Riding For My Life

Well here we are in June. Where is 2011 going?

I spent some time this week looking at my goals for the year and realizing that I am nearly right on track with most of them. I have put to rest most of the programming-related goals on my list and I am left with some grander ambitions from now until December. Let me summarize:

• Finish 40 Pounds Down. This is now the number one item on my list and currently being worked on. With warm weather now here in force, I am resuming the task I began late last year: not only losing quite a bit of weight, but getting in excellent physical condition. This involves more than just walking all over the place. I consistently eat better - if not entirely balanced - and spend equal amounts of time outside as I do on the computer. I hope to wrap this goal up sometime around August or September.

• Create a basic Android app. This is a new one. Given some recent tasks we have been plugging away on at work, I think it would be very beneficial if I got some Android development experience under my belt, and I have a couple of demo applications that I intend to write for my phone sometime this year. I will be starting this very soon.

• Become a JavaScript expert. I plug away on JavaScript projects all the time and read dozens of articles on the language every week. Practice makes perfect, essentially. I will revisit this goal near the end of the year and compare myself to where I was in 2010 before I started all this JavaScript obsession.

• Reduce stress. This is a newer goal that I added to my list around March. The irony is that only a month later my stress levels plummeted. A new job, a new apartment, new people to see every weekend, old friends returning to Ohio, tons of free time, more money than I know what to do with - in all honesty, changing jobs pretty much took care of this goal. Not bad for a month's work.

• Expand programming portfolio. I have one more website I am developing later this year. I am also lumping any Android demos into this category, so this will be completed without breaking a sweat.

• Write a short story. Umm, yeah, about that. Damn.

Finally, I am looking to get back into biking. With 40 Pounds Down being my primary goal for the summer, I am looking to expand my exercise behind just walking and jogging, and dammit, I love biking. I will be shopping around this weekend and some of next week for a bike, and I hope that by the second week of June I will be cruising up and down Perrysburg, Maumee, Bowling Green, and of course, the Towpath Trail. I would love to see this summer be a return to form for my biking habits. It has been ten years since I have been really serious about biking.

B3 out.