, though one of them kind of died on liftoff.(I promise to write in my food blog when I’m back, I have lots of photos to share and stories to tell) This blog, this place that has my name affixed to it, suffered as a results.

Now I’m a firm believer that a personal blog is your place and your place alone, and if you don’t want to write then you shouldn’t. Still, this blog has been a lot of fun for much to long for me to watch it wither away and die. In an attempt to resuscitate it, I’m setting a goal for myself starting on Memorial Day. I’m going to publish something every weekday until the end of June. It may be something mundane, it may be a list of what I ate that day, or a rant about Toaster Strudels, but I will hit the publish button before midnight Every Single Day.

A few other goals for June

1. Actually finish the theme for Garlic and Onion and start posting to the site
2. A minor theme refresh on this site
3. Get The Tour TC going again, and recruit some new folks to be tour members
4. Meet 21 new people from Twitter to push my IRL list to 200
5. Plan a trip home to see my parents

June will also be full of beers on patios, bike rides, photo walks, dinner parties, live music, and other fun stuff. Rock the Garden is this month and Picnic Club and True Blood Nights begin. I’m going to kayak/canoe/boat around the Chain of Lakes for the first time, try and go on a 50 mile bike ride, and try at least 3-4 new restaurants before months end. I’m looking forward to getting back to my city, hopefully my city is ready to have me back.

Still, I think I needed last week off, it was good to avoid any self imposed pressure to write. That post gave me the ability to just shrug off any pangs of guilt that creeped into my conscious thinking about all of you readers sitting at your computer hitting refresh every minute or so hoping I would write something new. Don’t lie to me, I know you did this all week.

But after a lot of great conversations with some really awesome friends, hanging out with some of my best friends from college who I don’t see nearly enough, I think I finally at least have a general goal for the next few months in place. As I stated before, I’m working on several projects, all website, that I hope to have launched in the next two months or so. I’m not ready to publicly announce what they are, but if you see me in person and want to know, I’ll give you the inside scoop. I’m really excited about two of them and the third is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’m not 100% certain I can make it work, but I’m going to try.

I have a few other things I’m working on and also need to do as well, some of which I can post here; others that I have to keep close to the chest for now. Still, I can give you a short list of a few things I’m working on, and am planning on doing in the coming weeks.

• Make ricotta and mozzarella cheese – I recently began getting whole milk from a local farm, and since I don’t drink much milk, I need to work on using up a half-gallon of milk a week. My goal is to try making some different cheeses and see if it’s something I can do weekly.
• The gym – I’ve been awful the last two weeks, and it’s time to remedy that. I enjoy food way too much to not be at the gym three days a week.
• Cook, cook, cook – I’ve been slacking in the kitchen as well and I need to start cooking again.
• Talk to some freelancers – This may be giving somethings away, but I really need to sit down with some people who do freelance work and figure out how one goes about getting started. I have some ideas of what I want to do, I just don’t know what I need to do to do them.

Well that’s a short list, some of which are always on my list, others are new. I like putting things up on my blog because I always feel guilty when I can’t write about how I succeeded. So now I need to get to work on accomplishing some of these things.

Have a great Monday everyone, time to get this week off to a great start.

What does that have to do with me? Well I was doing really well at this time last year. I was the skinniest I had been since high school, felt great, was starting to move down to pants sizes I barely remembered. Then I moved into Minneapolis, my social life expanded, and I fell right off the exercise bandwagon. I didn’t notice it at first since I wasn’t weighing myself and I thought all the walking I was doing would keep the weight off. I was wrong.

This weekend I got on the scale for the first time in quite some time, and I was appalled. I weigh almost 20 pounds more than I did when I first moved to Minneapolis. Now, part of the problem is going out way to much, part is portion control, and a good part is a lack of exercise. These are all things I am aware of and can fix if I put my mind to it.

