Q1 Resolutions Update

Back in January, I mentioned that I had two over-arching goals for the coming year. They were "to read more and record more of my own music." I actually had three, but I was keeping one of them under wraps. My third goal was to maintain, at least, and perhaps extend the weight loss I'd achieved in the fall of 2005. I hadn't mentioned that here as I feared I'd fail and have to eat a lot of crow. That's still a possibility, as I've found weight loss is a war you never truly win. It is, rather, a series of pitched battles where you and the opposing army fight to move the front line a few feet one way or the other for years.

Via email, I mentioned to my friend sjarvis that I thought the entire concept of New Year's resolutions was flawed and that if people made goals, they should make them quarterly, as businesses do, and adjust the next quarter's goals in light of the success or failure of the previous quarter. As a general rule, I have little patience for business concepts applied to personal life, but I think this one has legs. Steve liked the idea enough that he blogged his Q1 resolutions and a follow up about his results.

I never blogged my Q1 goals, but I scratched them down in my notebook and have had them at the forefront of my mind all year. They were these:

• Finish Pimsleur's French, Level 1
• Finish Russo's novel, Empire Falls and anything else decent
• Record and fully master one James, Not Jim track per month
• Get started on a print edition of Wheat's BassBook
• Keep the weight off

Though working on my French wasn't an official goal for the year, it's been a goal of mine for along time. When I discovered the Pimsleur method, I knew I'd found a way of reviewing and extending what I learned in college that would actually work for me. Since I have a twenty minute commute to and from work, these thirty minute lessons loaded on my iPod are the perfect thing. There are three levels, each of which has thirty lessons. The lessons focus a great deal on pronunciation--something my college classes didn't--and use repetition to help you get the ideas down solidly. I finished the last lesson of level one a week ago and am now reviewing the lessons to make sure I'm comfortable before I progress to level two.

The "read more" goal went very well. I finished Russo's novel and am now reading a collection of his short stories (I have one story left to finish it). I also finished Elie Wiesel's Night.

I didn't fare as well on recording my own music. I named my project, set up a web site and a MySpace account for it, and released one official track, "Ocean," and one unofficial one, "Soundcheck," that might get remastered and added to the list of official releases. I didn't think it was good enough, at first, but it's growing on me. I'm also very close to finishing another composition, called "Prodigal Son," but it's still not quite there. So I think my goal here was too ambitious. For Q2, I'm going to shoot for just two songs and see if I can make it.

I got a decent start on what will eventually be the print edition of Wheat's BassBook. I'm laying it out with InDesign and am looking into some self-publishing services, though I may try to shop it to "real" publishers as well. I hope to make a little money on it and I intend to build a companion web site for it to house the audio and, perhaps, video files that should go along with it but would drive up the price too much if I had to include them on a CD. It's been odd, after such a long absence from it, to do print design work. And it's painfully slow. I am essentially rewriting the book from scratch. I'm using what I can verbatim from the online version, but I've learned a lot since that version was conceived. I've been taking lots of photos, recreating all of the diagrams, and creating lots of standard notation examples with lilypond.

The best news is I've managed to keep the weight off. I'll devote a separate blog post to the specifics and some of the techniques and strategies I've learned. But I'm very happy to be at a much healthier weight. And I'm confident that I can, in Q2, push the ball a little further down the field toward my long-term goal [first martial metaphors and now sports metaphors--what has happened to me?].