2007 In Review

New Year's is a relatively arbitrary time point. Still, it has its uses. Large numbers of people take advantage of their inability to remember what number to date checks with as a chance to improve themselves. As anyone who reads this blog knows by now, I'm not working for a standard set of New Year's resolutions, but am in a multi-year plan of accomplishing things. I should be at roughly 36 of the items completed by now. Let's see where I stand:

Things definitely completed:

#4. My committee has been formed, and even met with.
#6. I had a poster at this year's Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Population Biology.
#7. I'm not required to take any more classes for my PhD. I might sit in on a few more, but no more are required.
#10. I'm hoping to make this an even more permanent habit, but the lab notebook was followed rigidly for a month.
#12. The Army ROTC requirements are done. Easily the hardest were the 42 pushups.
#13. My best mile is now 5:59.
#14. A 5 mile run is unpleasant, but has been done. Only once, thus far.
#15. I've bench pressed my own weight repeatedly, but the first was 155 when I weighed 152.
#17. The website fitday.com allowed me to track everything I ate for a week. I realized I needed to start eating more. Not what I was hoping to hear, but oh well.
#20. I feel I know how to play racquetball now. Jeff is once again beating me regularly, in large part due to having a better racquet than his old one, but I no longer feel incompetent at it.
#22. Yay for handiness, I now have a nice soft black scarf.
#38. I had a very pleasant date with a guy I hope I'll be seeing again, if he's not too upset with me.
#41. I saw the sunrise the night/morning I was reading the 7th Harry Potter book.
#45. I got to see the Perseid meteor shower while visiting my Dad in southern Canada, well out of any major light dome. There's something to be said for lying down in a hot tub at the beach watching meteors.
#59. By buying a book of NY Times crossword puzzles and looking for one that didn't require me to know many proper names of celebrities and/or athletes, this wasn't too onerous.
#62. A cousin's wedding in MA this summer filled the travel requirement.
#64. Yeah, yeah, it'll increase my risk of skin cancer, etc. I didn't burn, and actually getting tan meant a lot of time out in the sun, reading. It was enjoyable.
#65. I've started getting my hair cut at the training studio for the local fancy place. I go in and tell them I want something shorter than it is while being cut while also being very low maintenance. They've consistently given me a very well-done version of...the same hairstyle I've been kind of sporting since I was 10.
#67. Origami flowers are flowers nonetheless.
#68. There are several possible calls for this one. I'm now considering it to be the Julie Moffitt CDs I gave my Dad for Christmas, as he loves her music and I know her from college and thus want to support her music career. Win-win.
#73. I watched a live-action version of Wind in the Willows on Masterpiece Theatre. It was annoying watching British men in suits pretend to be toads and rats and whatnot, but part of the annoyance was probably due to my not liking the story line.
#78. I again reference the Julie Moffitt CDs.
#81. The Summer Circle Theatre had some fun plays, and were free to boot. Woot.
#84. There have been several high school friends I'd lost touch with who I've written to this year--primarily Mike D, Kathleen, and Anna.
#86. My IRA is now a real investment vechicle.
#87. The first jigsaw of the year was a circular undersea fantasy.
#88. Being practical is sometimes good, so the basement's organized.
#89. I didn't eat any of the chocolate chip cookies I made at Christmas.
#90. My brother now has even more financial motive to kill me beyond merely not diluting his inheritance from my Dad.
#94. I'm past the 30 mark in blog entries, though admittedly not by a lot.
#95. The verdict: silly, but not as silly as I expected to look with facial hair.
#101. Yay for good credit.

That's 32 definite completions. Now let's take a look at some arguable ones:

#1. I need to have written a scientific paper. I've done a lot of work updating an article for the Encyclopedia of Evolution for the new edition, adding some new studies to it, reworking some of the old ones. I'll get an authorship credit for this, in addition to my advisor (who wrote the first edition of this article and has also done a lot of editing for it, both on his old work and on my additions).

#27. This site isn't for a class, but I've done very little on the building end of it. So maybe?

#37. There is no official Boggle association. I've been playing on Facebook, where I got myself into the top 1% of players. Some people I've talked with about this call that a good enough substitution; others disagree.

#44. Some friends and I drove an hour and a half to go to a David Sedaris reading. Is that far enough to be a road trip?

#97. I've added information to several Wikipedia articles, but never written one from scratch.

So, that's 5 more arguable ones. I've also got some large ones partially done, so I think overall I'm pretty much on track.