On a promising note, the day started bight and sunny. I hope this is an indication of the days to come.

One of the things I have started to do in the last few years is to set up some goals for me to work for. Not really resolutions, but more goals to work for.

This year, I have decided to make them a little more public than in the past, and I hope this will make me more accountable. :)

So, without further babble:

• Social
  • Join and participate in at least one organization/club (outside of church)
  • Work on blogs more
• Travel
  • 1 Trip with family not to see family
  • Start planing on bigger trip
• Photography
  • Take and post a photo a day
• Simplify
  • Reduce wardrobe, books and computer stuff
• Finance
  • Set up emergency fund
  • Set up wills
• Health
  • Take better care of self

Now, I have a TODO list with almost 200 items on it (well, some of those are for work, bust still). I plan to work through the list with these goals in mind, and trim the list down. My goal is to not have any TODO items hanging out on the list for any length of time. We shall see.

2008 is almost over, and I think that this is a good thing. A few things that happened this year:

• I got my 11th boss in 27 months (at the time)
• The boy went to the ER/Urgent Care twice (once ended in the hospital for a day
• The daughter went to the ER twice. Both times were misses, but still
• The wife went to the ER, and a trip to the hospital with Spinal Meningitis.
• Ike (we were lucky. A week with no school, and only 4 hours without power)
• My bank bought two other banks, but I still have a job
• My bank was forced to take a government bail-out offer (does that make me a civil servant now?)
• Two of my photos were picked up by a website to be used

Tomorrow is my year end review (which was due the week after Thanksgiving) even though I am on vacation.

I can say that I am not going to miss this year at all. Bring on 2009!

A quick look at my resolutions for 2008:

Area	Resolution	Achieved?
Social	Join and participate in at least one organization/club	Joined a local photographic meetup club, but it is foundering. I am thinking about taking it over
Travel	1 Trip with family not to see family Start planing on bigger trip	Due to the problems over the sumer, we did not take a major trip, but we did do some good one day trips
Simplify	Reduce wardrobe Reduce books and computer stuff	This is the one I did the best in, but still not as far as I need to. More work in 2009, I think
Finance	Set up emergency fund Retire 1 major debt	While I did retire a major debt this year (yeah!), I did not set up the emergency fund. I will have to work on this more as well

Over the next few days, I will finalize my list for 2009, and I will post them here. They will include things like making a habit of exercising, making a habit of photography, making a habit around finances, and the like.

No, this is not a HOWTO, but more of a 'hey, cool, it works!' kind of thing.

A while back, I got an email from an old client manager of mine. I was working for him back when I got married. We got a long very well, and kept in touch after I moved to a different contract. I moved, then he moved, and we stopped chatting as often, and it went to once every few years.

Fast forward to now. I got an email from him stating that he had moved again, and had some major life changes, and was looking to get back into the tech market, but in a new town. He wanted to know if I knew anybody out there. I told him I did, and introduced him to a real close friend of mine who had moved to the same area about 18 months ago.

I got a call from the close friend tonight. They had dinner tonight, and hit it off. At least two leads were passed on, so the story does not have an ending yet, but things look good!

Now that the Silly Season is over in the US now that we have finished our elections, it is time to get back to some basics, like helping the planet.

Plastic Shopping bags have been getting a lot of attention over the last few years. Some cities here in the US have gone as banning them and some major chains are starting to rethink their position on them. I have tried to refuse them whenever I am out shopping and I only get a few things. Far easier for me to carry them than to deal with recycling the bags (for the longest time, they were #4 plastics, and harder to deal with…now, most of the stores we go to have them as #2 which is curb-side recycling for me!)

We have been using reusable shopping bags from the grocery stores we go to. For the longest time, it was a canvas bag from a national natural food chain. These are nice, heavy duty, and stand up to a lot. In the last year or so (as the price of oil has gone up), more of the main-stream store we go to started offering their own bags made from recycled plastic. All these bags are functional, durable, and greenish, but they still have full branding, and say `Look at me! I paid good money to advertise for someone!'

But, I just saw an article over at Simple Mom about some very nice looking bags. Most of the bags are targeted for the ladies in colors and patters, but I can get past that to help do my part to help fight consumerism (branding) and be more ecologically sound (reduce, reuse, recycle!)

Last post about the election for a while. We saw some interesting numbers last night, but we still did not have high enough turn-out. Sure, the guy I was rooting for won, but I would have been happier if we had more like 80% turnout nationally, which we did not.

I will have to wait to see what the numbers look like for the town I live in (not big enough for the nationals to post numbers), but Houston seem to have better than 50% turnout. I hope that this level will keep up in the next election, but somehow I think it will not.

Now, time to get back to other things in life.