Crabby Night Owl

Hello again. It’s been a while, right… Life, and all that, y’know?

So, if you were following my blog at The Varo Edition, you’ll have noticed it’s no longer there. I had to let the domain names go this year. I hadn’t posted on that blog in toooo long, and the domain fees were better used elsewhere this time around. I’m on a very tight budget right now.

So… I’m still playing the family watch dog, even though I no longer have to worry about my mother. My father is going in for spine surgery on the 14th of this month, and my sister’s status is unchanged since the last time I wrote about her. My dad’s surgery concerns me, in part because I’m still recovering from anesthesia, myself, 10 years after some very minor surgery. I probably won’t be writing much about my sister, since her friends may be reading this, and there are are many things she doesn’t want them to know.

The scoop: I’m working (or course), and I’m back in college. Again. Those of you who remember the old Crabby Night Owl know that I started this blog in the first place as an adult returning to college. This time, I’m taking e-courses, something which I actually find not very pleasant. Sure, I can work from home, but I can’t always chose the times to do all my coursework. Sometimes, life still gets in the way. And I miss the classroom experience, in spite of my self.

I’m also working full time at a job that’s “just a job.” It’s helping to pay the bills, so I’m still there. I’ll likely talk more about it later, if I can get away with talking about it and not be punished by my employer. It’s a customer service job, so I’ve been accumulating stories. Disguising them for retelling will be difficult, but I’ll figure out a way. I deal with some really obnoxious people.

I’ll probably need to ease back into the regular blogging thing, so my next few posts may be spaced rather far apart. But I do plan to become frequent in my postings, here and elsewhere.

So, I’m just rambling here, but it seems appropriate for me to say something about my New Year’s Resolutions for 2011.

The very sad fact is that I haven’t made any. I know it’s un-American, and it may well set me apart from the rest of the Western world, but I stopped making New Year’s resolutions when I stopped giving things up for Lent. That was about the time I had an epic multi-part conversation with Jesus in the school chapel after lunch, much to the irritation of Sister Carmelina.

Yes, for about 2 weeks during my Junior year in high school I spent my lunch period, and quite a bit of Sister Carmelina’s morality class, in the school chapel, discussing with Jesus exactly what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. What, exactly, we decided is between me and Jesus. But, in the end, I changed the channel, shall we say, on the issue of religion.

Oh, but we’re talking about Resolutions. I’ll save the religious talk for an other time.

So, I no longer make New Year’s resolutions. I do, however, delineate a map on my birthday every year. It’s sort of a birthday resolution. My birthday, conveniently, occurs a week before the Gregorian New Year, and the map is a list of things I want to accomplish in the following year.

This year’s map includes–and I’m making this public, so y’all can hold me to it–

• bring my understanding of maths to a second-year college level
• Stop playing at learning a language and actually learn one
• aim my online activities toward earning some money
• choose a subject by the first of March to master, and then expend the resources to become an expert in that subject within 3 years
• other, more personal things involving relationships and reputation.

So, birthday resolutions, rather than New Year’s resolutions. After all, your year starts the day you did. So, what birthday resolutions (or birthday progress maps) have you made for the coming year?