I noticed Cal Evans had put up a list of goals for the 2008 year.  It got me to thinking about my own, and then I realized pretty much everything on his list is something I’d like to do as well.

• Lose 30 pounds (I’d be fine with losing 10 this year, but close enough!)
• One blog post per week – I tend to do more than that, but occasionally slip for more than 7 days without, so I’ll likely keep on top of that more.  And keep them more focused.  I may end up splitting in to two blogs.  OR migrate WebDevRadio to WordPress and use that as a combined ‘tech’ blog and podcast.
• Write one new article per month – I’d like to write more in-depth how-tos than I do (which right now is almost 0).  Focus will probably be grails or groovy, but I’ve got some PHP ideas I’m working on.  Documenting those would be a good start.
• Another book in 2008.  Funny enough, I did a book in 2007 – well, 2/3rds of one after the publisher reviewed it.  It *may* come out this year, which would be nice.  I have two other ideas I’m putting together, and I have interest from publishers on them.  The issue is time to write, and I’ll work on making that happen.
• A picture a day in 2008.  I don’t think I’ll be doing this one.
• Learn a new language.  I was inspired to try to learn Chinese this year.  I have a tiny bit of the spoken down, but the writing is what I’ll need to concentrate on if I do this.  When I was in China, I couldn’t *read* anything, so trying to look it up in a dictionary was pointless.

A couple others I’d add to the list outside of Cal’s are:

• Get better @ Java – doing this mostly via Groovy, but may focus some on straight Java itself
• Work on business development ideas for current job
• Get Grails open source project(s) out the door before April(!)
• Get through “Getting Things Done” (a bit of irony there) and try to adapt that to my life and work
• Run a marathon.  Considering I don’t run *at all* right now, this might be interesting to pull off.

These aren’t ‘resolutions’, and I won’t beat myself up over these if I don’t hit them all, but having some written goal posts to measure things in a year will be good to have.  If I deviate from these, it’ll probably be because something else better presented itself.

Those of you who’ve known me for awhile have known I’ve a big aversion to vegetables, especially green vegetables. And especially *cooked* vegetables. Lesley has been on me for awhile to get more serious about eating more vegetables. I tried doing V8 for awhile, but as much as I like tomatoes, the beet juice flavor overwhelmed me and I couldn’t take it on a daily basis. I tried doing vegetable drinks from Bolthouse Farms which I did like – the ‘green goodness’ (I think it’s called) is great. But a combination of the cost ($3+ per bottle) and the sugar content (a big bottle would have 2 servings, so that’d be >50 grams of sugar, depending on the drink. If I’m going to get that much sugar, I may as well do it cheaper with little debbie goodness!

Long story somewhat short, I’ve started hitting Sweet Tomatoes, a salad buffet place down the street. Mind you, I’ve only done this for a week, and likely will get sick of it in a bit, but I’m reporting my progress here so far for posterity. In the past 7 days, I’ve been there 4 times, and every time had a big salad chock full of spinach, broccoli, radishes, zucchini, cucumbers, eggs, tomatoes and fat-free dressing. (and those brown crunchy things!). I will be attempting to keep this up for as often as possible – due to meetings constraints here I can’t always get over there in a timely fashion (I’ve walked a couple times too – round trip about .7 miles).

I think the primary reason why I can eat these in the portions that I do is because they are completely raw (washed, at least, but raw). They’re at least palatable, and from what I’m told, generally better than cooked in most cases because nutrients tend to escape during cooking. So, there you have it – finally eating my vegetables.

Those of you who’ve known me for awhile have known I’ve a big aversion to vegetables, especially green vegetables. And especially *cooked* vegetables. Lesley has been on me for awhile to get more serious about eating more vegetables. I tried doing V8 for awhile, but as much as I like tomatoes, the beet juice flavor overwhelmed me and I couldn’t take it on a daily basis. I tried doing vegetable drinks from Bolthouse Farms which I did like – the ‘green goodness’ (I think it’s called) is great. But a combination of the cost ($3+ per bottle) and the sugar content (a big bottle would have 2 servings, so that’d be >50 grams of sugar, depending on the drink. If I’m going to get that much sugar, I may as well do it cheaper with little debbie goodness!

Long story somewhat short, I’ve started hitting Sweet Tomatoes, a salad buffet place down the street. Mind you, I’ve only done this for a week, and likely will get sick of it in a bit, but I’m reporting my progress here so far for posterity. In the past 7 days, I’ve been there 4 times, and every time had a big salad chock full of spinach, broccoli, radishes, zucchini, cucumbers, eggs, tomatoes and fat-free dressing. (and those brown crunchy things!). I will be attempting to keep this up for as often as possible – due to meetings constraints here I can’t always get over there in a timely fashion (I’ve walked a couple times too – round trip about .7 miles).

I think the primary reason why I can eat these in the portions that I do is because they are completely raw (washed, at least, but raw). They’re at least palatable, and from what I’m told, generally better than cooked in most cases because nutrients tend to escape during cooking. So, there you have it – finally eating my vegetables.

Eats today:

• .3 pounds of grapes
• 1 pear
• Chewy peanut butter granola bar (3)
• Vanilla chai tea with soy protein
• Water
• 1 footlong wheat buffalo chicken sub (same as yesterday)
• 1 pack of ‘yogos’
• 2 cups of spaghetti (approx) with newman’s marinara and mozarella cheese
• 1 bowl of ice cream (chocolate!)

Also, I did close to an hour of walking last night – haven’t walked in a long time…

I may keep track of this in ‘nutridiary.com’ instead, which might be better suited for this.  My problem has been, when trying it, that they don’t have most of the foods I eat in their list.