Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2014, my friends! I hope you had a wonderful holiday break, and are as excited about the coming year as I am.

More about that in a moment. First, the picture. I attended a holiday party where I was shown a wine bottle stopper that looked a lot like the entity shown in this photo. I remarked to my son that it reminded me of "The Companion," and he had no idea what I was talking about.

I can think of no more obvious indicator of the decline of civilization.

Oh sure, you can point out that marijuana is now legal, or that Tim Tebow is no longer in the NFL, or that our government is taking away our rights to defend ourselves with large sodas, etc. Oh yes, those are indeed troubling circumstances. But when our young people can't even recognize a parallel between holiday beverage container accessories and immortality-granting electrical clouds, well...I fear that our future looks bleak.

I won't go into a lecture on the deeply spiritual message contained within The Companion's relationship with warp-drive inventor Zephram Cochrane, but I promise that I'll sit down with my son and try to fill in some of these egregious gaps in his education and philosophical development. If there is to be any hope for the future of mankind, then we all need to know exactly what to do if our date wants to see a Clark Gable movie.

Oh how I wish I could've eavesdropped on the meeting where Roddenberry discussed the visual effects for this episode. "Hey, let's make the alien look like a translucent Christmas tree. That'll show the audience that we're not just about lizards and superfluous antennae! And if the effect works, we can use it on Melvin Belli next season!"

But I digress. The point is that it's time to review last year's resolutions and make some shiny new ones for the upcoming year. Let us begin:

First, the review. It turns out that my resolutions were very vague last year. "Become a better athlete." "Be more productive." "Be less fat." "Become a chick magnet." etc. Unfortunately, even though these were broad enough to interpret liberally, the sad fact is that I did not demonstrate tangible progress in any of these areas.

The good news is that I did get my ankle loosened up, which has really helped my running. I may still be slow, but at least it's not as unpleasantly painful as it used to be. There's hope.

And my son found a pretty decent job, and is now making enough money to (almost) support himself. I realize that I can't take credit for this, having obviously failed as a parent if he doesn't even know the difference between Vaal and Landru...but it's still a milestone in my life, and one that makes me happy.

I also made significant progress on my family photo archival project, got my power tower set up, and have made some good progress on planning for some big future events (new car purchase, overseas trip, potential post-retirement activity planning, etc.) Despite the fact that I'm still obese, slow, and single...2013 was really a pretty good year.

But for 2014, I'm going to set some slightly more concrete goals:

• Regain enough flexibility to flat-hand the floor.
• Be able to do ten pullups without stopping.
• Finish the Olympic distance triathlon in 2:45 or better.
• Climb to the top of the wall at the Ridge.
• Do at least one new thing each month of the year.
• Swim 500 miles.
• Finish scanning our family photos.

Of course, I have some other personal and career goals that I won't share in this forum. And there are all the standard generic goals that we all have that remain in place from year to year. (Don't worry, be happy. Be nice to everyone except Commies and Jihadists. Try to remember that sprinters are people, too...and that a few swim workouts should accommodate their odd mutant tendencies, etc.)

I'm looking forward to this year, and I hope you are, too. I'm sure you noticed that my resolutions don't include commitments about a specific level of bloggery, but I do hope to be a little more reliable than I have been lately. Feel free to bug me about it if you notice that I've taken a break, OK?

My next post will feature a trivia quiz where you'll be asked to identify odd foreign words; I'm optimistic that you'll easily get them all. Until then, enjoy the crisp fresh air of 2014, and have a great day!