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What Are You Doing Today?

I'm going to do what I used to do only after donning boots, coat and scarf for a windy and sometimes snowy walk a few blocks north from my old stomping grounds in NYC to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for their Chistmas Eve music and mass, but nowadays from the comfort of my couch with a cuppa tea in hand. Plenty of snow outside but I'm happy to view it from in here. Anyway they livestream the event now from their website and on YouTube starting at 10:30pm. Happy Christmas to all celebrating!
 
Whatever you celebrate, I hope your holidays are full of love, fun surprises and special memories!
🎄
✨
😍
.

morris_the_labrador_1734242038.jpg
 
SouprMatt said:
It’s just a few hours from 2025 here, and I know for some members, it’s already 2025. Happy New Year to all. As for New Year’s resolutions? I found some inspiration from comic strip character Nancy…

View attachment 1823
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Run 900 km, increase my max pushups to 100, publish 15 papers, but most importantly keep saying NO to extra work😀
 
Hrafn said:
Only four impossible tasks makes it seem like you aren’t even trying…
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yeah just for January I have have about 5 tasks I should have said no to😀 But that's 2024's sin.😀

Pumbaa said:
Need a 5x5 matrix. Play New Year’s Resolutions Bingo!
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I listened to this audiobook called Atomic Habits. It's nothing I didn't use instinctively etc, but it's a good summary of how to develop good habits and kick bad ones:
1. Make good habits intuitive
2. Easy/accessible
3. Rewarding
4. Stack 'em (combine one healthy habit with others)
and do the opposite for bad ones. Like moving all the alcohol/unhealthy food to the basement, remove the TV from the living room, etc.


It all boils down to a plan that is feasible and harnesses a habit that is already in place [habit stacking].
For running, it will be relatively easy, because I already run 3-4x a week already (wed, sat, sun and on the occasional friday). I just have to add 5 minutes to my current plan. The true hope is to be able to run a sub 21-min 5K. The net gain is to perhaps increase my audiobook listening to 30 books next year.

For the papers, it's sorta cheating because I have about 5 under review already, and will be submitting 5 more in the next 3 months. So I only have to worry about coming up with that extra 5. The true hope is to get ready to submit my promotion packet in 2026. I also have 2 "capstone" projects that I need to do to prove the stuff I want to (we can design and do clinical trials differently).

That said, I'm much less confident about pushups, here the true hope is set as the goal, which is probably not the right way. I do do 50-60 pushups whenever I feel like it in the morning, but for the past 5 years, this extra minute of exercise is pushed aside by having to get the kids ready for school and then rushing to clinic. The better way to do it probably is to set a goal of doing 10,000 pushups and the performance would come with it.

At the end of the day, none of these matter. 2024 was lucky, we didn't have major family setbacks, no disasters, the kids were developing and growing as expected. Those things will always override goals with primary self-entertainment value.
 
Today I opened email from a pal in sunny Cal and this popped out. From the spelling I suspect its source is European but hey, the picture looks right.
​
yep time's a wastin'.jpg​
Meanwhile on this side of the USA someone suddenly turned the snow machine on, so I'm getting up to look out from the deck every half hour to see if it's time to shovel the path to the driveways again.

No wonder the wizards of political correctness changed the name from "global warming" to "climate change". The latter term's still right though: we just had our erstwhile January thaw in December.

Happy New Year everyone! We each have try to make a good 2025.
 
We beat Astro Bot today with the Girls. It's definitely the best of the best games I've played. They borrowed the best elements from Rayman, and they took it to the next level.
 
lizkat said:
Jason Carter's eulogy made me laugh, and then made me cry.

www.pbs.org

WATCH: Jason Carter honors his grandfather Jimmy Carter's life, legacy in eulogy

"Love is what taught him and told him to preach the power of human rights, not just for some people, but for all people,” Jason Carter said.
www.pbs.org www.pbs.org
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Brilliant, wonderful, - some very well made points - heart-warming and ultimately up-lifting.

Thanks for sharing this.

I have always liked, admired, and respected Mr Carter.
 
I don't have the patience to suffer fools gladly, but I do have the patience to sit down with our Christmas tree and totally unstring it.

You see, first one section of lights went out, and then later another, leaving dark sections of the pre-lit tree. My wife's suggestion was to throw a couple of strings of regular lights on there, but our basement is a mess thanks to recent remodeling work, and I really didn't want to dig through everything hoping to find random strands of lights. The other possibility was to use one of those light-keeper guns, but my success with them has been hit-and-miss, and they certainly don't help when you can see that all of the bulbs on one string are blackened from being blown out.

So my solution, the tree being in otherwise good shape, is to sit down and unwire the entire thing. Which turned out to be something of a job, as all the pre-lit strands are wound here and there and everywhere around all kinds of branches. But I do have the patience for that sort of thing. (It's also the reason I'm good at helping the grandkids with Lego sets.) For the last couple of days I've spent an hour or two each day unwinding and/or cutting the light strings. It's fairly mindless work, and that makes it good therapy as well.

Next year I'm going back to lighting the tree with my own lights. I love the stuff Target carries, which includes red-white-and-green sets, larger globe lights, and even some lights that look like holly berries (complete with leaves). They give the tree a very unique look...and are a hell of a lot easier to take down and replace, as well!
 
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