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Non-electronic goals for 2025

Well, 2024 is rapidly winding down. I set myself a lot of goals this year, and while I didn't achieve all of them I think I achieved most of them (and I still intend to make a little more progress on some of them in the final few days!). I am honestly surprised at how well I did in getting things down and, more so, at how much I actually enjoyed having a list of concrete and achievable goals to keep track of. I think I'm going to try to repeating this approach again next year. In this post I'm going to write out some "non-electronic" goals for 2025. Goals related to computing or radio I'll do in another post separately.

=> 2024-04-19 post wherein I outlined goals for the year | 2024-10-23 post with some progress updates

Back in September I wrote about how my wife and I climbed up a local hill in the middle of the night to get a nice view of the Perseid meteor shower. I am resolving to climb that hill at least one per month every month in 2025. Not so much for the sake of the exercise, which is really pretty modest, although certainly a nice thing to have as part of a routine, but rather as a way of grounding myself more in my immediate physical surroundings. I want to observe the changes throughout the year in the view from up there and the vegetation and bird life on the way up.

=> 2024-09-28 post where I first mentioned the hill

There's a river which runs through the city I live in. It flows into another river, which in turn flows into another one. This third one continues all the way to the sea, some of you will have heard of it, it's one of the longer rivers in Europe. I want to visit at least these two confluences, plus also as many as I can of some others where smaller rivers flow either into "mine" or the one that's in between mine and "the big one". I don't know if I will be able to full explore the entire system, but I think I should be able to put a good sized dent in it. This is more of the "grounding myself in my local environment" angle mentioned above. This goal is a good match with cycling.

Speaking of cycling, I have written before more than once about wanting to do a 100km bike ride, a so-called "metric century". I have been vacillating for years between being sure that this is something I want to do but making too big of a deal out of it in my head, thinking it's too ambitious, that I'm not ready, that I'll "bonk" in the middle of nowhere, or else thinking that it's a stupid vainglorious notion that I'm actually above, the kind of thing that the lycra-carbon-Strava-sugar-gel clowns who I supposedly define my cycling-self in opposition to would get excited about. After my Finnish archipelago tour earlier this year (yes, still not documented here! The shame burns but it's on my list of goals before I go back to work on Jan 6th!) I'm now firmly convinced that I really can do this, that it's not such a huge hurdle after all, so maybe it's time to just get it done so I can stop obsessing over whether or not it's something I can or should do. If I feel bad afterwards it can be a one time thing.

In the earlier days of my phlog it was a bit of a recurring theme that I was moving from one country to another and struggling with the process of paring my material possessions each time down to what could be easily moved. This kept my list of posessions pretty small, by necessity. But I've stayed put for four whole years now, and have no immediate plans to move. Not only that, but when moving here, my future employer actually paid to move all our stuff via truck from Sweden, which had never happened before, so the last move was not even accompanied by much thinning down. I'm feeling the need for a small purge. Nothing ridiculous, things have not gotten really out of hand, but I do tend to accumulate stuff. I have a problem with "rescuing" random electronics I find on the street which I think could feasibly be repaired or stripped for interesting parts or put to use in some kind of interesting project, and then never following up. And I have some film cameras I haven't shot in years; I have one I've never shot because it needed new light seals when I bought it and I've never gotten around to that either. A lot of this stuff could and should be moved on.

Speaking of stuff accumulating, over the past year or maybe two I've been buying cheap used books faster than I've been reading them. I like reading and plan to keep doing it but I don't want to go overboard and make a "thing" of it. I'm not going to set myself a goal of reading X books in 2025 like a lot of folks do, but I am going to make sure that I read at least two books per one that I buy. I am deeply pumped to start reading the works of Arne Næss, and this should provide some motivation to power through the backlog.

Speaking of books, some years back I used to keep a physical pen-and-paper diary, but I fell out of the habit back in, oh, I dunno, 2018 or so. I think I'd like to pick this up again. I'm not sure if it'll stick, and I don't want to force it if I feel like it's taking up more time than it's worth for what I get out of it, but I'd at least like to give it a decent shot.

I think that's it for now!