Late Resolution, New Skills & A Game of Tag

So I knew that I wanted to write a post about new year’s resolutions, but with a new baby somehow time just seems to disappear. Lucky for me I am stealing this few minutes as my three “birds” are occupied. One is asleep, one is watching spongebob and one is cleaning.

I normally don’t make new year’s resolutions just because I typically lack the will power to keep them going. But this I thought I would make a small resolution and take small steps to achieve my goals. My resolution is to learn 10 new skills this year. I figure that is achievable. I want to learn 10 new things and be proficient at them. I am on a self sufficient/survivalist kick so I figured most of my skills would focus on those type of skills. So I am currently learning to tie knots, I know it sounds like I am trying to be a boy scout, but I figured learning 5 basic knots would come in handy for everything from camping to tying down the kayaks. I would say that I am proficient at 3 of the 5 I want to learn now so I still have some work to do. After knots, I think I am going to work on fire starting using a variety of methods, then who knows what else maybe some axemanship for felling trees and splitting my firewood more efficiently. I know, I know its pretty boring stuff, but who knows it may come in handy sometime, right?

The other thing that I wanted to blog about was a game of tag I read about in the news. Apparently this group  of friends have been playing a game of tag for the past 23 years. They started off playing in grade school and with a few tweaks have continued playing throughout life. Apparently one of them is a lawyer or something and they drew up a formal tag contract where they would only play one month of the year, in their case February, and they couldn’t tag the person that just tagged them. So throughout the month of February they have flown across the country, staked each other out and enlisted the help of whoever it took to “tag” someone. It was a really interesting story, in you are interested in the particulars you can find them here. But anyway, after reading that article I thought it was a really fun and interesting way to keep in touch. I sat down and thought about if I could pull that off with a few of my friends. I think it would be possible but it would get way out of hand. I was envisioning suggesting this to the Goof Troop and the Trout Derby Brain Trust. I could see instead of “tagging” someone it would most likely be the old fashioned and crude “tap in the grapes” that usually gets played when they are around. But they are all seriously deranged I could see them hiding under my bed until 2 AM then jumping out and rochambeau (see South Park entry) me. So I am little on the fence about bringing it up, but we will see because it would be epic if we started this game.

So that’s about it. How are you doing with your resolutions? Do you have any interesting ways to keep in touch with your friends?