Preparations

In keeping with the approaching New Year Holiday I would like to present a series of posts. They shall go as follows: Preparations, Reflections, Beginnings. I'm pretty sure this should all be quite self explanatory.

Last year things were very different. I'm not going to go into it so much because that's the next installment, but last year I made myself a "New Years Resolutions" list that I promptly ignored because my situation changed and it no longer felt right.

This year I'm thinking much more about it and want to establish some good goals for myself. I want them to be things that I'll actually be motivated to follow through with. And even more awesomely I want them to be things that will generate self improvement.

I only have a few ideas so far:

Firstly I turn back to my old financial obsession and I intend to pay off one of my student loans. Way back during the college enrollment and preparations my father decided that my having a student loan was a good way to build credit (and also probably a good way to not have them completely hand life to me on a platter). So he had me, rather haphazardly, just sign up for the amount that we qualified for under the AES rules. I've been paying back the minimum required amount for about a year now. And a commonly held school of thought indicates that it is not financially viable to pay off student loans early, because of their favorable terms (ask me if you want to know the full logic), but I'm ignoring that. I figure that I should be able to without much problem at all pay off my 3 loans (one for each year of school) one per year. [bonus I totally found a new awesome blog that gives a link to specific directions for setting up sidebars - yay!].

Secondly I want to log 1000 miles on my bike. Quite simple and straight forward. Shouldn't be a problem given the amounts I was doing by the end of the summer this year.

And that's actually all that I've come up with. I'm trying to think of more awesome things becuase I'm pretty sure those two should be easy. But everything else I think of seems questionable:
Having a goal of the month - would I actually follow through?
Trying to accomplish the larger significant other thing - seems to important of a matter to be trivializing down into a list of goals.
And in general I don't want to list out silly little things like I did last year.

Ah well.