Charity: 2011: 2.1%.  2012: 2.3% is a small but reasonable step up.
Weight:2011: started 370, ended ~380. Not the right direction.  2012: Keeping last year’s 340 goal, which would be on average a bit less than a pound a week. Possible.
Exercise:2011: nothing significant until December’s treadmill acquisition.  2012: goal of 5 hours a week of some kind of decent exercise. Treadmill is definitely helping toward that goal.
Medical: 2011: Dentist, eye doctor taken care of. Still no doctor.  2012: find a doctor, get rid of some cysts.
Romance: 2011: nibbles, no hook-setting.  2012: not really any goals still.
Job: 2011: crazy busy, but good work, good pay raises. 2012: more of the same.
Vacation: 2011: STS-135, Bitches! Also other Florida attractions. 2012: thinking about a few days in NYC or a road trip back home. We’ll see.
Finance: 2011: was a “grind” year, no real milestones. 2012: will pay off car completely, should be about 25-30% of the way to a down payment on a house.
Forums: 2011: upgraded to vb4, no cms. 2012: maybe do the cms thing, or find something else to put on the front page.
Reading : 2011: few issues of sciam/login, lots of audiobooks. 2012: more sciam/login, some ITIL stuff on deck, lots more audiobooks.
Property: 2011: monitor upgrade, treadmill. 2012: nothing planned.
Wine: 2011: good for synthetic corks, couple good reds, couple good whites. 2012: more red, more white, more exploring, more unnatural corks!

Charity: 2010: 2% target, met. 2011 target: 2.5%.
Size: 2010 peak: 372. 2011 goal: stabilize at 340.
Exercise: 2010 goals: abject failure. 2011 goals: just make a dent.
Medical 2010: abject failure. 2011 goal: not that.
Romance 2010: First dates = 2. Second dates = 0. Second dates declined by me: 2. 2011: no goals, I’m not digging myself enough to dig the ladies who dig me.
Job 2010: great. 2011: dark scary things coming, gonna do my best to keep it good though.
Education 2010: nil. 2011: take something! Anything!
Work Travel 2010: Minneapolis in February (solo, which was new). Louisville in the springtime. 2011: no plans.
Vacation travel 2010: Gettysburg, PA. Luray VA, Shenandoah National Park/Skyline Drive. 2011: take a week for myself, go somewhere!
Finance 2010: Student Loans gone (!). Car loan down to ~12k. Positive net worth (w/ retirement included). 2011: car loan sub-4k, positive net worth (w/o retirement/investments), big start on savings for a house.
Forums 2010: bought vb license, upgraded 3.5->3.8. 2011: upgrade to 4.x w/integrated cms for front page. Stretch: update tracker interfaces.
Property 2010: major purchases: PC upgrade, office furniture. 2011 goal: living room furniture that doesn’t suck.
Wines in 2010: lots of reds. Ravenswood Shiraz 2007 was the go-to. Who knows what 2011 will hold?

Anyway, so I’m 30 now. As of turning 30, I hit pretty much the low point in my fitness level, which is fairly scary. I got to the point that walking a mere 2 mile moderately-hilly walk was hard work. My 27-year-old self would be ashamed.

I started exploration of wines in earnest on my 29th birthday, so this seems to be a pretty good point to look back on it and reflect on a year as a wine-drinker. I’m no afficionado yet, but I’ve probably averaged a bottle a week, give or take. I’ve tried various vintages of pinot noir, pinot grigio, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, burgundy, shiraz, chardonnay, champagnes of various styles, port, sherry. I’ve had wine that’s come from Italy and France and Australia, and a lot that’s come from Napa and Sonoma, and some from Virginia. My palate is a bit unrefined, so on some of the more delicate wines (pinot noir, I’m looking at you…) I think I probably miss the point a bit, but I love me a good bold peppery olive-and-berry shiraz, and have found a couple of go-to wines that usually make me pretty happy to be drinking them. I’ve also figured out my hangover threshold and ways to consistently avoid hangovers, which helps a lot. The most expensive bottle I’ve drunk in the last year was in the mid-$20 range, while the cheapest was probably about $6 on a very good sale.

In other fronts, I got the promotion I was hoping for at work. I’m now at the highest level that I can be at without managing other people. I am honestly stretched a little thin, but not being hit with anything I feel like I can’t handle, just maybe more of it than I can do in any given day. My oddball work schedule seems to both help and hurt that … I tend to wake up in the 8:30-9:30 range, take a shower and make it to work around 11, work until sometime between 6 and 9 depending on the day and my state of restfulness, and head home. That means I get about 5 to 6 hours of time when other people are around, and generally between 2 and 5 hours of time in any given day that I’m there solo. Sometimes my job requires interaction with people who’re on normal schedules, and other times the job requires that people stop pestering me, so when I can make it work it’s great, but sometimes I don’t end up getting to the “pick up the phone” part until after 5 when everyone else is gone, so I end up pushing stuff off a day or two (or indefinitely) due to the limited afternoon hours.

