New year, New resolutions!

Last year I had these 3 resolutions

1. I planned on reading 12 books - one each month. I didn’t make it. I only got 6 books and barely finished my 6th at the midnight hour! Here’s my GoodReads tracking my progress.
2. I planned on “finishing” 12 games - again, one each month. I didn’t do a great job here either. I didn’t get very far in Ocarina of Time, so I’m not counting that. I did, of course play iRacing consistently, and I played 150+ hours of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and defeated Gannondorf. I played several hours of Vampire Surviovors, so I’m counting that as well. I picked Backloggd to track my games last year and then didn’t make any updates. I’m going to try to do that more this year. Here’s the page.
3. I didn’t have any specific plans for iRacing besides a wishy-washy desire to get to 2k iRating. It didn’t go well. My iRating dropped the lowest ever (around 1100) and I made a last-quarter change to focus on one car which has been a good idea. I’m in the 1500-1600 range now. My iRacing ID is 424440.

This year I have these goals

1. Books - I’m going to try to read 6 books instead of 12. I achieved that this year so I’m comfortable I can do that next year. Here are some books on the shelf
   • Starter Villan by John Scalzi
   • Lock In by John Scalzi
   • Island of Secrets by J. Beckett (a pseudonym of John Wilker)
   • Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
   • 42 The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams
   • A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
   • oops that’s already 6
2. Games - I’m going to “seriously play” 6 games. I don’t have time to 100% anything any longer but I’m going to try to get to the end of fixed length games and play for a minimum of 20 hours games that don’t have an end. Obviously iRacing is going to take up most of my time.
   • iRacing. I want to hit 1800 IR, 4.0x SR and do at least one endurance race (8-24 hours).
   • Super Mario Wonder
   • One of Eastward, Sable, Journey to the Savage Planet
   • Mass Effect Trilogy. This counts as 3 games.
   • Horizon Zero Dawn
3. Cycling - I really dropped the ball last year on my riding and Strava tells me I’ve only ridden 256 miles! A travesty! I was averaging nearly 2,000 miles before the last 2 years. Time to get back to it! I’m going to try to do 1000 miles (which should be relatively easy for me) and participate in at least 3 organized gravel rides. There are several to choose from here in CO so that will be easy.
4. Car stuff - In addition to my regular participation in iRacing, I’m going to try to buy my old Lotus Elise back this year. I’m going to sell the house and I’m hoping I can get enough from the proceeds to afford the car. This is a big if! However, I’m really looking forward to it.
5. Travel - I want to take at least 4 out-of-town trips this year. One per quarter (maybe biased for the summer). I’ve already started planning a trip to Boston to visit a friend, and I’m tenatively going to attend the Lotus Owners Gathering in late September.
6. Education - I purchased a lifetime membership to Rosetta Stone over Thanksgiving and I want to learn Spanish. I have never learned another language so I don’t have a solid idea other than I would like to be verbally fluent. I have friends who are native Spanish speakers, and I plan on trying to watch some Spanish language television to help.
7. Tech / Career - I want to shore up my cloud development skills and build an app to “putter around” with. Right now it’s just the blog - learning Jekyll, Ruby, and refreshing my HTML+CSS skills. I’ll be spending a lot of time in React at work, so I’ll definitely learn that. I asked my manager at our last 1:1 what I need to advance in the current org, and he had some good feedback. I am still trying to get to a VP level, so I need to continue working on that.

Here’s to the New Year!