What’s the equivalent of humbug for a greeting of Happy New Year? Can the Grinch dress up with party hat and non-alcoholic bubbly to try to ruin the celebrations of New Year’s Eve? Or is it sufficient to see the bleary-eyed celebrants on January 1st trying to adjust to a day of football games and heady resolutions that are expected to make life in these next twelve months better than the previous?
It’s been some time since Maggie and I made it all the way to midnight to see the ball drop and kiss in the new year. We used to celebrate at my sister-in-law’s, and the explosions of Auld Lang Sine on the TV triggered toasts of various sparkling beverages and the wild clanging of pots and pans as the girls charged out into the frigid night to announce the new epic to anyone who might have nodded off. Bring in the new with a little disturbance of the peace and pointed disregard for the neighbors.
But while I have always been a bit of a reprobate when it comes to New Year festivities (I always stared in vague horror at the crowds massed into Times Square), I do see January 1st as a convenient point to stop and assess my life and see what corrections or adjustment might be called for. I have always been a big fan of New Years resolutions, and over the past decade or so, I’ve taken to writing them down and even posting them at my desk as reminders. Then, on December 31st, I pull out this list and give myself a critical evaluation for each resolution of a scale of 1-10. Hey, it’s what happens when you spend 45 years of your life as an engineer.
This year I added an additional twist. I pulled out the old resolutions from the previous three years and compared them to this year’s results. This works because I often make the same resolutions each year, just trying different approaches to achieve that final score of 10. Entering retirement in January 2024 had a telling impact on 5 of my standard resolutions:
| Resolution | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
| Old Writing Projects | 3 | 1 | 10 | 9 |
| New Writing Projects | 4 | 4 | 10 | 10 |
| Home Projects | 2 | 4 | 6 | 5 |
| Reading | 1 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Activities | 8 | 10 | 3 | 4 |
| Overall Average | 4.9 | 5.4 | 6.1 | 6.6 |
(I only scored an 8 on Reading for 2023 because Adella forced me into consuming the entire series of Game of Thrones that year.) Of course, the biggest change is on writing projects, and most particularly on tackling and promoting the older works. Yes, the additional time available from retirement had a huge impact here – even more than I hoped – but I need to give the majority of the credit to Barbara for the encouragement, the assistance, and the technical expertise that really pushed forward both old and new works. We appear to have created a small but interested following, and we need to see if we can expand that following in 2026.
It is also significant to observe the marked drop in the Activities category in 2024. This came as an unexpected surprise, and there are a range of reasons for it, not the least of which being a slight change in definition following retirement. But one undeniable contributor was that I entered my 70s in 2024, and I’ve settled into a comfortable routine around the house (and writing and activities tend to be in inverse proportion to each other). Yes, that’s all part of a well-earned retirement, but it is also a warning, a sign of decline which the tracking of these resolutions was specifically designed to catch. I fully expected to see the improvement in the writing projects; I was mildly shocked to see the decline in activities.
So, what’s to be done? Simple. I make a New Year’s Resolution for 2026 and see what rating I assign on December 31st.
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