Skip to main content

Determining to Do Better in 2019


2018 has been an odd year for me. There have been some amazing highlights, such as the birth of my second grandchild, Cormac Douglass Swanekamp; the marriage of my son Jack to the wonderful Erin; and the emergence of Corinne Mae Swanekamp as a remarkable little girl full of personality, humor, and love of her Granddad and Nana. 

However, the year for me seems to have been characterized by a general malaise, or more accurately, a general lethargy. I wasn’t able to do much physical exercise for much of the year, and for whatever reason, besides work and doing some fun things with Donna and some of her siblings, I didn’t seem to do much else at all, except gain weight, watch television and read (okay, and do a lot of Sudoku and crossword puzzles).

I’m looking forward to getting back in the saddle. In January I’m starting back in the pool if there are no more spinal issues and I hope to start training for my fifth Chesapeake Bay swim in June – I’ll find out in January if I got selected through the lottery. I have started doing some intermittent work on the treadmill and I intend to do that more regularly. I hope to eat and drink less, as my discipline seems to have evaporated. I’m hoping that if I get into better workout routines my eating habits will improve as well. I also expect to start a new job at Constellation that will be more challenging and exciting than what I have been doing there.

Finally, I plan to get back into blogging. I have started a few posts but always get sidetracked or just allow drafts to sit and collect dust.

So, as we enter 2019, I’m resolving to make the above resolutions – and keep a few of them.

Happy New Year!




Comments

  1. This posting is marvelous and what a fantastic research that you have done. It has helped me a lot. thank you very much. for more information visit our website

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Afri-freaking-ca!

Donna and I recently took the trip of a lifetime, a safari in Tanzania on Africa’s central east coast. We visited Tarangire National Park, with multiple herds of elephants; Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which features the renowned Ngorongoro crater; and Serengeti National Park. Serengeti, like Ngorongoro, is a UNESCO World Heritage site; it is home to some 1.5 million migratory wildebeest, 400,000 zebra, 3,000 lions, and many other herbivores and predators. After much research, we booked our 10-day excursion through Micato Safaris . It was a great choice. We were pampered with luxurious accommodations, incredibly up-close animal sightings, and vast amounts of fascinating information. It was a life-changing experience that greatly exceeded our most optimistic hopes. We arrived in Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro International Airport after a 10,000-mile, 26-hour journey, and were greeted by our remarkable tour director, Joseph Mushi, and a driver. We hopped into the rugged Toyota Land Cruiser,

Getting Lost in a Good Book (or 21)

I’ve always been a reader, from my childhood on, and the allure of getting lost in a good book has never released its grip on me. Since my retirement in June 2022, I’ve been reading a lot. Here are some of my favorite books from the past year; let me know your thoughts about these or others! Fiction 100 Years of Solitude , Gabriel García Márquez – Márquez’s fantastical epic about the Colombian Buendia family is one of the greatest books I’ve read. Cold Mountain , Charles Frazier – Outstanding literary novel about a wounded Civil War soldier’s desertion and return to home. Beautifully written prose. Age of Vice , Deepti Kapoor – Great fictional account of a poor Indian boy’s introduction to the Indian mafia, his rise and fall within, and his ultimate redemption. The Slope of Memory ,  Jos é  Geraldo Vieira – A cerebral tale of a Brazilian writer that is like a mashup of a D.H. Laurence novel and the philosophical dialectic of Plato’s Republic (but much more entertaining than I’m

OBX

In recent years we’ve rented houses on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island for a week and hosted our kids and their families. This year, we decided to try something new: Donna and I rented a house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks for a week to kick off summer with our children and their families. It was one of the best family vacations we’ve had. The weather was fantastic the entire week. The ocean water was so warm that even Donna got in. The beach was composed of soft, powdery sand and the waves were mostly calm. Skittish ghost crabs, with their pincers up and their eyes atop periscope-like stalks, would partially emerge from their hiding holes in the sand, cautiously sidestep a couple feet, then dart to another hole. Patrols of pelicans, rarely seen at LBI, were ubiquitous, and we saw dolphins arching just past the breakers nearly every day. The house Donna had found – she has a knack for finding great vacation houses – was perfect. Oceanfront with private beach access. Pool. Seven be