Since this is a relatively new blog, I don’t have a lot to share in terms of New Years content. In my family we didn’t spend a lot of time with resolutions for the New Year, because generally we didn’t spend a lot of time making good on them, and like most people, if we did within about two weeks those resolutions would go by the wayside.

• Clean the house. Ha, that’s a good one. My parents (and then myself and my brother by extension) were pack rats of the highest order. When it came time to clean out the house to sell it in ’92 my brother and I rented a small dumpster (10 yard I think it was called) and filled it within the first several hours. It was at that point we started to get serious and understood how much of a job we had ahead of us. In came the 40 yard dumpsters and I think over the course of 10 days we filled 4 of them with stuff that in many cases shouldn’t have been pitched, but our time was running out for the new owners to come in. Even then, we ended up leaving practically an entire basement of antiques to the new people. It was just too much. This house is smaller in terms of number of rooms, and volume, but with my wife being 75 this year and me 15 years behind, we need to get serious and busy about paring down what we have here, before we need those dumpsters again.
• Make a will. We’ve tried multiple times to do this, but each time we ran into roadblocks. Since both of us are older, and my wife didn’t have siblings and mine are either estranged or distantly related, we’re a bit stumped what to do with our collective estates. Going the cousins route is difficult, since mine are on average at least 10 years my senior, and I don’t have what one might call familiarity with their descendants. Probably in the end it will be distributed amongst various charities, since leaving it to the state would be stupid. Even so, this one needs to be done before some sort of issue befalls us and either she or I end up fighting with the state government over money that they have no right to.
• Be healthier. Like many people, with the advent of the New Year, it’s time to look at the waistline and think “ugh”. I’ve started using a new app called Yazio, and it works in a sort of clunky manner to help me keep track of my eating habits, as well as interact with my Apple watch to translate my steps into calories burned. Being able to see what I normally eat has been a bit of an eye opener, so I can get a handle on better eating habits, and better food intake to manage my diabetes, rather than just taking my blood sugar, rolling the dice and hoping for the best.

I dunno, that seems like a good start. Over the course of the year, I’ll be revisiting this, to see how I’m doing. Happy New Year from Oleo Acres.