At the beginning of this year, I decided to make a few New Years resolutions. Since this time of year has a lots of lists and reflections, I thought I’d take a peek back and how I did.
Read More Books
Well, I did okay on this one. Sadly I’m STILL working on a book that I started in June (Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy is excellent!), and I’m only about 2/3rds done with it. This book wasn’t even on my initial list! 8^D I’ll have to balance my free time a bit better this coming year.
On a good note though, I will have successfully read the entire Bible in one year. The reading plan was rather intense at times, and some mornings I needed a bit more coffee to complete things, but I’m very excited to have done this. I realize I should have taken more notes along the way, because writing up some reflections on this journey would be good. If I had to summarize the entire journey, I’d have to say it was refreshing, insightful, and inspiring. While I don’t plan on going through the entire Bible in a year in 2011, our church does have some reading plans and I’m going to start going through them.
In the “let me try to squeeze some extra points for my reading badge” category, I did read a couple of technical books as part of a new blogger review program I joined at the end of the year. This has been a great way to get some new tech under my belt, as well as refine my reviewing skills and get some free books in the process. I’m working my way through a recent “classic” called Beautiful Code and I hope to get the review up early next year. Props to O’Reilly Media for making this happen.
Get Back Into Running
I took me until September, but I finally got back into running! It was great to hit the trails again, and I realized how truly crazy it is around here with the hills for my run. It was a quick learning, and humbling, experience in keeping myself properly paced and not to go out too hard. I also was able to stumble into some new running tech to help along the way.
The sole disadvantage to daylight savings time around here is that come late October, it was still pitch black at 5:30 in the morning, which is when I typically took my runs. I haven’t been able to find a suitable timeframe to run again, but I’ve already made a commitment to run the Whiskey Row Half-Marathon in May, so I’ll need to work things out quick.
Get a couple of small projects going…
The projects I had in mind never made it to the table, but surprisingly enough, four OTHER projects came into place instead:
- Maintenance/Updates of the Evangelical Outpost website.
- Updating an existing BlogML WordPress plugin to make it compatible with version 3.0 (and allow me to migrate my blog in 8^D)
- A simple app little mobile app that leverages the new features of HTML5 to allow me to run it on my iPod touch, as well any Android devices without installation. It makes my guys nights playing L5R that much more fun.
- An application to migrate your blog from one platform to another. This app is a lot more flexible than the WordPress plugin and actually made a little bit of money. It went out as open source and I’m excited to do some needed updates to this application.
In Conclusion
There’s a saying out there that goes “Man plans and God laughs” since we truly have no idea what is going on in the bigger scheme of things. While I met the resolutions I had planned for this past year, none of them really turned out how I envisioned they would. In this past, this would have frustrated me to no end. Now I see how being open to new changes when it appears your plans are not going according to your intentions can lead to bigger and better things. While I definitely have some ideas for my 2011 resolutions, I think one of them will be to simply keep my life open to where God wants to take it, and what plans He has decided for the year. As scary as this often can be (we want to drive so badly!) it can also be very stress reducing and exciting. We’ll see what 2011 holds…