End of Year Stuff

The sun rose warm and luminous this morning and chased away the lingering rain clouds like a flock of black birds. The autumn leaves are history now and what's left are bare oak, persimmon, hickory, and sycamore trees that look lonely and beautiful.
We are having dinner here tonight for all of Jilda's kinfolk who have birthday's in December. A December birthday is kind of a rip. People tend to want to bundle the birthday's up with Christmas. Jilda, does not let that happen and each year she invites them all to come over to "dinner" (a verb) with us and we try to make their birthday celebration special.
I've been on vacation this week. I like taking the end of the year off because it gives me time to reflect, to plan, to set goals and prepare for the new year. After taking a long hard look at my goals for the past year, I can see I made some progress and to some degree, met many of my goals. Yet there are others...still on the piece of paper on which I wrote them.....no progress whatsoever. For example, I weigh exactly the same as I did in January. My goal was to drop down to 195....didn't happen.
I find myself running out of steam towards the end of the year and letting things slide. I spend a lot of time on things that in the long run don't really matter while the things that do matter get the short end of the stick. I think it is a matter of focus.
It is my intention, to eliminate a few bad habits and adopt a few good ones. You can't fix everything at once but you can fix one thing at a time.
Here are some candidates for my list of goals this year:
To exercise, meditate, and eat better and be more health conscience
To do a weekend get-a-way with Jilda once a month and to take one actual vacation this year
To spend quality time with our group of friends at least once a month
To firm up my 3 1/2 year retirement plan to make it a reality
To take fifty or so of my best blog entries and publish my first book
To publish all the songs we've written over the past two years and pitch them to artists
To continue daily posts on this blog
These are subject to change prior to 1/1/07. I will most likely be adding other goals as well.
What are your goals for next year?