I love New Years. Even though it is a somewhat arbitrary date, I always feel like it is a great time to look back on the previous year and to set goals and make plans for the upcoming one. I don’t believe in “resolutions” per se, but for taking on large projects there really isn’t a better time to start.

Last year I lost 50 pounds. Actually, at the moment the total is somewhat closer to 40, but with the holiday eating season officially over I hope to get back to my fighting weight soon. With my health in better shape, I decided that one of my goals should be to work on my fitness. To that end I plan to attempt the “Hundred Pushups” program. I want to do this alternating with running. I tend to run between 3.5 and 4 miles on a treadmill three times a week, and I plan to continue that, perhaps even running in a formal 5K at some point in time over the year. If I manage to keep up that program, the next one is “200 Sit Ups“, but that’s not a firm goal for 2012.

The main goal of 2012 is to streamline my life. I have a lot of stuff in my life – both physical goods and intangibles, as well as having a small business and a small farm. My goal is to get rid of stuff I don’t use and don’t need (like, I think it is time to get rid of my vinyl record collection) as well as to focus more on important things. I’d like to get a book written about OpenNMS (our software product) and in order to focus on that I decided not to attend any conferences, with one exception, this year. I tend to speak at four to five conferences a year, and if I have time to do that I probably have time to write a book. So – focus.

With the exception of gaining five or more pounds, I had a great holiday. Saw some old friends and numerous relatives, and if I had any complaints it would be that we had too many people over which didn’t leave much time for other things. I basically ended up with two free days – one which I “wasted” simply sitting at home and reading, and the second where I was able to head into the office and start cleaning up our storage room, which has become rather cluttered in the last few years. I still have about a day to go on it, but I made a decent dent.

We did do our traditional New Years celebration with Bob and Kathy and their daughter Megan (this year she brought along her friend Adrian). It’s always fun and pretty laid back – we play games, watch the ball drop, eat herring and black bread at midnight (old German tradition), drink champagne and shoot off a shotgun. We were blessed with some great weather this year (the high for today was 65.5F) and so Bob did some fishing. He caught the largest fish I’ve ever seen come out of our pond.

Pretty amazing.