A few times on the web I've come across lists made by adolescents or young adults detailing what they hope to accomplish in their lives. If I had made such a list a quarter century ago it would have included some things I've manage to accomplish since, such as getting married and raising children, some things I still might yet accomplish, such as writing a novel, and some things which just aren't going to happen, such as hiking the Appalachian Trail.
The arrival of a new century and a new millennium has inspired me to think more than usual about my past and my future, about what I've accomplished and what I hope to accomplish. Here, then, is a list of what I resolve to do before the end of the Twenty-first Century, which, unless there are some unforeseen medical breakthroughs in the next few decades, means before the end of my life.
(yearly updates below, including more resolutions on 01/01/07)
I started this novella, which was originally to be just a short story, in 1997 (I think). I had good reason to believe a year ago that it would be finished before the turn of the century, but it didn't happen. The first draft is mostly done; it shouldn't take too long to finish.
When it is done, I'll add it to the fiction section of my website. I'm not sure how people will like it. It seems to me to be less accessible than 126 Kisses (for instance), but the responses from those who have read what I have so far have been positive.
This is my novel. I started it in the mid '80's. I put it aside once to write 126 Kisses, and again to write A Diamond Found on Paradise.
The first draft was about a third done when I broke for Diamond. I haven't been ignoring it in the meanwhile; I've been thinking a lot about the story and the cultures involved, and, in fact, when I get back to it probably the first thing I'll do is tear apart and redo much of what I've already written.
The major part of this resolution is becoming semi-fluent in Spanish. I studied Spanish in high school and have tried to keep it from getting too rusty since, but I was never fluent. I can handle written Spanish much better that spoken Spanish, but, while I don't have too much trouble when I try to read the Spanish version of the handouts my kids bring home from school, I'm far from good enough to read García without so much of a struggle that the flow of the work is completely lost.
Gladilatian is a language I'm constructing. It may never have an extensive enough lexicon for fluency to really exist, but I want to at least become fluent enough that I can write notes to myself in it.
I'm not sure why, but Iceland has always fascinated me. It seems such a dramatic place. Even though I wouldn't want to live somewhere with so few trees, I'd like to visit it someday.
That's "the southern sky" as in "a clear night sky in the Southern Hemisphere".
I've seen plenty of shooting stars and rainbows and a few comets, but I've never once seen the northern lights.
I've seen total eclipses of the moon and partial eclipses of the sun (including one just last week), but I've never seen it become night in the day.
I'd like to be able to juggle clubs as well as I now juggle balls, i.e. not necessarily able to do any fancy tricks, but able to pick some up and start juggling without really having to think about it.
I used to know a bunch of string figures, which I taught myself out of a book when I was in college. I want learn them again. This will probably be the easiest to accomplish of any of the resolutions here.
My current USCF rating is 1711. The highest I've ever had was about 100 points above that. Expert is 2000 to 2199. I think I can achieve that if I set my mind to it.
The GHCC was once a very active club, with 20 or more regular attendees every week, simultaneous exhibitions by local masters, and periodic USCF rated tournaments, including the yearly club championship. That was back when we were meeting every Wednesday at a book store in West Hartford. However, we lost that place, and soon after lost Dave Aldi, who had run it for years. I took over from Aldi, but I was never able to find a good replacement for the book store and it eventually dwindled away to nothing. The club now exists as a box of equipment in my garage.
I grew up mostly in the outer suburbs, where there was at least a patch of woods between one house and the next. I now live in a city, where my yard and my neighbors' yards are really just one big yard delineated by fences. It makes me claustrophobic. Laura and I had not planned to live in the city this long. When we bought our house the housing market in Connecticut was near its peak, and Hartford was one of the cheapest places to get a decent house. Soon after that the market collapsed, and for a while we had negative equity. Now we're only three and a half years from paying off our first mortgage and starting to think about moving again. When we do it will be to somewhere much less urban.
My goal for this holiday vacation was to complete the first draft of A Diamond Found on Paradise. As of this writing (early New Year's Day evening) I'll either just make it or just miss it. In either case I am fast approaching a significant milestone in this project. There's still a bit of work to do after the first draft is done, but I feel like I'm making real progress. (I realize I said last year that the first draft was "mostly done". That was true in the sense that more was completed than remained to be done. Now I've got one scene left to write.)
I now know seven string figures. I do them every morning, and I'm to the point where I know these well enough that I consider them learnt. I want to add more to my repertoire before I declare that resolution fulfilled, though.
There's not much progress to report on the other resolutions.
Late in April I finished A Diamond Found on Paradise and put it up on the web. What reaction I've got has been very positive. I don't know if the silence from others I've told about it has been because they haven't read it, because they didn't like it and want to be polite, or because they just haven't mentioned it. I am pleased with it, at any rate.
I now know nine string figures. It's still not as much as I'd like, but I'm going to call that resolution fulfilled, because if someone were to ask me "Do you know string figures?" I would have no problem answering "yes".
Since finishing Diamond I've returned to working on my novel, Raisinbread. I have made embarassingly little progress in that time though. Still, some progress has been made. It's all in the form of revisions to what I'd already written, and the total word count has possibly even decreased, but I have been working on it, especially late in the year, so hopefully I'll have more significant progress to report next year.
Reviving the Greater Hartford Chess Club is beginning to look like it's not going to happen. I've joined the New Britain Chess Club, in a neighboring town, and it is a very active club. The Hartford club's equipment is now on loan to the Hartford Public High School Chess Club (founded by my son), and it appears that the best use of the GHCC's equipment is there. I'll have to decide soon, since my son is going to graduate this year.
There's not much progress to report on the other resolutions.
