Resolutions

For New Year's this year, I have decided to actually make resolutions. So, without further ado...

New Year's 2007 Resolutions

1. No candy or pop at the movie theater for 100% of the movies seen. (I don't eat popcorn, but that would be banned, as well). This should reduce my calorie consumption by about 500-1000 per week, depending upon whether we went to one or two movies in a week. I eat so much candy at the theater and when I can't decide between two candies, that's right, you guessed it, I get both. No more. This one will be hard, so I'll have to come up with a way to display my success, or failure (no! there will be no failure!), on my list of movies seen in the sidebar.
2. Pick up clutter in the house before bed each night for 90% of the time. I need to focus on being more neat, not so much more clean. Therefore, I am going to institute a nightly pick up rule and concentrate on picking stuff up during the day and not just leaving it. How someone as organized as I am can be such a slob is confusing to me, but now my slob tendencies are making me less organized and this I cannot have. Again, this one is going to be hard for me. I leave stuff laying around constantly. I'm thinking with practice, though, it'll start to feel natural within a month.
3. Achieve 93% dog walking rate for the year. I could bump it to 95%, but I believe that I need to give myself some room for error and sickness and badly timed days. I'm really proud that I met my goal this year. Why I was able to manage that one and not the workout goals, I don't quite know. Maybe because of the silent staring from Turtle.

In non-resolution news, when my mom was here, we called Qwest and got her signed up to get DSL. She has been paying for dial-up, but with her new camera she can now use the extra bandwidth for uploading. We managed to get her total bill down by $10 from what she was paying for services individually by bundling with Qwest ... and that is with the better service of DSL compared to dial-up. We had a minor issue with the DirecTV boxes (which had to be switched out for some stupid reason) and the TiVo not working with the new box. This morning we managed to get the channels changed through the TiVo box (essential because if the TiVo can't change the channels on the receiver, then it can't record shows you've scheduled) using the IR cable. I had my mom take pictures of the back of her TiVo and the back of the receiver so D and I could talk her through what she needed to do with visuals. This worked quite well! The IR cable method (vs serial cable) makes for slower channel changing, but I find with TiVo I hardly ever just flick through TV, so it doesn't bother me. Hopefully this will be true for Mom, too. I believe her modem is due to arrive for her DSL installation today. It'll be so cool for her to have DSL! D was in the room when we were deciding what type of modem Mom should get. She only has a desktop, so I said she didn't need wireless, but D had this panicked look and his face and said that she needed the wireless, what about when we're there?! So now Mom's house will have wireless.

I know no one actually cares, but I need to explain why we seem to have told a slight fib in our Christmas letter. We said we went to "over 60 movies in the theater" this year. It turns out, we've only gone to 58, including the 3 over the past three days. I told D the number including the 10 movies we went to see in 2005. I felt the need to clear that up and let everyone know we weren't exaggerating, but rather made a mistake. There, I feel better. I do actually now feel like we should see three more movies so we really did go to over 60 movies this year.