So one other problem with the oddball schedule is that it’s a bit self-perpetuating. Like an engine with warped crankshaft, or a washing machine with a brick tossed into it, my sleep and waking schedules are all over the place in unpredictable directions. Some nights I go to sleep at perfectly reasonable times and wake up at similarly reasonable times. Most nights I go to sleep 4 hours after a perfectly reasonable time for when I have to wake up, and end up running in 3 or 4 hours of sleep per night for several consecutive nights. It’s a bad pattern that I need to get in check, and I’m not so good at that.

Thinking about patterns, over the course of me being 29, I went on precisely one date. Part of that may be the scheduling, partly the fitness slide and associated reduced self-esteem. But then, I also realized, from that one date, that there’s such a thing as better off alone, and that it’s probably better to be single and career-focused than dating and focused on personal-life drama. Besides, I’m a guy, my biological clock is basically giving me another 15-20 years to reasonably start a family with the right girl, so I’m probably better getting my own house in order.

Still, it’d be good to have a drinking-buddy, right now the drinking is pretty much a solo affair, which limits my willingness to go too far with it. It perpetually rings in my mind…. drinking alone as the first sign of alcoholism… but as a bachelor with few drinking friends, I tend to find myself in the “go solo or abstain entirely” mode a lot.

I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks lately, as my last couple posts indicated. Got the whole audible “platinum” membership …. $23/mo for two download tokens, which are generally good for a book each. Some cheaper books (the sub-$11.50 ones), if I’m really interested, I just drop cash for, but with a recent “want to buy 3 more credits?” promo I’ve just gotten myself a nice backlog to listen through. I’ve gone through something like 22 full-length books in the 8 months or so I’ve been at it, with and I think the 3 book a month pace is probably going to hold out through the rest of the year and into next. With my lack of a good place to go and nest and read comfortably for hours, the audiobook thing has really picked up my consumption of intellectual material in general — I think in the 10 months before that, I made it through maybe three books, and a decent chunk of that progress was due to the work travel putting me on planes and in hotel rooms. So that’s a fairly positive change. I think this actually puts me at a higher consumption rate than I was at when I was working for CACI and spent 2 hours a day on the metro.

And now that audible’s released their android app (which does dramatically better than the pc version), my new phone has become my primary audio-listening station… meaning I can listen when I’m doing more repetitive/mindless stuff at work or when I’m out walking, which is helpful for both the listening and the walking.

Lots of other free time has been filled with supcom 2, then starcraft 2, then civ5, now back to starcraft 2. I’ve found that I’m an antisocial gamer … the hyper-competitive games in the rts world and the griefers in non-rts games pretty much kill their appeal to me entirely. I played some online Red Dead Redemption, and the only times I had any fun at all involved me playing at unusual times and finding the server I was on somewhere close to deserted. Even a while back when I played rockband and rockband 2 online a bit, it wasn’t really a good time.

On the political front, I think I’ve been slowly evolving further and further away from my parents for a while. My parents are both pretty conservative, and I guess I grew up in a pro-Bush(1), anti-Clinton, Christian-chauvinist household. In high school I read Atlas Shrugged, in early college I read The Fountainhead … I really bought into the libertarian romanticized capitalism ideal for a long time, but I’ve since kind of come to regard Rand’s work as beautiful romantic tableaux of precisely the way the world isn’t. Having watched the hypocrisy of conservatives, seen the true results of free markets run amok, and generally become more aware of the world around me, I’ve gone from a hereditary Christian center-right subscriber to a full-blooded center-left atheist. Which is probably convenient, given that I’m living in a very blue district of a very blue county of a pretty solidly blue state, and really really don’t like the sort of bullshit I’ve seen coming from the republican party as a whole these last couple of years.

Moving back to other less-internal topics, I’ve no longer got student loan debts. As of the 15th, I’ve paid off the student loans in full. I’m paid up on my car through January, which puts me at something like 3 months ahead. No credit card debt, and with the promotion came a comfortable raise that accelerated a lot of my financial goals a bit. At the same time, I’m thinking about pushing back against that by spending some of the newfound income on upgrades to my life as a whole … like new furniture, maybe a treadmill to keep the exercise up through the winter. Still, it’s a damned big milestone having college paid off, and I’m pretty happy to have met that one.

