Happy New Year. Wonder if posting after midnight invalidates these thoughts.

It's 12:30 AM.  Makenna just made a cameo appearance downstairs and was shuffled back to bed.  Finished watching "Love, Actually", a little bit past midnight.  Enjoyable movie.  Despite his choice of vehicular dates, I never stopped finding Hugh Grant's work enjoyable.  Add an all star cast from both sides of the pond and I'll admit I happily lapped it up.

Hey, 2011, how's it going?  I've been scouting you out since about 8:00 this morning when I talked to my friend Dave who had rang it in already in Adelaide, Australia.  As the day moved along, I continued to wish my friends well in Asia and Europe.  Sorry, right coasters, I was an hour plus into the movie and didn't stop for Dick Clark or anything.  Besides, I'm sure whatever celebrities they decided to parade past the TV audience from Times Square was SOOO worth it.

Did anybody catch ABC 7's coverage in Chicago?  Was Janet Davies drunk again this year?  That for me is the annual question, not how the city celebrates and where, but can Janet anchor the coverage without being anchored herself.

Eighty-six the day itself, though.  Let's get to the meat of this post; the 2010 year in review and the look-ahead to 2011.

2010:  It was  a very "meh" year


Inexplicably, the best thing I can say about 2010 is that it's over.  And as I promised some friends online, my goal is to make sure it it shot, drawn, quartered, disemboweled, a wooden stake driven through its heart and the remnants burned in the quenching fire of a volcanic outburst somewhere on the planet at an opportune moment.

Don't get me wrong, we've all got our health, the kids are a year older and cuter and more precocious and 50% of them are for the moment rather mouthy (we're telling ourselves it's just a phase Makenna's going through).  Those around us have good or better health.  Non working or worn out parts have been replaced (see the bionic Nana and her two new knees), some have been nursed back to stable condition (my back, circa late April into May) and some are just about back to 100% (when doing GOTV on Election Day, watch how you come off front porches).  When done improperly, GOTV causes fractures in feet that take a while to repair themselves.

We lost Bailey in May of this year.  Kelly and I both wrote about it at the time, Makenna still talks about her and how she misses her, and for me, the dogs were one of the first things that bound Kelly and I together.  If I hadn't passed muster with the dogs, we wouldn't be where we are now, for sure.  Not having been a dog owner, let's just say that you get accustomed to privacy doing certain things, and if you've never shared a bathroom (in your home) with any other living thing while doing your business, it can be very distracting all the barking and pawing and the door when you've shut the canines out.  You eventually relent and hope that while keeping you company in that small space, they're not finding a way to critiquing your work.

(Now, fireworks outside.  It's 12:44.  Are these people's clocks really 3/4 of an hour tardy?)

I can't help but escape the feeling that I just escaped the year.  And I find that disappointing.  Survival isn't supposed to be how it works.  There's supposed to be improvements and milestones and growth points and, "Hey, wow, do you believe it," kinds of moments.  And they're garishly lacking for 2010.  I don't feel like I particularly hit one over the fences at work.  At home I muck about and grind, but wonder if I'm doing better.  In the "me" time of hobby or whatever else...it really was non-existent this year.  It was a real shit year in my line of work for the first six months.  Lots of late nights talking to friends half a planet away or trading e-mail to help out my clients.  Begging, cajoling, threatening, browbeating, crying...there really wasn't an emotional ploy I missed and those hours cut into my ability to focus first on my family and then on me.

Writing is something I love to do and do well.  I've got this really cool leather diary thing that I tote back and forth all the time.  There are two entries for 2010.

Two.

One.  Two.

That's pathetic.  I've got time to read, consume, digest and write all kinds of things for all other medium, but I can't stop to put pen to paper.  I can't (or won't) carve out that small amount of head-clearing time?  See the first sentence of the paragraph.

2009 was a landmark year.  One for the record books for lots of reasons.  BEST thing in '09 was the addition of Rylan to the family.  He ran my ass *ragged* tonight at dinner at Rock Bottom Brewery in Lombard, laughing all the way (deliberate tip-o-the-cap to Jingle Bells on that one).  It was a year I competed and completed a host of firsts and capped it off with a magnificent race in December in Dallas.

This year, the one race that I did was a pathetic attempt at schlumpfing my out-of-shape, out-of-fitness, coming-off-a-month-of-back-rehab backside around Western Springs for 10 kilometers.  In '09, that would've been a warmup, an appetizer, a veritable canape before the main event.  This time it left me so winded I couldn't even run the 5K, the traditional second half of that back-to-back.  I was disheartened.

The absolute highlight of the year, though, has been the indirect benefit of not competing and the late nights and that's the morning wakeup calls with the kids.  Having Makenna run into our room, climb into my half of the bed and burrow in under the covers; awesome.  Waking up in the morning and finding myself as the meat of a mommy and Makenna sandwich; awesome.  Laying with them both in bed watching them fight over the iPad; priceless.

And those are the things you can't duplicate, recover or otherwise try to recast.  They're here-and-now moments, and I've loved nothing more than being there-and-then. For that, 2010, I thank you from the deepest part of my soul.

2011:  So what's to be resolved?


