New Year, Resolutions

I did not make any New Year resolutions this year, which is not unusual. Nevertheless, here are a couple I can make now:

Retire

I actually need to resolve to retire, because even though I am planning to, I keep wavering. For a couple of years at least, my target has been to retire on the Friday before my birthday this July, which to be precise means Friday, July 17, 2020 will be my last day of work; however, I have seriously considered extending that to the end of October, or maybe to the end of the year, and I have thought about getting a job right away after I retire. After a couple of discussions with Jackie and a recent discussion with my boss that seemed to confirm that she would not try to talk me into staying longer, I am back to shooting for July 17, and just fully retiring, not going back to work part-time.

So I resolve to do that. With retirement will probably come a robust list of additional resolutions. What they will amount to in sum is to use the time to do things and to enjoy life rather than watch TV or play the same video games over and over, but there will be time enough to come up with those.

Writing

I do not feel a great need to write a certain number of blog posts or to post on some predetermined schedule, as you can see if you look at my posting history, but I do get the desire to write every so often, and I usually let it pass without actually writing anything. I only posted twice last year - once about Trump, once about Emmitt - so it should be easy enough to surpass that output. I will be halfway to last year's production as soon as I hit the publish button for this post, and it is only January 11.

One thing I am thinking about is to post less about politics and more about everything else. The problem with politics is that every insight I may have, every opinion, everything has been written about already. I just started using Twitter, and there are hundreds of posts about politics just on my Twitter feed every day, so that subject gets covered whether I cover it or not. On the other hand, no one posts about the events in my life except for me.

I think that retirement will be a good subject to write about, but I need to wait until I get a little closer and can be sure it is actually happening. I don't want to put too many plans in print and then have to stay at work if Jackie loses her job, for example. Must wait.

So good, two resolutions. I really hope I can keep the retirement one at least. I bet that I will keep up with the writing too.