2007 Personal Enrichment Goals

I decided to take a blogging break pretty much the last half of December. Now that 2007 is over and done...How did I do with my personal enrichment goals for the year (listed here)? Here’s the run down.

1) More Charity Work – FAIL. The point of this was to perform charity work in addition to financial donations. While my donations increased this year, I only performed one act of charity and that was the 5K Susan G. Komen Walk back in April.

2) Switch to Ubuntu – DONE. Very successful and a really enjoyable experience. I’ll be building on this further in 2008.

3) Take a Self-Defense Class – DONE (plus bonus). I completed a 6-week Krav-Maga course. Posts on the classes are here, here, here and here. In addition, I joined the gym that provides the classes.

4) UnClutter Apartment – DONE (partial). Most progress has been made in cleaning out my closet, re-organizing my physical/computer files, keeping my desk(s) tidy and cleaning (slightly) more frequently. I even managed at some point to dust (well, vacuum) my baseboards. Unfortunately, I ended the year behind on my cleaning so no full credit.

5) Start a Weblog – DONE. In addition to creating the blog, I’ve actually managed to do a few minor improvements and get pretty consistent at posting. I’m especially proud of the recent reduction in link-posts. I generally do these when I don’t have anything else to write about so a reduction means I’m generating more of my own content.

6) Be More Sociable – FAIL. This was an effort to be more social. Options were either an Astronomy or a shooting club. A visit to the SA area astro-group did not inspire and I’m not really ready for a shooting group. I get some partial credit for joining a gym and commenting more often on other people’s weblogs.

7) Take 1-2 Classes – FAIL. I signed up for a First Aid class. Unfortunately, it got postponed and rescheduled to conflict with my self-defense class. This will be on the 2008 list.

8) Re-plant Patio Garden – DONE. After months of neglect, I replanted last Spring. The garden is currently in extreme under-watering mode to avoid frost damage. I found that skipping watering or doing it very little helps protect some plants during a freeze. But I just did a litte bit of pulling and rearranging the patio.

9) Digital Photo Improvement – DONE. This was my sole add-on goal (added after writing the list). I’ve been taking a great deal more pictures (evidence in my PhotoBucket page). Also, they’re getting better. Still room for improvement.

The 2007 list was about half-completed (some items I didn’t list on this blog). Some of the incomplete items were due to too general/specific or discovered they weren't feasible (for instance – I had “teach myself Matlab” until I learned how friggin expensive a Matlab license was). Honestly, I consider 2007 a practice year. Part of this year’s list was convincing myself that a list of personal enrichment goals was feasible and something I would do. Both points are well-proven. The 2008 goals will be much more ambitious and (hopefully) with less flaws than the 2007 list.

Sometime in the next couple days, I'll post my (much more ambitious and kinda scary) 2008 Personal Enrichment Goals.