It’s that introspective time of year when people start thinking about their shortcomings and what they might do about them, in the form of New Year’s Resolutions. I can already envision the post-holiday crowds forming at health clubs everywhere!
I consider myself a pretty well-adjusted person, but there are obviously things I should do, but don’t (and vice versa). In fact I’m sure that I could easily come up with a dozen changes I would like to make in my life. This raises a question: do I try to make all of these changes beginning on 1 January 2006, or should I prioritize them and pick just one for 2006? I’ve been given good advice on attempting massive changes in habits — it doesn’t happen without concomitant motivation, e.g. your life hangs in the balance. I don’t have such a threat hovering over me, so the shotgun approach is out.
But instead of attempting one Resolution for 2006, potentially failing to stick to it, and maybe even picking up another bad habit this coming year, I thought of another possible approach: How about a monthly resolution? I’ve heard that if one can willfully change their behavior for a full month, the new behavior becomes habitual, i.e. something that doesn’t require effort to maintain. If I adopted this approach, I’d have 12 chances for self-improvement in 2006. Heck, if even one of these things “stuck” I’d be doing better than most people with respect to New Year’s Resolutions! But being realistic, I know that I’m likely to fail at least as often as I succeed in this endeavor, so I’m not going to queue up a new resolution for every month. Instead, I’ll allow for several “do-overs” starting about April (or later, on the off-chance that I’m successful in January and February).
What sort of resolutions would be good candidates? Well, it seems to me that they should be daily (or more frequent) tasks, particularly things that are important to me — my family and my health are the first general things that come to my mind. Some possible specifics might be:
- Ensuring the chores are done every day (both the kids’ and our own)
- Bicycling daily (either commuting or recreational)
- Getting my “5/day” veggies and fruits
- Flossing every day (here I am married to a dental hygienist, and I only floss once or twice per week, tsk tsk)
A dozen monthly resolutions seem like a better approach to self-improvement than the typical New Year’s Resolution. I’ll pick something easy for January and see if I can stick with it throughout the month. For February I could take the next easiest task, and so on. Hmm, if I kept at it for a few months perhaps I would get into the habit of changing my habits. 
We had a great turnout at the December boardgames meetup, especially since our numbers usually plummet during the holiday season. There were about 28 people (+1 baby) gaming at the Fox & Goose Public House on Tuesday night. All together we played about 10 different games — we would have played more, but about ¼ of our players left early to go to a karaoke (sp?) bar. I took a bunch of pictures, but I didn’t want to blind anybody with the flash, and I didn’t bring my tripod. As a result, only one picture was even marginally viewable.
We’ve been trying to keep track of all the games we play whenever we get together. There is a thread on the meetup message board with a list of nearly all our events since May 2005. Each event has an associated “geek list” which shows the games we played that night, usually including the players and their scores. Many thanks to Kevin for coming up with this idea and doing nearly all the work to make it happen!!!
We get together every Tuesday night at the Fox & Goose, but the first Tuesday of each month is usually our best attended. There are also several other events every month at other venues. See the full schedule on the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup site. If you’d like to join us, feel free to drop in during a scheduled event or you can join the Meetup group (free) and RSVP. You can use the RSVP comments to request a particular game or to pre-arrange players for a game.
Many of our members have listed their games collections on BoardGameGeek, also known as “BGG” or “the ‘Geek.” You can find our members’ BGG usernames by checking their Boardgame Meetup profiles for an answer to “If you have a profile on BoardGameGeek.com, what is it?” (Take a look at my Sacramento Boardgames Meetup profile for an example. About halfway down my profile you’ll see my BGG username and URL:
“I’m jimv on the ‘Geek, http://www.boardgamegeek.com/user/jimv“
Unfortunately, Meetup doesn’t convert all URL’s into clickable links, so you’ll have to copy-and-paste the URL into your browser.)
Holy electric bill, Batman! The Christmas light video making the Internet rounds is an actual display from last year! I assumed it was done with some video trickery, and I still thought it was pretty cool. But if that’s something you could really do on your own, that’s worth several million points out of ten!!! See the “Update” section at the bottom of the article for details.
Also, I was able to read the instructions last night and again this morning. It appears that the WonderlandChristmas site was suffering from slashdot effect and was temporarily crushed.
“Humor” isn’t really the correct tag for this post: it’s more along the lines of a “diversion” than outright funny…
If you’ve got Windows Media Player and a fat pipe, I received an amazing WMV media clip (about 4.8 MiB) from Becky, a.k.a. “The Punk.” These people had way too much time on their hands!
Sorry for not providing an open format — If somebody has a “translation” of this clip, please leave a comment with a link!
Update: According to snopes.com, this is an actual video (vs computer-generated or stop-motion animation) from Christmas 2004 done by a guy named Carson Williams of Mason, Ohio using Light-o-Rama controllers. Some of the links in the snopes.com article are broken. In particular, the instructions link times out when attempting to contact the server. 
Today (fourth Thursday of November) is Thanksgiving in the US. This marks the beginning of the holiday season, which lasts until New Year’s Day.
Thanksgiving is the holiday that I look forward to all year, because there’s no gift exchange so it seems less commercial than other holidays. And then there’s the food… I love to cook, and this is a great excuse to pull out all the stops in the kitchen! I don’t have time to post any recipes right now, but I may type one or two in later. Our family’s Thanksgiving feast customarily includes:
- Pre-feast appetizers (deviled eggs, olives, sweet pickles, celery with peanut butter, celery with pimento cheese, veggie dippers, spinach dip, candied walnuts)
- Turkey
- Stuffing
- Mashed potatoes
- Gravy
- Poppy seed rolls
- Cranberries (homemade, of course!)
- “Awesome strawberry stuff”
- Candied yams
- Pumpkin pie
- Butternut squash pie
- Mincemeat pie
- Apple pie
- Libations — wine, sparkling apple and/or pear cider
My household normally hosts Thanksgiving for our extended family, but this year we don’t have enough room in our “new” house so we’re gathering at my sister’s in-law’s house. We should be finished with our remodeling project before next Thanksgiving, so hopefully next year we’ll resume our tradition of kicking off the holiday season at our home!