The problem is that I want to lose those 20 pounds at an accelerated (yet safe) rate. So I’m putting myself on a diet. First of all, I’m going to bring back the no-meat pact that I made in September, only instead of no meat for an entire month, I’m going to stop eating meat during the week.  This means that from noon Sunday (come on, you have to have bacon at brunch), until Friday at dinner time, I will not be eating meat. I’m going to start eating more beans, more dairy, and other alternative protein sources. Secondly, I’m going to avoid eating pasta for the entire month of February (an exception will be made for Mac N Cheese tour). This is going to be one of the toughest challenges for me.  I love spaghetti, ravioli, and every other type of pasta you can think of. It’s my go-to main course and I think that has to change. It just has too many carbs and I tend to eat way to much of it. Hopefully forcing myself to learn to cook alternative dinners will help me expand my cooking horizons and help me cut back on the amount of pasta I cook once February is over.

So I’m technically putting myself on a diet, but I consider it a short term solution with what I hope are long term implications. I think reducing my meat intake to 2-3 days per week will be huge, and of course broadening my cooking horizons will be a fun adventure. I intend on raiding the Minneapolis Central Library for cookbooks this weekend.

Finally, I have joined a gym, and my friend Nicky will be making me go until I start making it a habit. Of course I have been going three times per week without much effort since I joined two weeks ago. I even went to Cycle to the Movies on Saturday and biked for a hour and a half. This is the really important step because I don’t want to have to limit what I eat forever, and I know that once I get myself to where I want to be again, if I keep exercising and eat a reasonable diet I can keep it there.

As I stated in my 2009 roundup this year has been a great year. So many new experiences, new friends, and a new outlook on life. I don’t have a lot of resolutions this year. I do have few though. I need to work hard on trying to take things that I want, even if the attempt might hurt. I need to stop being afraid of failure. I’ve made strides in this, but failure still terrifies me. So I’m making a promise to myself to fail more in 2010.  Sounds weird I know, but it’s what I need to do. Second, work hard at finding what I am passionate about that I can get paid for. I think my first resolution will help with this, but I’m not sure. I have told a few people I’m looking for a career change, but when anyone asks, “What do you want to do” I have no answer. I love so many things, but I don’t know what combination of them I need in a career. So I need to spend some of this coming year searching for what I want to do for a career, and being willing to fail in the attempt to get there.

Anyway, have a great new year, and if you are reading this before 2010 actually get’s here I wish you a happy and safe evening. If you read it after 2010, I don’t know what to say, I’m disappointed, I thought this blog was all you cared about.

That being said I didn’t accomplish a lot of the goals I set for myself at the start of the year.  I’ve hardly put a dent in my MN to do list and I only accomplished three of my seven goals for the year. But I’m fine with that. If I had known how my year was going to go, I wouldn’t have set those goals like I did. Instead I would have made the following list.

• Meet close a 100 new people in real life by using the Internet
• Break out of my comfort zone and do some crazy public speaking
• Shop locally as much as possible
• Eat out at many new restaurants
• See more live musical performances than I had in all previous years combined
• Get a photo on Minnpics
• Fall in love with street food
• Discover a ton of new music, including lots of local artists

Yet that’s the beauty of life. You set goals for yourself and even if you don’t accomplish those goals, you usually end up better for it. I’m going to maintain a few of the goals from 2009 going into 2010. I will bike a century and I will look up my relatives. My MN to do list is going to undergo a major renovation and I will try to do more of it.

My major goals for 2009 are to move my career to a place I’m happier with, keep meeting new and interesting people using whatever resources I find, and keep doing what I’m doing. I’m not going to say my life is anywhere near perfect, but it is great. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings.

For those who do not want to read my mindless jabbering in more than one post today, my goals were as follows.  Volunteer more, date more, financial management, maintain my relationships, and eat right.  Here is a quick update on my progress.  I’m going to try and do these monthly so I can shame myself into working harder at accomplishing them.

Volunteering

So far, this goal hasn’t picked up more steam.  I did pick up my involvement in the Orchestra and put in quite a bit of work over the past few weeks for that organization, but I haven’t done anything besides that.  I hope that this month, maybe over Thanksgiving, I will find an organization and work a few hours for them.

Date More

Ummm, we will leave this as unaccomplished and very little progression.

