I'm getting overly ambitious at this new year, and trying out something I have seen Emily Liu and Cory Zue do, though doubtless others have done it as well. If you comment on the Bluesky post that announces this blog post, it will show up here as a comment! I'm not sure/not thrilled with some of the other ways to handle comments on a statically generated site, so this is what I'm going with for now. It may not be a permanent solution but it's a fun way to spend an evening for me today!

The main reason I'm doing this is that I want my posts to be more conversations than just me blabbing at the world (though I'll do lots of that too).

In the New Year's Resolutions category, that's not something I've ever done much of. But I do have some goals this year. Last year I set a goal of reading 52 books, and read 55! That was a big deal because for the last few years almost all of my reading has been for grad school classes. If I read 5 books for fun in a year, it was a win. This year I'd like to just set the same goal. 52 books is a book a week, and with four kids, two of whom I homeschool and one of whom is just... two, that's plenty ambitious.

So far I have finished one: Arise, O God, by Father Andrew Stephen Damick. Father Andrew is a fantastic writer and podcaster whom I have the honor of calling a colleague (we were grad school buddies and translated Beowulf in class one particularly strenuous semester) and friend. He hosts numerous podcasts and has written a few books, but this one is a small, approachable, and yet beautiful explanation of the Evangelion, the good news. Because he writes from an Orthodox Christian perspective but comes from an Evangelical background, he first strips away the sales-pitch gospel that is usually presented in American Christianity before contextualizing the terms and the facts of the Good News in their first-century Greek usage. This change in perspective also is a change in position (that's how perspective works; to see things from a new angle, you have to move to that new angle). No longer is every person on the receiving end of a sales pitch they can accept or reject, now they are on the streets of a battle in which they must choose a side because it is a war that consumes everything. Honestly, I'd recommend this book to anyone as an easy read that can give you a really interesting and reorienting look on Christianity, whether you are a Christian or not.

I also have the short-term goal of doing my PT faithfully every single day... sigh. It's not hard. It's just inconvenient. There is NO way I don't ave 10 minutes twice a day to do the exercises that will help me move past this chronic and miserable back pain. I don't even have back pain while I do them! But over the Christmas holiday, it was easy to just pack up the yoga mat and not get it out again.

Now if you've read this, I'd love to hear some of your goals for this year. If you came from Bluesky, comment and let me know! It would be very helpful to test if the comments really do show up here!