Huh, It's Late December...

It's that time of limbo where the Christmas rush is suddenly over, you're still on winter vacation, it's not the New Year yet, but you feel like you're about ready to leave the current one behind. Or maybe not. I wind up considering by New Year's goals and figuring out what I want to do next year.

Of course surviving college is on that list, since I'm taking 19 credit hour next semester and then transferring to a four-year university in the fall, and that goal is probably going to stay on the list until I'm out of college, in which case it'll probably be changed to finding/keeping a job or something.

I've got a few Italian goals, little things to count as milestones: finishing up my current Italian course, achieving a B2 level of fluency, finishing the entire Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in Italian, writing a short story in Italian (that last I feel would signal to myself that I have a reasonable mastery of the language that I can construct a thousand words or so of comprehensible script, which in my opinion is an accomplishment). I'd like to start a new language as well, maybe Swahili or something, but those Italian goals come first.

Also linguistically related, I'm sort of putting my created language, Ganyi, on hold. It doesn't appear I'll have too much time to devote to it, and I didn't even complete my goal for it this year (yes, I technically have a few days left to work on it, but I have plenty of other things to do at this point as well, like catching up on my Italian work). So for now it gets the goal of adding at least 100 words to the language and we'll just sort of go for a slow but steady pace of improving the vocabulary, which is largely what it needs at this point. I can't just randomly assign words though, I want to have my etymologies straight and common roots and all of that jazz, so it's not as simple as just any little algorithm to work it out.

Piano playing makes the list, in the spirit that I don't want to drop it. I want to improve my jazz and blues playing skills (I'm not adding a great quantifier to that, no, but as my jazz and blues skills are currently non-existent, I'll know when they're actually there, and that means they've improved. I'd also like to work up at least ten pieces to, well, I guess performance level, even though I don't expect to perform them. Maybe offertory or something at church.

What else... I would like to blog somewhat regularly, maybe weekly with a few excepted weeks. Maybe I'll shoot for twice monthly. Also a little fitness goal, and something fun like memorizing "Fox in Socks," and then something NaNoWriMo-esque: I want to participate in either one of the Camp NaNoWriMos (I'm thinking June) or else the original flavor of NaNoWriMo, in November. It is not on my list to do both a Camp NaNo and the regular one, since I doubt I'll want to try a NaNo challenge in November when I'm away from home. August is when school starts and I'll be moving and such then, so I'm thinking ideally we'll go for June, when school is out but there's not usually a whole lot else.


So that's about my plan for the next year. We'll see how it holds up under stress. It's not that I care much about planning the whole thing out, but the lists I make up are sort of reminders of things I'd like to accomplish, things I want to perpetuate, an organizing exercise, of sorts. So, yeah. I'm off to enjoy my time of limbo!