Financial Management

This is a mixed bag.  I haven’t made any big purchases this month, even though B&H sent me an email that the prime lens I’d been looking at was in stock.  I do need to stop eating out as much, though I didn’t go out for lunch all last week.  I think if I can limit myself to only eating dinner out and only doing that two times a week I’ll be happy with my progress.  This isn’t going to be easy though.

Maintaining Relationships

I ordered and received Moo cards with my contact information on them.  This was great and now I just need to work on making sure I have some with me all the time and also work on getting other’s information from them.  This is going to be a challenge but if I just remember to work on it, I know I can succeed.  On a positive note I ran into an old co-worker from college last night and remembered to get a card to him so hopefully I can reconnect with him and his wife(who I also worked with) sometime.

I haven’t made a conscious effort to send thank you cards, but I do have some sitting on my desk now, so I can’t use the excuse that going to the store and buying them is too much effort.

Eating Right

This was going great up until the last week or so.  Too much eating out, and not enough portion control.  On the plus side, I’ve been eating whole grain cereal almost every morning which not only helps with the calorie consumption but also is just overall good for you.  I’m only allowing myself to eat out on Tuesday this week, until Friday when I head to Grand Forks.  This weekend will be a challenge but I’m going to work hard at not gorging at every meal.

I am giving myself a C grade for this month.  Though I’ve made progress in some of these goals I’ve also not made much more than a mildly conscious effort to push them forward.  So, for those of you who know me, yell at me if you see me slacking.  For those of you that don’t, please also join in the yelling.

In honor of my irrationality, I’ve decided to post one goal a day for the next five days.  These goals are things I want to accomplish by my 28th birthday. I hope that by putting these out into the public eye, I’ll be able to accomplish them. The first post in the series can be found here, second here, third.

I’ve been single for quite a while now and though I’m not desperate for a relationship, I need to get myself more opportunities to actually be in one.  To this end I’m proposing a goal of going on at least one date a month over the course of the next year.*  Now this might seem like a lot to some people, or not even trying to other.  But for me it will be a challenge.  It’s not that I don’t have chance to meet girls, or even that I lack the ability to talk to them, it’s that I fail to ever actually get a phone number, ask if I can buy them coffee, etc.

This is one goal I’m honestly terrified of because, well it’s not like I don’t want to date, it’s that I don’t know how to go about getting many.  I’ve tried the online dating thing and I didn’t have much luck.  I’ve gone on two blind dates this year, both of which were fun.

My hope is that by putting this out there I actually force myself to take a chance and actually get a date instead of just saying nice to talk to you.  If any one aspect of my life shows my fear of failure it’s this, and if I can turn it around by the time I turn 28 I’ll be happy.

Of course if you know any available smart, geeky, funny, cute, and independent girls who might want to go on a date with a self professed geek who happens to love photography, biking, music, reading, blogging, and also happens to be a half-decent cook, and want to send them my way, I won’t complain.

* Of course this is moot if I happen to have a girlfriend during the next 12 months.

In honor of my irrationality, I’ve decided to post one goal a day for the next five days.  These goals are things I want to accomplish by my 28th birthday. I hope that by putting these out into the public eye, I’ll be able to accomplish them. The first post in the series can be found here, second here.

The third goal I’m publishing is another item I’ve worked on for years and have never completely gotten a handle on;  financial management.  I’ve got a solid handle on my debt this year, killing almost everything off but my student loans.  I paid off my car last month which was awesome and now that I can turn my attention to my student loans those should go down quite a bit faster.

Thanks to some changes at my work I’ve a great start on a 401k and I don’t have to stay for five years to take it with me as I would have had to do with our previous retirement program.  I also have started putting a good amount of every paycheck into savings.

The things I need to work on are budgets and big purchases.  I have a horrible habit of killing any sort of budget I make by saying, well, I’ll just adjust it next month or spend less next month.  This is especially true of restaurant expenses and alcohol expenses.  I tend to go out multiple times each week(stupid social life :P).  It’s never a huge budget overage but that of course is not the point.

I occasional get a handle on things and go into a month with a nice cushion.  The problem is then I decide to purchase something I’ve been eying for a while.  The last few items have been a bike, camera, computer upgrade, and upgrades for the bike and computer.  Though I’ve loved everything I’ve purchased, I would have been better off setting up a savings account and waiting 2-3 months and keeping that cushion I had created.

