New Year’s Resolutions
- Beat .50/1 at Party
- Track my finances
- Make nutritional adjustments
So the first one is poker, the second is personal and the third is partially swimming related.
Beating .50/1 at Party should be easy by the end of the year. If I am not beating it by the end of the year, I will probably quit playing ring games online. If I am not beating the easiest game on the net after 18 months of working on my game, I really shouldn’t consider playing poker anything but entertainment. And entertainment can be had in the form of tournaments where I have absolute control of the amount of the loss. A $10/$1 sit-n-go is cheaper than just about any form of entertainment I partake in short of payperview movies. It is certainly cheaper than dinner or the going to the movies.
Finanacial tracking. This really is a no brainer that I have been putting off for all too long. I know that I am net positive, but thats about it. We have no credit card debt, both cars are paid off and the house is worth more than the loans. But I have no idea if my net worth is $5 or $100k or even $500k. Thats not the really important thing. I have no idea where all our money goes and that really bothers me. I should now have 12 months history in this house and everyone working normally. If I had kept track of everything over the last year, I would have a really good idea what our income went to last year and I could make a good prediction as too what it will be going toward next year. Yet I have no idea.
I started working on Quicken this morning. It crashed trying to get an update from the bank. No problem Quicken, I have Money on the box too. Money works, but I started to realize how massive our combined accounts are. Not counting business accounts, I have come up with 11 major accounts that we need to track. And the credit cards need to be tracked at the itemized level and categorized. Charged meals should be put into the budget now that we go out like normal people again, but $5k in flooring needs to be put off into a one time charge. Does Money suck all this info out of my account for the last year and reconcile it against my other accounts? Hell no. I have 30 days of credit card transactions automatically, and Money has no idea how the credit card gets paid off. And I doubt any of this information is directly useful to the budget. Money is going to guess that I need to make a huge payment to my credit card each money, but instead the credit card needs to be treated just like my checking account.
So I need to decide how I am going to track my expenses. If I am going to delete my Money online links and just do everything manually. Money certainly doesn’t like that idea. Or do I do everything with pen and paper? Excel spreadsheet? I need to decide soon, and just start doing it. More than likely, I will be reposting this section next year.
Nutrition I couldn’t think of a better way to put it, without writting a book for my resolution list. This will affect Brook greatly, so I might be in trouble on this resolution being successful. Let me point out that our breakfast and lunches are 100% separate. The only time there is any discussion about lunch is if we both might want to take the same left overs. I usually leave the house before Brook even starts making her breakfast, which is good. We don’t work well together in the kitchen.
I need to increase my caloric intake during breakfast. This will be difficult for two reasons. I hate most breakfast foods and who has time for a large breakfast. Swimming is in the morning, and energy is needed for the first half of the day, thus breakfast should be a large meal. So I need to find a list of breakfasts that can be prepared in advance, provide an abundance of calories, are easily reheated and that I will enjoy eating. This is a major stumbling block, and I have yet to succeed for more than a week finding something that meets these requirements. I need a new calendar, so maybe a trip to the book store is in order and I can find a breakfast cookbook to expand my knowledge.
Lunch is pretty simple. When I eat out, I am in good shape because I want to keep lunch a high calorie meal. BJ’s pizza and two beers is probably not ideal, but a burrito or a quiznos sub is probably right where I want to be calorie wise. If I can cut out the cookies and pepsi’s, then I am looking at a decent mix of fat, protein and carbs. Not 30-30-40, but enough of a mix that I shouldn’t be seeing a blood sugar spike followed by a crash.
Dinner changes are going to require a family meeting. We eat too late in my opinion. Most people eat dinner and then head off to sleep about 5 hours later. If Brook gets home on time, we eat dinner and then head off to bed an hour to 90 minutes later. Thats not too big a problem. If Brook gets home late, we eat dinner and then go directly to bed or maybe 30 minutes later. Thats a problem. You don’t need to fuel up for sleep.
What I would like to do is disband eating at the same time, and drastically reduce the size of dinner. If I am front loading my calories in breakfast and lunch, which should be ideal based on my periods of energy consumption, then dinner should be rather small, about half the calories as breakfast and lunch. During the summer, when Brook is late four days a week, I will just make dinner and eat when I get home. During the rest of the year, we will just eat at 6:15, and if she is late, she is late. The dinners will be so small, dinner will not be a significant social event anyway. This will put dinner at a more reasonable 2 to 3 hours for me before bed.
The other nutritional change is the elimination of caffine. I am almost done with the last of my espresso beans, and when I am, no more espresso. I finished the pepsi last night. The espresso after workout has needed to go for a while. If I have a really hard workout, then I am left quite dehydrated, which results in a serious headache if I don’t rehydrate. Caffine is a dehydrant, and I really should skip it has such a workout, but if I skip it, then I will be stuck with a caffine headache. I should run out of espresso here in the next couple days.
With this new meal plan, if it all works out, I expect to go out to eat more regularly on the weekends, and probably spend time making meals in advance. I also expect to be shopping for some new dishes in the next couple days. Dinner will probably be served on nice dessert plates in the near future.
As an aside about the plates. We have normal plates, where the outer couple inches is obviously a rim. So when you fill the plate, you fill to the inside edge of that rim. My in-laws bought new dinner plates about a year ago that have a cupped edge. If you fill these plates to the edge, you now have that entire two inches filled as well. And of course, you fill your plate without thinking about it to the edge. It doesn’t look like you are taking any more than normal, but I am guessing that you are taking almost double the food. If I fill one of their new plates, I am not able to go back for seconds and have difficulty finishing. This is greatly upsetting, so now I fill my plate with spaces between everything when I am eatting at their house and when they ask me why I didn’t fill my plate, I can tell them, “Don’t worry, I will be back for seconds.” We eat at their house once or twice a month, and this is a regular occurance. Even after we have told them that the plates are nearly twice what we are used to. Just a word of warning to everyone with force feeding inlaws.