Another fine year down the drain. 2011 had some real downs. I struggled in friendships and money. However, towards the end, things solidified with my friendships gelling together, a raise and a promotion on the way and money isn’t as huge as it once was. Things are looking up! Here is my review of my 2011 goals and goals I plan for 2012.
Online Life
I do believe my blogging has gotten better this year. I think that I generally average one blog a week, though I could get better! With my new job giving me a couple of later mornings in order to write, I am hoping to be able to chug out the occasional second post out in a week. Hopefully, I can get up to at least 6 posts a month. In other regards to the blog, I’ve long had it in my interest to speed up the blog a bit. To that end, I want to do some house cleaning on old drafts I have laying around, get rid of some old plugins and maybe find a couple of performance plugins to make it run better.
I never did get back into Twitter like I wanted to, and to be honest I am ok with that. I am so over twitter. More and more this year, twitter seems to be about advertising than anything else and I have lost all interest in the app. I am currently giving Google+ a shot, though i don’t see that making the grade either, I just don’t like these social websites.
I have started playing Lord of the Rings Online with some work friends casually now that it has gone free to play, but I still don’t foresee my MMO life growing any. For a time, I was interested in KOTOR online, however it looks lame to say the least. It is a shame. There are a few games I have my eyes on that are coming up but I don’t have hopes that 2012 will bring me back to the genre. I think my best shot is the F2P market which has gotten a lot better. Besides LoTRo, I also now have Lineage 2, EQ2, and CoH to play for free, all of which I may return to for various points.
Gaming Life
I do think I was able to finish off a few more games this year. I definitely started gaming a bit more than I had towards the end of this year and I am hoping that continues. I currently have a score of games that I have purchased at deep discount, most of which are indie games like Magicka, Cave Story +, and Terraria, but I also have some Wii games now like Mario Galaxy and Lego Indiana Jones 2 to play.
My Work Life
Major success here! I actually did get a new job! Well it doesn’t get me out of the company, or even the department, but it pays more, gets me off the phones more, gets me researching more and is just a general improvement over where I was. I am much happier with where I am now. I do hope to still use this position to rebound me into a new job in another department/company. But that isn’t as high priority, at least for now. I was able to continue building documentation, but now that I am the team lead of my department I want to get into that more hardcore than I had been previously. I think this was one of the things that got me promoted and I don’t want to quit now, we don’t have that great of documentation.
I am putting this as part of my work life because it is part of a work I’d like to have in the future, even though I don’t want to now. I want to work more on my arcade and my writing more. I would like to be to a point this time next year to at least be seriously moving forward with one of these two things. I don’t know what exactly that is, but that’s what I want.
My Personal Life
Weight. If anything, I gained even more weight this year thanks to my work trip to Ohio, where a lot of the food that I ate was junk food, and even if it wasn’t I was just eating more. Right after that came holidays so pretty much from August on I was eating too much. Was I gaining ground before that? Hard to tell, probably not. We were struggling monetarily and didn’t have the luxury to always buy the right foods. I try to eat at least one really healthy meal a week and have been trying to work out good diet foods to eat. I want to get a new scale and start weighing myself daily to help me get a better sense of my progress (or lack thereof). Over the course of the year I actually had stopped my sit-ups as well and I just started getting back into that over the last month and will continue that. Other than that, pretty much everything from last year I still want to do. I still want to use Wii Fit more, go for more walks, and lower consumption. I also recently started drinking more water as a way to get more full for less calories.
I do feel I did much better at meeting new people this year. My department grew by 6 and many of them I have started talking to outside of work on a fairly regular basis. I also started going to an outting with people from work usually about once a month. And there is the aforementioned lord of the rings online outtings that I do with people from work. I think these have really opened up my scope of friendships. I want a goal for this year to be to hang out with at least one new friend on a regular basis (big goal I think for my age).
JAPANESE! Good lord I totally forgot about that goal. Needless to say, I didn’t get far on it. I mean I was looking into Japanese language more, but not for any end goal and I didn’t do well. I will need to schedule some time in order to do this in the next year.
My last goal is a new one. Organization! I want to get more organized with my life. I think that if I had a cleaner household and if everything were more organized that I would have a more efficient life. I could get more done with less time. I have started reading up on how to be more organized and I think I found a series of books that will help me do a little more a little bit at a time and hopefully by the end of the year I will just be better overall.