Mike ArsenaultIt’s been so long since the last time that I blogged that this is essentially a do-over. My name is Mike Arsenault, how do you do?

The last few years have been crazy. Lisa and I have both switched jobs since the last time I was regularly blogging. I am splitting my time between Red River College and Naida Communications and Lisa is in a new role at CanadaDrugs.com which is keeping her quite busy. Things have stabilized to the point where it makes sense for me to devote a small amount of time to writing again. I got so busy for awhile there that I had thrown all of my hobbies under the bus. All I pretty much did was work and spend time with family. With that came the inevitable weight gain and health degradation inherent in working crazy hours and doing jack squat for exercise.

So now it’s 2011 and I want to try and undo some of the damage I’ve done to myself, and to find a better balance in my life between all of these competing priorities. Here are the over-arching goals I want to pursue this year:

  • to learn more
  • to lose the weight I put on while pursuing my current jobs
  • to spend more time on hobbies and fun stuff (including writing and gaming)
  • to spend better time with my family and friends

To those ends, I made a plan to put everything into motion:

  1. I resurrected my blog, and tied in all of the various social media hooks that I am involved with. I don’t do too much in the way of updating for things like Facebook and whatnot, but I find services like these very handy for keeping in touch. My goal for this blog will be to just talk about things going on in my life and to do the occasional angry review about whatever I am obsessing over at the moment. Nothing too heavy, just enough to stretch my writing muscles and hopefully have a little fun in the process.
  2. I resurrected my XOSoftware domain. This will be where I write about nerdy tech things that my normal friends won’t care about, but it will also be my focal point for learning new things. I really like WordPress, so I will be teaching myself how to make WordPress Plugins. I will also be learning a bunch of stuff about SEO and Ruby on Rails this year, so what better way to chronicle the learnination than blogging as it happens? When I have working plugins to share, I will use XO as my distribution mechanism. And when I have to vent about Sharepoint, those rants will go on the XO site rather than here.
  3. I resurrected one of the first domains I ever owned, HeinousBrains. This is the one I will use to foster my various nerdly hobbies. So talk about gaming, creating my own games and game worlds (4th Ed D&D I am looking at you) and exploring various other nerdy topics will all go there.
  4. I re-joined the YMCA. Having access to a gym on the weekends and in the evenings when I have the time to do it makes sense, and it was the linchpin of my successful weight loss attempt in 2008.  I have access to a gym here on campus for free, but depending on my schedule I can’t always take advantage of it. My thought is that I should be taking advantage of it way more as it is so time-efficient, so the sub-goal here is to kick my own ass into using the facilities more.
  5. I created a Tumblr blog to track my weight-loss efforts. A lot of people who go through this process will tell you that making your journey public is a great way to keep yourself accountable. My thought in using Tumblr is that a) it’s something new to learn and master and b) it keeps that part of my life organized and outside of this main site so that I can really focus on what I am doing weight-loss wise. Tumblr is super-easy to update (even more so than WordPress, sorry guys) and I thought this would help me actually update it every day.
  6. I’ve pared down my list of friends and associates to a level where I feel I can maintain those relationships without over-extending myself. My family comes first, but for people outside of my family, I thought really hard about who I wanted to keep as friends. The goal now is to make regular time available for those friends. It won’t be huge amounts, but I think the people I’ve picked will get it, as they are busy people too.

I am feeling pretty confident about how this is all mapped out, and I am certainly open to ideas and changes as they come up or become necessary. More soon!