“New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” ~Mark Twain

Okay, I’ve been a bit delayed in putting my resolutions down.  Quite frankly I’ve been adding and subtracting them over the last few days.  Tonight I had my first run on the year so it gave me a chance to really reflect and let them come out.  I also had a chance today to watch my favorite movie “Field of Dreams”.  My friends who have been in the video business dock me for life as a film critic for enjoying any movie with Kevin Costner, but the movie hits me personally on so many levels that it helped me.  It is a movie about faith, believing, and following your passions.  Seeing it again helped me finish my list of resolutions.  During the movie they play a couple of Doobie Brother’s songs.  They don’t play the one below, but it is a favorite and I thought would set a tone for me this year.

So here go my resolutions which of course fall into some neat piles of Health, Happiness and Wealth (they are the most common according to all the news I watched this year):

Health:

1.  Get more sleep!  I’ve been averaging 6 hours or less and just need to get more this year!

2. Continue to improve my cardiovascular and running. This year I ran 1126 miles and reduced my avg. miles from the pedestrian 10 minute pace down to 6 and half minutes per mile.  I was really inspired by Dara Torres the Olympic swimmer who in her 40s was able to perform at a level she did in her teens.

3. Investigate the small personal health concerns that I have and make sure that I get the answers.

Happiness:

4. Spend more time with the children.  I think the health issues this year were a small strain on them as well.  For my daughter I want to find an activity that she and I can call our own.  For my son, I want to spend more time on his social development.  This is a hard one given that both teachers told us that we need to keep doing what we are doing, but I want our children to just know that their parents love them.

5. Rebuild my one to one relationship with my wife.  With her cancer having consumed the second half of 2008, our 50-50 relationship really became a 90-10 relationship.  It exhausted me and it changed my view of my wife as more of a patient than a partner in life.  I want to make sure that we get some one on one time and rebuild the bonds that made our relationship special even before cancer moved into our lives.

6. Continue and expand on my parenting thoughts here in this blog.  I don’t want this to seem like a “how you should do it piece” or a “what are the best tips for raising a kid” piece.  I want this to be an insight for my children to someday see the dilemmas and decisions I made as they relate to them.

7. Start blogging about my other passions like photography, sports, etc.

8. Take more time for myself.  Take those vacations!

Wealth:

9. Secure our future plans.  Develop a more secure will and documentation of our assets.

10.  Tighten up random unnecessary expenses – Magazine subscriptions, luxury items, extra coffee, etc.

11. Analyze and reconfigure personal debt as needed (Refinance, close accounts, etc.). Save $5-$10 per day.

Well that is it.  Quite a bit and I must say, I’d be very very happy to accomplish all eleven.  Writing it down does put it out there and hopefully it something I will look back to.