So my goals for the next year are the following.  The first is to eliminate any large purchases.  I’m allowing myself one purchase and that is going to be a fixed focal length lens for my camera.  Thankfully Nikon is helping me out by releasing one that is under $250.  I’m not going to order it though, until I have money in a separate savings account for this purchase.  The second goal is to keep myself within budget.  I’ve been using Mint.com a lot more lately, mainly due to the fact that I have an app on my iPhone that lets me review it easily.  I’m going to sit down and figure out what I can reasonably spend on groceries, going out, and other discretionary spending and work really hard on keeping myself within these items.

One idea I have been toying with is going with the cash only spending method.  Only instead of withdrawing $40 and telling myself I can only spend this on the weekend, instead drawing my budgeted amount for each item each period and then being able to see that I have $10 left to go out with.  I may try that next month and see how it goes.  This also eliminated the problem I have with not being able to track where the cash is going without using my debit card.

This goal is important by my least pressing. But, since I’m so close to where I want to be I think it may be the most difficult.  I’d love to hear ideas for managing budgets.

In honor of my irrationality, I’ve decided to post one goal a day for the next five days.  These goals are things I want to accomplish by my 28th birthday. I hope that by putting these out into the public eye, I’ll be able to accomplish them. The first post in the series can be found here.

The goal I’m publishing today is to work on maintaining more relationships.  For the first 26 years of my life, I have not done a good job keeping connections established with people outside of my close circle of friends.  I have never had a problem making friends or having conversations with people.  My problem is that once I find myself no longer in a situation where I had to interact with people, whether due to changing jobs, finishing a project, or a semester ending, I failed to maintain the relationship.

I’ve decide I have to remedy this, not only because I’ve lost the connection to a lot of great people, but because of the opportunities that may filter my way due to these relationships.  Whether it’s a new job, volunteer opportunity, or something else, knowing a large group of people can lead to great things both for me and hopefully to those around me.
I’m not quite sure how to go about this, it’s not in my nature to just reach out to people just to reach out.  Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin are helpful, but technology isn’t the solution to this problem.  I need to get better at just sending out quick notes to people, providing feedback, and thanking those who help me.

To this end, I’m going to try and do the following:  One, I am going to purchase personal business cards for myself so I can exchange cards with more people.  Getting peoples name and contact information is an important step.  Second, I am going to make a point of sending thank you cards for more things than just receiving a gift.  Things such as sending a card to those who host events I go to, to people who introduce me to someone new, or for taking the time to provide feedback on something I’m working on.  This isn’t something I’ve done in the past so it will require a commitment. Third, I need to get better at just picking up the phone, sending email, in essence just interacting with others.  Even just an email to an article I think someone may find interesting would be a positive step.

This goal may be the most difficult goal I am setting for myself, mainly because it’s something I’ve never tried before.  I would love suggestions on different ways you maintain your relationships.

In honor of my irrationality, I’ve decided to post one goal a day for the next five days.  These goals are things I want to accomplish by my 28th birthday. I hope that by putting these out into the public eye, I’ll be able to accomplish them.

Today’s goal isn’t new, it’s something I’ve been working on for the past two years. I want to continue to eat better and exercise consistently. Last summer I dropped quite a bit of weight, was good about eating correctly, worked out 3-4 time a week, and was feeling good going into winter. Winter was a different story though, I stopped going to the gym, started eating more junk, and not watching my portion sizes. Sadly, these things continued into the summer.  I finally got back on the scale a few weeks ago and it was not good. I’m by no means huge, but I’m not where I want to be, both for my own personal image but also for long term health.

To remedy this, I’ve started tracking calories again to help keep my intake in check, stopped eating meat for the month of September, and started working out again. I started the 100-pushup program last week, and am adding the 200 sit-ups and 200 squats programs this week. I’m also trying to bike at least 10 miles 3 times a week. Hopefully, I’ll be back on track by the time the weather turns and I will be able to hit the gym consistently.

My goal is to make these things a habit and not a challenge by the time my 28th birthday rolls around.  It may not be easy, but it will be worth it in the end.