So a new year comes and with it a new set of resolutions to be broken, or perhaps not. (That’ll be a first, right?! ) I’ve settled on a few resolutions and I thought I’d share. If you’d like to share too, I’ll be happy to point at when you break them, as I’m sure you will for me.

1. Put my health a higher priorities. Since college, I’ve let myself go a bit. I’m teetering on that point of becoming a 200 lbs. I don’t want to go there and I see myself at an ideal weight of around 165. I’m planning on eating better and making exercise a more regular part of my routine. Pilates more times a week.

2. Putting on the seat-belt before driving. I have a bad habit of putting on my seat-belt after I’m already driving my car. Even if it is only just out of my parking lot. Sometimes, it causes difficulty driving and why not just be secured at all times? So that’s one I will definitely try to keep. Yara’s going to help.

3. Be nicer to Yara. That one just speaks for itself.

4. Focus on my work. I need to put a little more concentrated effort in developing my real estate investing. This year, I’d like to do over 12 deals. That would be 1 a month.

5. Work on my golf game. I’d like to play some more and get my score to be less than a 30 handicap by the end of the year. I think this is possible. I guess I’d also like to play a complete game without losing my ball by the end of the year. Those things just love the water I tell you.

6. Manage my finances completely. I really need to get to the point where I can track every penny into and out of the Harry financial universe. It’s gotten a bit sloppy as of late, and needs to be put into shape. As my friend Les Gee says, you have to control your expenses.

Here’s some others that are just fodder for being undone.

Learn Spanish. Improve my Korean. Write more letters. Keep in better contact with my friends. Get my Java certification (something I said I would do a while ago). Get a new car or really fix my current car.

So what are yours?

Happy New Year’s everyone. I hope everyone has a happy new year and with it, plenty of opportunities.

I just had a wonderful Sunday night and I’m pretty much exhausted. Two of our friends came over for dinner and some intense Scrabble playing. Our friend Minal is a vegetarian, so we made an all vegetable meal. This was a little different for me, since I usually make steaks or burgers for my friends. We found two nice recipes on the internet. One for orzo, the other for some mushroom sandwiches. The sandwiches were a real hit. I marinated them in a mustard, rosemary, and oil vinaigrette. That kicked up the flavor. The rosemary came fresh from the garden. The orzo was colored up with some roasted red peppers. We added those to the sandwiches and it was great. I learned that when you want to roast red peppers, you should just put them whole on the grill, then char the outside. Stick the peppers in a paper bag for 15 minutes to make the skin literally steam off. The skin is kinda tough when you finally get it off, but the steaming really helps. The sandwiches were totally awesome once we finally bit into them. Even Yara ate most of hers. Minal brought some delicious brownies over, then we cracked our knuckles and sharpened our wits for Scrabble.

It was a tough match. Matt is an English grad student and works for a newspaper, so he sees a lot of words in a day. Minal and Yara are med students. I went to Vandy. Yara led early in the match with a masterful use of the triple word score. Minal then used a Y and an E on a triple letter score to produce some 28 points. Matt never really got going, except very early with his word, “Fiasco”. I managed to pull into the lead with “Zen” played off of Yara’s “Zit”. That gave me a ridiculous 36 points with a triple word score. I then finished them off by playing an X (8 points) on a triple letter score. I ended up winning with Minal in 2nd, Yara just behind, and Matt still challenging “GAR”. (Turns out it is a fish!) Minal showed me that QAT is a word, it’s a plant common in Arabian countries. Maybe Qatar is named after it.

It was a fun night and we had a really good time playing and talking about lots of things. Matt and I will probably hang together some more since I found that he loves playing video games. He saw my Gamecube and Dreamcast and was pretty excited. I hope to whoop up on him in Soul Calibur. But for now, I must rest… much work to do before Christmas. Gotta go buy gifts too!

The other day, I went to the bank to deposit some money and to say hi to my banker. I’m still building that relationship, and I think it’s going well. I step out of the bank, which is in a busy mall like area.

I hear all this honking and screaming going on in the parking lot. I scan the area and I see it is coming from the grocery store. Apparently, a truck is pulling out of the parking lot with a baby carrier on top of the roof!! There are people honking their horns and other people even running after the car waving their arms wildly in the air. I’ve seen something like this before on [I]Jackass[/I], an MTV show. Some of the people catch up to the truck and the driver gets out and grabs the carrier off the roof and brings it into the car. There didn’t seem to be much concern or gratefulness on the driver’s part which confirmed my suspicions that this was just a stunt.

The fact is, every parent I’ve ever seen puts their baby into the car before their groceries. Sure some don’t, but they sure as hell don’t try to lift 15 lbs onto their roof, just to put a few bags in. Most parents I see, buckle their kids in first if anything. Then they tend to the bags. I rarely see anyone even put groceries on their car. These people were just doing this as a prank. To get a rise out of people, just like what happened on the TV show.

It got me thinking. If I were to see this and be in my car and I swerved to stop the car and they struck me, would I be a hero or at fault in a car accident. If someone had a heart attack at seeing such a horrible sight, would the driver be at fault? Could the police arrest the driver for upsetting people like that?

In my opinion, causing a disturbance like that was the same as yelling fire in a movie theater. There was an intent to deceive and the fact that it was for someone’s amusement is in no way an excuse. In fact, it should earn a more severe punishment. I’m all for amusement when people don’t get hurt, but when people are hurt, emotionally, mentally or physically, someone must pay. Sure on [I]Candid Camera[/I], people laugh afterwards, but they border on grounds for a lawsuit too. I’m not a hardass, ask anyone who knows me, but when I see recklessness like I saw in that parking lot, the jovial side of me goes on a long vacation. I just wanted to share my thoughts on a humorless event.

A friend of mine has been dealing with a subject I deal with everyday. I was reading his blog and made a comment, and decided to post it here too. He was talking about fear, but I think of this subject as noise. The text of my comment is below:
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