It's the last day of 2009, a good time to think about the year to come. A good time for making resolutions for 2010.Over the last couple of years I've come to the realization that I'm not young anymore and I can no longer take my health for granted. Like it or not, I have to take better care of myself. I don't like to think about giving up hours a day to meal planning and prep, food discipline, recording my food intake, and exercise, exercise, exercise, but if I want to have good quality of life and live to see grandchildren some day (my fondest wish) I have to adopt the changes. This last year has taught me a lesson about living with limitations. It was a lesson I didn't want to learn.
Last February I ruptured multiple discs in my spine. The resulting back pain is still with me every day and I've become dependent on my loved ones to do many of the everyday things I used to be capable of handling easily. I'm a burden to them now and I hate it. They never complain about it but I feel bad just the same. I need to devote myself to relieving the pain and getting back to my daily living activities. In order to have the time to work on improving my health I will need to give up some of the time I've been spending on genealogy and blogging. It's all about balance. How many times have we heard that?
A major problem for me is that I spend too much time sitting in front of a computer. My job (web design) requires me to be on a computer much of the day and my hobbies (genealogy and blogging) require additional computer time. As a result, I spend too much time sitting. I need to be up on my feet and moving around more. So I'm going to try to find a new line of work and work more exercise into my day. (Notice I didn't say I'd give up my hobbies ;-)
In terms of my genealogy research, I'm doing little more than dotting i's and crossing t's. There are always more details to collect, of course, but honestly at this point my time would be better spent organizing my previous research info and writing up my family history than doing additional research. If only organization and composition were as much fun as research!!! I'm too addicted to give up my research entirely but I am looking at ways to be more productive with the time I will allow myself for research. For instance, I don't currently subscribe to any online databases. My local library (at home) has Ancestry.com and free WiFi so I go there when I want to look something up. But I'm thinking about getting a subscription to Ancestry so I can access it from home (or the condo) without the travel time involved. If the Detroit News and/or the Polish Daily News would create a digital archive of the past editions of their newspapers I'd jump all over those subscriptions too. Having to go downtown Detroit to research is another time drain. And it sure would help optimize my research if the folks at the Family History Library would put their microfilms online as soon as they are digitally created rather than waiting for everything to be transcribed. I'd be happy to look my family members up on my own without using a database to search... I do it that way now on microfilm (hint, hint ;-) . OK, enough wishing and dreaming!!!
So, with 2010 knocking on the door I find myself hoping for a healthier and less painful year to come. It is my intention to change my lifestyle (exercise more, sit less), change my job (to what???), and focus more on organizing and writing up my genealogy research and optimizing the time spent on research. I don't anticipate a great deal of change in my blogging. I can't give that up, it's too good a mental exercise!
As this year draws to a close, I want to wish all of my fellow genealogy bloggers and the readers of Creative Gene a happy, healthy, and rich New Year. May 2010 be your best year ever!