I now live in the woods. When 2003 started I had no idea that the silvan resolution would be fulfilled before it ended. My wife, Laura, deserves most of the credit. She initiated the process, finding a real estate agent and figuring out how we could use the low interest rates to manage it financially. A large chunk of the middle of the year was consumed with searching for a place, buying it, moving, and selling the old place. We're now all settled in Vernon, Conn., though. We have a simple house on 5.6 acres of land. The lot is only 150' along the road but goes back a long ways. It's wooded except for the house and lawns. The woods are mostly black oak and sweet birch (a.k.a. black birch). (The oak might be red oak; it's hard to tell them apart.) It also contains white birch, yellow birch, red maple, beech, hickory, hemlock, spruce, and probably other species. It's very peaceful here. I'm very happy with the place. It feels like going home; it's a lot more like the place I grew up in than any place I've lived in since was.
I continue to make slow progress on my novel.
I've given up on reviving the Greater Hartford Chess Club. I'm calling that resolution abandoned. Most of the equipment was donated to the Hartford Public High Chess Club.
In October of 2003 there was a huge solar storm and predictions that the northern lights would be seen in Connecticut. I kept going outside and looking for them, but couldn't see anything. The next day the paper printed a picture taken in a neighboring town showing the sky blazing red with the aurora.
So, three years into the Twenty-first Century I have three resolutions fulfilled, one abandoned, and nine still open. A couple things happened this year, though, which weren't fulfillments of resolutions but which just as well could have been. One is that I've become the Connecticut State Director of American Atheists. Not that becoming state director per se would have been a resolution, but becoming active poltically could have been. The other is that I put myself on a diet (of my own design) and lost 60 lbs. For years I'd been overweight and telling myself I should do something about it. In 2003 I did, going from 240# to 180#.
From the 19th to the 26th of September 2004 Laura and I were in Iceland. We spent a night in Reykjavík, a couple nights in Brattholt, near the Gullfoss Waterfall, three nights in Langaholt on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, and another night in Reykjavík. I got to see hot springs, geysers, glaciers, volcanic craters, many, many waterfalls, windswept moss covered lava fields punctuated by sudden mountains, and storm-battered cliffs by the sea. I had several great hikes, including one along the rim of the Hvítá River canyon, and another up from the southern shore of the Snæfellsnes to Arnardalsskarð Pass and back. I had a great time. It was all I'd hoped it would be.
Twice while we were there, we saw the northern lights. Once as a green stripe while we were in Reykjavík, and once as several bands of greenish white stripes while we were in Langaholt, including a band directly above us. I continue to make slow progress on my novel. An idea for another big writing project has been forming in my head meanwhile, so that could end up delaying it more. That leaves me, after four years, with five resolutions fulfilled, one abandoned, and seven still open.No resolutions were fulfilled this year, but the year still seems well spent. I've been hiking in the White Mountains every couple months or so. I'm still active with American Atheists. The "big writing project" mentioned in last year's update is well underway.
I've also made some progress towards some of the original resolutions, even if not to completion. I study Spanish (and also, for that matter, Latin) on my own, working my way through childrens' and young adults' books. My chess rating is 1822.Again no resolutions were fulfilled this year, and again the year still seems well spent. Part of the reason is that, as could have been predicted, new goals have arisen. In fact, I'm going to take this opportunity to add five more resolutions to the list:
This is the heart of the big writing project mentioned the past couple years. I'm inventing a constructed culture, along with a language, planet, and sapient species, and this story is intended to tie it all together, or at least be a starting point for someone to explore it.
When I wrote An Atheist Apology I expected that all of the arguments therein had already been made elsewhere, even though several of them had been invented independently by myself. That's essentially been what I've found, but the key arguments about the equivalence of "potential" and "actual" universes, and the incoherence of the concept of the "creation" of a universe have not, as far as I've been able to find, been expressed in quite the same way as I have, although similar ideas have indeed been proposed (for instance by David Kellogg Lewis).
I know, I'm proposing writing projects faster than I'm finishing them. I guess I'll just have to live forever.
There are 48 peaks in New Hampshire with an altitude of at least 4000 feet and a prominence of at least 200 feet. Hiking all of them is a thing a lot of people do. When I started hiking a lot in the White Mountains I didn't think I would be one of them, but I still kept track of what I'd done, and when I got into the 20s I decided I wanted to do all of them. So far I've done 27.
I still don't think I'm ever going to through hike the Appalachian Trail, but I might be able to manage the Long Trail, which runs the length of Vermont, some day.
This is the same as the Spanish resolution, but applied to Latin. I'm already to the point where I'm reading the unabridged Cicero in the back of Wheelock's Latin textbook with a lot of help from the footnotes. I'd like to change that to reading Cicero, and the like, with only occasional help from a dictionary.
No resolutions were fulfilled, but progress continues to be made on several of them. I'm now up to 37 of the 48 4000 footers in New Hampshire (summiting the 38th on New Year's Day 2008). I hope to finish on Moosilauke in late summer of 2008. I'm still studying Spanish and Latin. I'm making slow progress on The Tale of Tifa Walbatnuwa Siina, where, with all the footnotes and research, it sometimes takes a half hour to write a sentence of the main story. I'm saving up vacation days for a through hike of the Long Trail in 2009.
On the 31st of August both my sons, my brother Geoff, and several members of Rocks on Top accompanied me as I summited Mt. Moosilauke, bagging the 48th New Hampshire 4000 footer.
No other resolutions were fulfilled, but I continue to play chess, study Latin, and work on The Tale of Tifa Walbatnuwa Siina.
It looks like the Long Trail through-hike is going to happen this year.
From 28 June to 24 July of 2009 I hiked the Long Trail from end to end, starting in Massachusetts and ending in Quebec. My Trail Journals and pictures are online.
No other resolutions were fulfilled, but I continue to make progress on some of them.
You can go to my homepage or mail me.