Progress Report: New Years' Resolutions

One month of 2011 down, eleven more to go. 1/12 of the year is finito, over, kaput, spent, yesterday's news. But you all knew that already, didn't you?

I'm not one who likes to be a sheep; I don't follow the crowd automatically, do what everybody else is doing while they're doing it. If my friends decide to blog about their New Year's Resolutions, I think, "Hey, just because they want to let the world know about their goals for 2011 doesn't mean I have to." No sir. I'm more likely to be the one who says, "Wait for me, fellow sheep! I'm coming, just wait up!" I, more often than not, follow the crowd on my own terms.

With that said, here are the resolutions that I have made for myself this year:...

• No sweets for the month of January.
  
  • This means no cakes, pies, candy, cookies, or ice-cream (except for the home-made non-sugary kind).
• Draw in my Donald Duck notebook and write something everyday.
• Doodles, poetry, short-story ideas, movie reviews, sketches, just anything creative that involves a pen/pencil.
• Finish Toastmaster Speeches 8, 9, and 10
  
• In my basic "Competent Communicator" manual

...and here is how well I've been keeping to them:

• No sweets for the month of January.
  
  • I almost kept this resolution for the whole month, until the Toastmaster's Officer Training event in Boca Raton on Jan. 25th. Those darn Danish pastries! Ah well. This was just an exercise to test my will-power, and now that January is over I think I passed my self-inflicted test of endurance quite well.
• Draw in my Donald Duck notebook and write something everyday.

• Alas, this resolution I haven't kept as well as I wanted to. There have been days where I did not draw a single smiley-face or write a single sentence, but I can say with confidence that the days that I did do something creative outweigh those days that I didn't. Check out the drawings I did this month on my Art Blog here
• Finish Toastmaster Speeches 8, 9, and 10.
  
• I didn't deliver any speeches this month, but that's okay, because this resolution is for 6 months, until June 31st. I'm going for 3 speeches in 6 months, 5 months now, so I've still got plenty of time. In other news, our club is having a couple of contests in the coming weeks, which I'm helping to organize.

Now that January's over, I think it would be a good idea to renew my resolutions with some all-new goals that I'll be more likely to keep this year:

• Deliver my 8th speech this month and blog about it afterwards.
• Write reviews for movies I watch in February and put them up as blog-posts
• Put at least 10 new drawings up on my Art Blog
• Read 3 new books and review those on my blog
• Blog, blog, blog!!!

This month, my goals are all about blogging. I think that if I can write online more often about the things I'm interested in and what I'm doing during this period in time, the better I'll be for it. At the very least I want to break my blogging record for last year (in Feb. 2010, only 1 post did I write).

See you later!