I guess what I’m saying is 29 was a somewhat off-balance year. I made big strides forward in my job, in my finances, in my situation as a whole, made some strides on my personal intellectual development, but pretty handily failed phys-ed and didn’t really join a whole lot of extra-curriculars or do much on the social front. I’m shooting for 30 being a fair amount more steady, with the goal of re-balancing the professional and the personal me. That’s it…. that’s my big-zero-year update.

Other than that, we also noticed squirrels running around the roof, going down our chimney. In short, the whole house was porous. So we got the chimney re-sealed, we did other rodent exclusion work and pretty much got the mouse problem in check. And we went to trim away the tree branches from the side of the house.

And that’s when I noticed it. Much of the thick, vibrant foliage on that dogwood wasn’t dogwood leaves. It was some sort of insane climbing invasive vine that had gotten to the top of the tree and completely established a canopy. It was a mess. And it was wild grape.

Well, tracing the vines back to a root location, I chopped them down and did my best to remove them, and I think the tree’s been doing better since losing its aggressive competitor. Hard to tell though, the damage was probably already done. Anyway, I cut back the vine and left it at that.

Well, fast forward a couple months, through the winter and into today, and I was out in that area raking up some dead leaves, pulling some ivy vines, etc, and one apparent vine was buried a bit better than the normal ivy runners. Pulling on it revealed a bigger thing that looked exactly like the above-ground grape vines. And more pulling and digging and following had me pulling out probably in the neighborhood of 30 foot long vines from just under the surface of the ground, snaked out into the lawn, running along the house … just everywhere. It was really phenomenal. I filled one of those kraft paper yard waste bags with ivy vines, late-fallen leaves and rogue wild grape roots, and I know for sure I didn’t get all of them either from that vine head, or from that part of the yard.

So let that be a lesson to anyone who’s paying attention. Wild grape is insane. Kill it. Kill it fast. Kill it with fire, if you can. Because if you don’t kill it, it’ll kill your trees, it’ll kill your grass, it’ll take over your whole damned yard from both above and below with a virulence and implacability that trumps even ivy.

That’s all.

Flights were direct on USAirways/republic, out was on an embraer erj170, which is pretty good for seat space but not great for legroom. Return was on an erj145 (the 2-1 seat layout). Tiny seats and I couldn’t even pretend to stand up in the aisle, which had a clearance of maybe 5 foot 8, so I was practically crawling in it. Not something I intend to aim for…. I’ll stick to the 2-2′s in the future if I can.

Louisville itself was uneventful — we spent a lot of time onsite, and went to Buck Head’s again for one dinner (it was pretty good). Watched some curling. Really, not much to say there.

Right now I’m in Minneapolis. This is the first solo business trip I’ve taken, so I guess that’s a bit of a milestone. I’m on this trip to install a dev server on the site here, so it should be pretty easy.

Flying in out and back are all southwest, via midway. I was initially uneasy about flying Southwest, because of the no-assigned-seating thing (fearing a long line-up and a big free-for-all scrum), because of the whole we-only-fly-737s thing (they spec out as having some of the smallest seats in US airframes), and because of the very recent, very salient, very relevant-feeling Kevin Smith “too fat to fly” episode. I’ve been sort of yo-yoing in the 350-360 range pretty much since the days got short… something like seasonal depression or something I guess.

Well, it turns out that so far, so good. You do online check-in on southwest, and get into it fairly early, and you end up in the A group and find a place to sit. Flying in the middle of the week, middle of the day, seemed like both flights so far were running between 1/2 and 2/3 full, so all the middle seats were open, and while the seats are certainly no 777 seats, they’re also not as bulky as big modern seats, so the seats themselves don’t take as much space as the seats on a lot of other planes. I was actually, just barely, comfortable on both the trip from IAD to Midway and from Midway to MSP. Nobody gave me crap about being big, and with the open space I could pretty easily spread out after takeoff. So that was cool, I guess.

Anyway, so now I’m chillin in a Fairfield literally across the parking lot from Mall of America. I wandered around there tonight to find food (ended up just grabbing a slice at Sbarro). Mall of America is almost surreal … it’s definitely pretty huge, but other than the massive surplus of materialism, the most striking thing I noticed was the food courts. Every one of the standard-issue mall type food court spots was waving samples at everyone walking by. It’s such a buyer’s market getting cheap food on a weeknight, you could hit the two courts sampling and leave full without spending a dime. It’s also kind of a trip how they have like 3 or 4 roller coasters (including one that looks pretty goddamned intense) right in the middle of the mall, where most malls put the food court. To say nothing of the store with the 9 foot tall vases. I wish I had brought my camera on this trip.

Oh, also, Minneapolis in February…. not really a good idea. Just saying. It’s pretty bitter now that I’m acclimated to the mild winters of temperate Maryland.

Right, so … tomorrow onsite, then tomorrow night red-eyeing it back to dulles (again via midway). Might follow up the post, might not.