Oh goodness. My soft 2019 goal of blogging at least once a week went off the rails rather quickly, but if I can salvage some credit for myself, I’m doing great on my soft goal: I’ve already finished six books and read more than 2,000 pages across multiple genres and authors. According to Goodreads, I’m two books ahead of the pace I need to keep in order to hit my reading goal (so many goals this year) of 20 by the time the calendar turns to 2020. This year is off to a good start!

I’ve also started a new job, which is great news. While it was a fun time just hanging out, exploring Syracuse, and being unsustainably unemployed, I always felt guilty that I didn’t have work. And so, as fortune would have it, I was able to find something similar to my old AV position, and now here we are.

But with that position came less time to write. More ideas, sure, but less time to write. I never realized how much easier it was to crawl into bed and read someone else’s ideas than it was to get mine out there. That’s why I need to make a concerted effort to do better as we roll into springtime.

Honestly, it’s surprising that spring is just around the corner based on the constant layer of snow on the ground outside. We peaked into the 60s on Thursday–it was amazing!–so it was understandably hard to face the (cold) reality as snow and ice returned this weekend. But it made me incredibly excited for a Syracuse spring and summer.

I have so many plans. First, I want to hit up as many small towns in the area as possible. There’s really nothing better than a good, small upstate town: a main street, some cool shops, possibly a diner, and then BAM farmland. If it’s a really good small upstate town, it’ll have plan #2: ice cream. I want to visit as many local soft serve stands as possible. Nothing says summer (or warm weather generally) to me more than a vanilla cone. Hell, maybe that’ll be my next online project, a big upstate ice cream map. I know I’d love to have one.

My third plan is, obviously, baseball.

And the rest of my plans are…to make more plans. Ice cream and small towns and baseball (and the combinations thereof!) are great, but I feel like there should be more. So that’s my self-imposed homework heading into the warm weather season. I think I’ve got some time until that gets here, but I can’t wait for it to start.