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I. New Year's Resolutions
It's January 2nd, which means that it is already possible in this fresh and gleaming New Year, to be behind on one's New Year's Resolutions. I love making resolutions, and my first for 2017 is particularly important for readers of this blog.

MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS 2017
1. Blog one hundred times in 2017. (Hence the title of this blog.) Twice a week ought to do it. Also, I will try not to count any one sentence blog+photo entries in the overall total. To increase the likelihood of my completing this resolution, and not even having consulted my wife beforehand, I am hereby declaring that the incentive for completing this resolution will be a new laptop, something smaller, more portable, and with better battery life. Something like a Chromebook, but really probably a Macbook Air. Having said all that, I'll take any and all blogging requests. It can be hard to come up with content, but on the other hand, Owen is learning how to talk...

2. Memorize Hamlet. Partly to have a classic memorized, partly to see if my powers are still as sharp as in my teenage years, and partly because I just love the play. If anyone is aware of staged production in 2017, please let me know, as I would love to watch it live once the project is completed.

3. Memorize 1000 words in French. I'll be keeping an actual physical list on this one, but really it isn't about hitting a total number of words. It's about Vacation 2018, the 10th anniversary trip that we'll be taking some time during the summer of our 11th anniversary. Along those lines, I'm going to start asking now if anyone wants to babysit our (three) kids for a couple weeks while J and I got to Paris.

4. Wegmans-free month. J doesn't have to (and won't) participate in this project, but I want to see if it's even possible to go for an entire month without stepping foot in a Wegmans while living in Rochester, NY. As part of the financial summary I prepare at the end of every month I break down our grocery expenses with a total of how much money we spent at Wegmans and how many trips we made. Last month it was a scant 11 times. It's been as high as 26. It's not that I don't love Wegmans...it's more to see if such a thing can be done.

And how did the 2016 resolutions go?
Pretty well, overall. We hit the savings goal that we set out at the beginning of the year, and I finished all of the books that I put on my To Be Read list. More mixed results came on my resolution to go to bed earlier each night (without my phone)--I was going to bed pretty reasonably for many months of the year, but holiday pops and other busy times pushed bedtime back to midnight or later, and I ended up bringing my phone to bed on many of the nights between Owen breaking my first alarm clock and Owen picking up a second--and also the resolution to mix in some upper body fitness work with my running routine. There were several months when I was really good about coming downstairs at 6 AM and doing down-dogs and push-ups while the coffee brewed. But then, again, holiday pops. So we'll try to pick that back up in 2017. Finally, I did NOT get a website launched for 2016. I did pick away at a couple of the components that I would need for the project, like an updated CV and headshots, but I never got around to making recordings or actually building a site. Putting up a website with my own name on it would be a great idea professionally...but maybe I'll just work on the blog for this year too.

II. Ribbit
Potty-training Owen is going to be a challenge. He's been asking to sit on the froggy potty he got for Christmas, but he doesn't want to actually use it. He wants to grab it around the sides and hop it out of the bathroom shouting "Wibbet! Wibbet!" The child has always been an exhibitionist--nothing makes him happier than running into a room full of surprised people with his little boy bits dangling out. Now he's found a way to combine his instinct for nudity with animal noises, and somehow (in a connection that he understands very vaguely, if at all) some sort of action that involves a candy reward.

III. Pishke
Owen likes to play with my mouthpieces. If I'm practicing trumpet, he wants to hold a spare mouthpiece and sing through it, pretending that he's playing just like Daddy. If I'm up on stage performing with other musicians in an actual concert, he also wants to come up and play "his mouthpiece."
So, I've become a little careless about letting him take one. And yesterday he was walking around the downstairs (without pants) singing into a spare mouthpiece and slobbering on it while I did long tones.
He came back into the library.
"All done! Hooray!" he declared.
"Where's your mouthpiece?"
"All done!"
I checked in the living room. I didn't see it on the floor.
"Owen, can you point to the mouthpiece."
He pointed to the pishke. The pishke is a waist high ceramic jug for spare change (I don't quite understand the origin of the word or the custom) that J's family has handed down to us. Ours is starting to get satisfyingly full of coins. And apparently, a mouthpiece. And, as I discovered when I shone a flashlight down into it, several spoons, a toy car, and a bunch of marbles.

I don't even want to know what he's thrown out in the kitchen trash.

IV. 2016 Reading List
It was a lovely year

Marmion
Romans (Greek)
The Iliad (Greek)
Rabelais
In Dubious Battle
Henry Esmond
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Polikushka
A Tale of Two Cities
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Mark Twain's Autobiography
Tolstoy (A.N. Wilson)
Existentialism Essays
Berkley
Origin of Species
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Spinoza
Rawl's Theory of Justice
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Reconstruction in Philosophy
Lippmann's Preface to Morals
Bringing up Bebe
Decline of the Middle Ages
The Tradition of Courtly Love
Buber I and Thou
Dead Sea Scrolls
To Kill a Mockingbird
Superforecasters
Josephus Jewish War
Christ and Culture
The New Jim Crow
The Responsible Self
This is Your Brain on Sports
Fear and Trembling
Sickness Unto Death
Bhagvad Gita
The Documents of Vatican II
The More of Less
Theogony (Greek)
I Maccabees (Greek)
Out of Africa
Moll Flanders
The Tenth Man
Everyman and Miracle Plays
The Plague Dogs
CS Lewis Oxford History of English Literature
Cousin Pons
Martial Epigrammata (Latin)
A Modern Instance
Autumn Quail
Memoir of Marco Parenti
Islands in the Stream
Pygmalion
The Fellowship of the Ring
Olynthiacs I-III (Greek)
Aristotle Essays
The Two Towers
The Return of the King
Booknotes
Tristan (Strassenberg)
Maurice (Forester)
I-III Phillipics (Greek)
Watership Down
Pride and Prejudice
Pinnochio
Amusing Ourselves to Death
The Three Musketeers
Lorna Doone
The Metaphysical Club
Tortilla Flat
Cannery Row
Point Counterpoint
The Will to Believe
Luke (Latin)
Burke Reflections on the Revolution
A Nation of Immigrants
Barfield Unheavenly City
Letters of Pliny the Younger (Latin)
On the Cheronese (Greek)
The Classical Utilitarians
Harry Potter 1-7
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Little Drummer Girl
Aeneid Book 2 (Latin)