January 1

Tuesday January 1, 2008 8:30 am Lethbridge, Alberta

It is -16 C with a high forecast of -6 C. Sunrise 8:29 Sunset 16:41 Hours of daylight: 8:12

8:30 am

A. Morning Musings

Much to my surprise, I am up and alert.

There is somethng special about the first day of a new year. It is an opportunity to sit back and reflect about a few ways in which one might make the coming year a little bit better than the last year.

The first thing that comes to mind, and not for the first time, is to concentrate on health and fitness. Basically I believe that our diet is good shape in terms of variety and nutrition. But my portion sizes should be smaller. The real area for improvement is exercise. Once again, I generally feel that I am in fairly good shape. We go for regular walks and the fact that I returned from a cross-country ski trip a couple of days ago without any aches and pains the next day is a good sign. Nonetheless I do not have a regular exercise routine. I will try to rectify that with some abdominal exercises and upper body and arm reps with weights.

One of my Christmas gifts was a calendar for 2008 that consists of a set of cards that provide a "Watercolor Lesson-a Day". Perhaps this will be a nice supplement to the book "Watercolor Journeys - Create Your Own Travel Sketchbook" by Richard Schilling. The initial activities are very much like having a coloring book. The picture is already sketched and one is supposed to color it using the palette of 5 basic colors. My first thought is to scan the card for today and then print it on a page of regular size paper. That way I can repeat the activity if I want to.

watercolor

I am still feeling my way into my new format for 2008. My idea at the moment is to have 4 separate web sites. This web site is for my daily journal entries. The intent is provide details about various activities that might all fall under the general heading of Learning.

In addition I plan to have 4 other web sites: one each for Model Trains, Mathematics, Literature and Birds. At the moment I have completed the structure for the Model Trains web site. I do not want to duplicate effort, so when I am working on my Model Trains, the detailed description will be in the web site for that activity, and there will only be brief mention of it on this web site - for example an entry in my Planned Activities for Today table.

Learning Category	Planned Activities for Today	Time
Drawing	Complete Jan 1 calendar watercolor activity	1 hr
Model Trains	Clean mainline track; inspect for trouble spots,; program 6700	1 hr
Literature	Continue reading "The Tender Bar" by Moehringer	1 hr
Technology	Begin "Wikinomics" by Tapscott	1 hr
Technology	Install updates to system	1 hr
Technology	Design structure for Literature web site	1 hr

I have a total of 6 hours of Learning activities identified for today. That may be a bit ambitious as there are other activities such as exercise and a walk, taking down the Christmas tree and cleaning up around the house.

B. Actual Learning Activities

10:00 am

So far, so good. I have my head around the day. The first plus is that I have been sipping a glass of water instead of drinking a couple of cups of coffee while working on this web page. The next step is to engage in an early morning exercise workout.

3:00 PM

I have begun my exercise routine (day 1). Nothing too strenuous: a couple of abs exercises and some barbell lifts. Just a good way to begin the morning. I have also set up the FitDay software to monitor my weight and exercise as I try to bring my weight down. The Christmas season turned out okay in that I only put on about 3 pounds. I am where I was when I first returned from Australia. Now that the special snacking and calorie rich foods are behind me, I hope to focus on getting myself back into shape. The cross-country skiing should be a big help here as well.

I spent about an hour with the model trains, cleaning some mainline track and programming the correct locomotive number (6700) into the decoder. Now I call up loco 6700 and then control it. That part worked fine, but I have lost all of the presets that locomotive 0003 had. Now I have to learn how to program this information into loco 6700.

4:40 PM

I am back from a one hour walk along our "level" route that goes past Nicholas Sheran park. There was no wind, so although the temperature was -8 C and it was beginning to get dark, it really was quite pleasant.