It hit me tonight that resolutions are like short trades; if there's no capital behind them, when the margin call is made there can be a serious scramble to find liquidity in a hurry.  My friends who play the market can happily correct me if I slaughtered that which, given my limited economics aptitude, is likely a certainty.  So it's with the thought it mind that I must start small to build to the more grandiose resolutions.

1. Find my friends and find time for them again.  As we've grown more accustomed to communicating by text message and status update, I've grown woefully abysmal at keeping up with people on the phone or in the real world.  "Meatspace," I believe is the term.  I need to reconnect with with friends.  
2. Goals or things-to-do must come with deadlines.  I've got a pile of things that need to be attended to.  Some of them are easy enough to accomplish, others require the participation of third parties.  I can tell you that this year we got college funds in place for the kids and it felt so awesome.  In 2011, life insurance and wills are just a few of the grown-up things that need addressing.  And they can't be eaten in one bite.  Bit by bit they'll get done, and setting interim targets along the way will aid and abet that greatly.
3. Resume balancing the three-legged stool properly.  Family, work, health.  There needs to be appropriate balance between them all so I can feel a palpable sense of accomplishment being a husband, father, triathlete and executive.  That was a key to the feeling of underachievement I had for 2010 and will be key to how I feel this time next year rolling into 2012.
4. Give back or pay it forward.  I can be a selfish bastard.  Self-centered or me-centric, you pick the phraseology.  There are people out there who need help.  Whether charitably via giving, through mentoring or doing *something*, I need to try to find once a quarter maybe to give some time to somebody who could use it.  Hell, maybe I should give blood.  Must check with my coach first, though, to see if I can train and race down a pint at times in the year.
5. I get by with a little help from my friends.  Whether professionally or personally, there's no way any of us can go it alone.  The quicker I acquiesce and understand this and ask for help before things snowball out of control, it should help the balance and my psyche.
6. Become more assertive.  This defies quantitative description, much like a former Attorney General's definition of pornography.  Let's just say that judicious use, where appropriate, holds exciting prospects.
7. Find time to explore creativity beyond cooking.  For my family who are reading, DON'T PANIC.  I'm not trading in my spatula for a paintbrush anytime soon.  But I love creating other things, whether the famed Makenna Dophin Cruise movie while on vacation in Sanibel this year or just finding ways to express myself (Thursday night doing Improv at a coffee shop and just embracing the process for an hour and letting my brain get loose), structured creativity will help me elsewhere.
8. Write here.  Write there.  Write somewhere.  It's cathartic and I do it well.  I need to do it more personally and not just professionally.
9. Read.  Books, not just blogs and magazines.  Is a book a month too ambitious?
10. Take a year off from rabid political tracking.  It's no secret that I'm a political junkie, and one from the progressive left as well.  I just think that given the finite amount of time that I have to devote to to some of the things laid out above that something will have to give, and I'm thinking it ought to be following politics.  This means unsubscribing from a lot of alerts in Twitter or FB or other places, but it's going to be a really crappy year with the 112th Congress getting underway and there's no sense getting caught up in every eddy of it.
11. Find a peer group I can trust and learn from.  I've floated in and out of a few different groups of people, but by and large I've got a close-knit group of four or five  I share (just about) everything with, professionally.  They're my sounding board and compass.  I know there's a lot I don't know and there are glaring weaknesses in my leadership toolbox.  The sooner I can find people to introduce me to those concepts and put those tools there, the better.  A "peer" does not necessarily mean only my age.  Older, younger, I've no preconditions set on who can teach me things I don't know.
12. Regain access to my new "old" wardrobe.  Those who know me well know I've battled my weight all my life and it's just within the last couple of years that I've gotten it under control and relatively stable.  So after getting to the lightest point in my life in late '09, I decided on last year's Asia trip to get a bunch of new shirts made.  Tight.  Fitted.  Tight.  Those shirts (and pants and a sportcoat) are unable to be buttoned after a year of inactivity.  It's going to take some work, but I want to be back in those clothes by March 1st.  
13. Improve my relationship with food and avoid binges of poor eating.  When I stop exercising, I stop making good food choices in quality and quantity.  I accept the consequences of my actions and will ask for help from my support group in not just making good choices in the present, but for setting better habits to moderate the peaks and valleys in the future.
14. Sleep better, sleep more and get to bed earlier.  Calling and working with Asia (who are anywhere from 12 to 14 hours ahead given the time of year) means you've flipped your clock to theirs and it's a second full time gig.  Work with folks in this hemisphere by day, come home, work with people in another hemisphere for a while by night.  It comes with a price to my family as well as my health in diminished sleep which reduces that urge to answer the 4:45 - 5:15 alarm clock call to get up and exercise.  Work with my partners, do it early and put myself to bed at a reasonable hour.  It's 2:37 right now as I write this, think the kids will show me any mercy in five hours or so?  No.  F**king.  Way.

I was going to make one of them something about "better, stronger, faster, best such-and-such" but realised that there's no unit of measure for it.  The things I've picked above can be measured when I go back and look at calendars, clocks, timing sheets or financial results.  It's all about the metrics and are you meeting them.  I hope as I press "publish post" and I put my head on the pillow, 2010 becomes a thing of the past and 2011 is a new tableau.  You out there will be hearing from me a lot more during the course of it, so I guess we'd both better get a good night's sleep and get ready.