So I’m making two this year. I held off sharing them because one of them was impacted by the steam sale that’s ending today.

My first resolution: no beer in January, with an option to extend it through the end of March if it has the effect I hope it does on my weight. Basically, doing what workouts I can has allowed me to get to 170 and more or less keep it there, but no lower. I’m not able to bring more activity into my life with a toddler and baby in the house, but I can experiment with my diet, so I’m going to forgo 300+ calories of delicious beer for a while to see if it works. So far the signs are promising. The goal is to get to 165 if I can. If I do on this no beer diet, I’ll assess next steps at that point. If at the end of January it hasn’t worked, back comes the beer 😉

My second resolution has two parts. First,  no buying of videogames until April 1, with 2 exceptions. The first I mentioned – I waited until the end of the Steam sale, and I did buy a bunch of stuff on sale in the first week of January. The second is that I pre-ordered Nuni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch as a Birthday present for myself. Studio Ghibli teaming up with a Japanese game producer to make the jrpg of this generation (maybe…Xenoblade certainly makes a play for the same honor…I’ll draw my own conlusions after I’ve played both) was something I could not resist, nor risk allowing it to go out of print and become ridiculously expensive/out of my reach. The second resolution comes about because my game buying habit has become ridiculous. I have a backlog so long that I could play games all year and not finish all the ones sitting unfinished on my shelf and various hard drives. I’m going to stop buying them for a while, play what I have, and see how things go. The second part of the resolution extends through the whole year: after March, I cannot buy a new game until I have finished one I already have. This year I’m going to try and bring balance to this. We’ll see how it goes.

To help things along, and to make this fun, I’m going to use a trick I learned back when I was trying to quit smoking. I’m going to take the money I would have spent on beer and games and stick it in a jar, then use it to buy something fun for myself or the family once enough has accumulated. I’ve decided that amounts to $30 a week. I haven’t yet decided what I’ll spend the loot on, but I’ll report back here once I have.

Bonus content since I can’t resist hyping Nuni No Kuni – some footage:

Last year around this time I had one of the worst computer failures I’ve ever had, wherein an upgrade process for my server went south and I lost all my database tables, permanently. Some, I had backups for. Others I didn’t, and those included the photo galleries of my son Brady’s first year. None of the photos were lost, but all the comments, photo titles, etc were lost forever. I was so pissed off about this I abandoned Ubuntu and moved everything to other systems; for about a year I hosted everything remotely with site5.com, then when I ran into some limitations with that arrangement, I moved things in house. I also assessed photo hosting software and decided to move over to piwigo instead of sticking with menalto’s gallery, which I had been using for >10 years. I mention all of this because everything is now finally running, and more importantly we’ve been slowly refilling it with content. This includes many of my collections of AGCW photos, and a month’s worth of photos of my new daughter Laura. There’s lots more coming as well. It’s back at its original location, ie www.metamusing.net/gallery.

There’s not much actual video, this is all about the audio. It’s under a minute long. Things really get started at about 35 seconds:

This was the second night this week they showed up. They continually made forays into the yard to try and get at our chickens. I put a headlamp on, grabbed a broom handle, tied my dog Soolin on my waist, then went out to chase them off twice. It worked both times but it didn’t dissuade them from coming back. One of the times I’m pretty sure they didn’t even leave, they just went quiet and skulked around in the high grass and tree line on the verge of my property, this based mostly on Soolin’s reaction. We only caught sight of them once, when my headlamp caught somewhere between 3-5 pairs of eyes looking at us from near my barn. Meanwhile, the idiot chickens’ reaction to this was to burst into agitated clucking and crowing, which only served to further agitate the coyotes.

The video fails to capture them at full throat, but it’s still pretty impressive the racket you can hear. It’s a little intimidating. I wouldn’t say I was afraid, but there’s some primal reaction it caused in me along the lines of ‘caution man, this is not cool.’ I was a little worried for Soolin, mostly if she got off-lead somehow and ran off.

[Edit: update – they Coyotes stopped by 3 times this week – one more time after I posted this]