I was pretty unwell for a few days spanning the ’08/’09 switch-a-roo. I was laid up in bed being attended to by my carefully appointed transition team. Special thanks to my nominee for Secretary for Buying Me Soup, whom I won’t name because it occurs to me that I haven’t actually asked her yet if I’m allowed to talk about her on the wild-wild-web. She’ll appreciate being called whom anyway.

So here we are, a week into the year, at the point where most people are already starting to give up on their overly-ambitious resolutions (“Exercise how often?”; “Spend how long with Grandpa?”; “Limit myself to how many class A’s?”) and I haven’t even written any. What’s more, I’m not meta enough to make that a resolution itself (though I’m meta enough to make that joke—go figure).

I’m usually a proponent of starting on changes as soon as you think of them instead of waiting for some arbitrary time to pass. Think of it as starting on November 4 instead of January 20. No sense in lazing about with three cigarettes in one hand and a glazed leg of ham in the other, staring at a calendar and waiting for permission to stick a patch on your arm and step on an Obese-B-Gone™ treadmill.

The trouble is that this year—or rather last year, sorry—I was holding off on making any big attempts at changing anything while I waited for the conclusion of some career wrangling I’m trying. The short version of that story is that I’m trying to move into a new job that I have described as, “Same company, same office, same desk, same team, similar work, and it’s taken over six months to get this far with the switch”. I wanted that whole rigmarole to be over before I picked up and moved on with my life from there. So the plan went.

I had expected that to be reasonably close to wrapping up at the end of the year, but it appears that it’s going to drag on for another bit. I now realize that there’s no reason for it to keep getting in the way of me making plans, so it happens that I find myself here at the start of the year thinking about what I’d like to do with myself in the near future.

Expect news of what transpires.

This year, I’ve gone for something new. I set out to learn Spanish, and—in contrast to the rest of my life up to this point—I’ve actually made some progress. I can tell people I like the cinema, and have one brother, and would like to know how to find the pharmacy. I know the word for beer, and all the numbers up to 1000. Actually, those last two facts might be dangerous in combination.

Of course my real aim is to work into a conversation, “Sólo sé decir esa frase, y esta otra explicandolo” (“I only know that sentence and this other explaining it”).