And in with the New

Yes, the fabulous New Year's Day has come upon us, to be celebrated this evening with a bottle of champagne that we forgot to open, and a dinner featuring half of a turkey-breast that I slow-cooked in our very small slow cooker.  Perhaps I should have added the champagne to the turkey, though it did not lack for good taste and an abundance of moistness, which rates five stars in my book.

  It was very quiet here last night at midnight, but it often is very quiet here, so I don't take it to mean that we are not looking forward to a new year, and particularly looking forward to a new decade that might have more cheer in it than the last one did.  Of course, the last had lots of cheer: think of all the babies born, the college graduations, the first drivers licenses, weddings, terrific vacations, and all that personal stuff, but of course I was thinking more of the public setting and the trials therein (and for some people--john Yoo, we're thinking of you--the lack of trials therein).

On that front, I suppose we could all sit down and resolve to have a better public life this next year, but I don't exactly know how we would achieve that.  "I resolve that more people will not only think about the things that I think about, but will think about them in the same way and come to the same conclusions that I come to."  Nice, maybe even Utopian, or maybe just plain silly.  We live, we disagree, and nothing I can resolve, no regimen I can pursue, is going to change that.

Making successful new year resolutions perhaps requires that they be exquisitely and exclusively personal.  Then, if you don't do your own part (the only part there is), it is clear where there has been something lacking. 
My own commitment in this respect has been with exercise.  In the spring and summer, gardening can pass for exercise--often actually really truly is exercise, and I end some hours exhausted--and there are enough pleasant days that walking is regularly and easily available to me still if I want a little more feeling of doing something south of my neck.  In the winter, even in the late fall, not so much.  The garden doesn't need me, and the rain discourages me, and the gray days make me think it's already evening and too late for walking.  Not to mention the fact that it's so dark in the morning that 10 a.m. seems an extremely early start.

However, for the new year, I took it in my mind to return to an earlier enthusiasm for riding a stationary bicycle.  I'm not entirely sure that I could successfully, which is to say safely, ride any other kind of bike any longer.  Once in my mind, though, I took to actually doing it.  I started cautiously at ten minutes.  Boring but successful.  Then, each day (with the help of the CBC) the past ten days (with Christmas Day off for good behavior), I added a minute, and by yesterday, I was up to 20 minutes.

At this rate, and if the gardening chores in spring don't take me off my glide path, by next Christmas, I will be able to ride my stationary bicycle for almost six hours every day.  Well, it's something to think about, although perhaps not to aspire to.