New Years

I'm not a big fan of the New Years holiday. I think it's ridiculous. What do people do for New Years? They stay up so they can "celebrate" that split second when we can get a new calender. What else was significant about Monday night this week? Nothing. If you want something to celebrate, see my post on the winter solstice, that has some significance.

I know, New Years isn't only about staying up until midnight and celebrating the new calender, it's about starting anew, with a new year ahead of you. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. You can "celebrate" March 12 and make the appropriate changes and see how you perform until March 11 of the next year. The same is true for any day of the year. It's really not any different, except if you make the changes in your life that you feel that you need to make throughout the year, you are far more apt to develop into the person that you want to be. Oh and it's easier to remember January 1 than it is to remember March 12, but that is really of little significance since most New Years resolutions don't make it past March 12.

So I am not a fan of New Years... maybe I would like it better if I drank. I guess I'll never know.

Some people may say it's the new year that spurred the idea, and maybe it was, but I've been thinking about my blog. This upcoming semester I will have more free time than I did last semester, so I would like to write more regularly. I think I want to write daily on week days. That sounds great, but what in the world will I write about? Here's the thing; I would be willing to bet that most people really don't care what I did today. My goal with this blog is not to keep a journal, my goal is to keep up on my informal writing skills. I spend lots of time writing really boring scientific manuscripts and I think it is important to maintain the ability to communicate with real people that have better things to do with their time than read boring scientific papers.

OK, so I want to write informally, but I also don't want to write about nothing. Still nobody cares about what I did today, so what should I write about. When I started this blog, I named it "Sans Auto" partly because I just sold my car and was depending far more on other forms of transportation, and partly because Fatty had a great blog on bikes and I wanted to be like him. I ran into a couple of problems... 1) He's a far better writer than I am. 2) Riding my bike everyday has become the norm and I don't have much more to write about without copying verbatim from Fatty's site. I would also like to add that it's not bad. I really don't feel that I'm missing out on anything and not having a car actually brings much more to my life than it detracts from it.

That's where I'm trying to go with the blog. My family is trying to live without many things (car, television, TP, etc), but really I don't want to write about doing without, I want to write about what it brings to my life and how it helps my family. As we do without, we are far from deprived. I would call it liberated and free. --Oh, and I"m going to try and post more pictures.

So there's my plan. Now I'm going to spend the weekend trying to come up with something to write about on Monday.