pat loughery

Here are some of the things I’d like to do this calendar year. I reserve the right to update this and modify, but it will be fun to look back at this post in a year.

• Read 1 pg/day, tracked in The StoryGraph. This goal / use of TSG has been an easy one in the last year and a half of so, and has led me to read and consider things way outside my norm.
• Increase active days tracked in Strava by 25% over 2024. Heck, let’s just say 150. Overall, I want to be at the gym 3x/week, and have two days of mountain biking or hiking or paddleboarding or canoeing or …, depending on season. This should be easy – 2024 only had 116 total activities, owing to lots of stuff.. but previous years were less active.
• Sketch 3x/week and paint 1x/week. Anything counts. A few years ago I mentioned to a friend that I knew I had enough margin for life when I was painting some of what I sketched. That’s been a reliable indicator ever since, and in recent months, it’s empty. So I’m starting a new sketchbook with the new year.
• Write 2x/week, including blog and newsletters and whatever else that may turn into. Social media posts don’t count.

• Visit 4 national parks and 8 state parks. Shannon bought Brogan and I these cool National Park sticker water bottles for Christmas – visit a Park and put the corresponding sticker on the bottle – so we have to start that project. I wish there was something similar for state parks, which are even more fun to visit.

• Camp 10 times. We did a lot of car/truck camping the last couple years after being out of the habit and loved it. For “times” I’m thinking of separate locations, or times I have to set up our massive tent 🙂
• Read 40 books and 10,000 pages. I’m keeping this goal well below what I’ve read recently, because I’ve learned that if I set that goal too high, I read stuff I didn’t want to read, just to check off the list. There are some Reading Challenges on The StoryGraph that I want to make good headway on.. it’d be cool to finish out the Read Around Ireland challenge, for which I read one book from each of the 32 counties.
• Increase my music listening to 30,000 minutes (from 25,183) and 10,000 tracks scrobbled (from 8,655). That probably means less podcast listening time, and more music just around the house. So far it’s meant more music in the background while
• Propose a paper/presentation and attend the Symposium for Pilgrimage Studies again this year

My tendency would be to crank all these up, but I’m trying to be realistic here.

More broadly and less measurable, some other things I want to do:

• Avoid any hospital trips, whether for mountain biking injuries or surgery due to aging or whatever. That really messes with life (written while still recovering from an aging-related surgery).
• Read a bit less, summarize and write up what I’m learning more. (create learning exhaust; also write a blog post up about that idea)
• Learn how to fly the 2-line sport parafoil kite I bought in Ocean Shores
• Learn how to fly fish from my canoe
• Spend a week on the Oregon coast for my birthday. We used to go every year and have gotten out of the habit.
• Spend a week in British Columbia.
• Broaden out the content on this blog to better represent what I’m up to these days. Include sketch/watercolor stuff, trip recaps, etc.

I’m looking forward to this year and enjoying life. I’m also looking forward to reviewing this in a year as part of my Practices of Review – the year behind, the year ahead.