Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I've been reading various 2005-overviews on friends' pages here that are really wonderful… I wish I had time to post a list of my own because it's been a wild year. First of all, we moved to Mexico of course, and have traveled in Africa, South America, Europe, and of course across Canada and the US as well. Rachel has restructured our business lives, and this is the first year that BME (which grew significantly in 2005) has had real employees.

I don't have time to post a year-in-review, so here's my likely-to-be-broken New Year's Resolutions. Probably being pessimistic about it is not a good start. Anyway, here are three I think I can mostly keep:

• Physical
  Living in Mexico I've gained about fifty pounds, primarily because of not maintaining a vegan diet like I did in Canada. The picture above is me at about 180 pounds, taken near the start of the year in Durban, South Africa. I want to do two main things: (1) get back as close to an ethical and healthful diet as I can reasonably do here, and (2) exercise with a target weight at the end of 2006 of a fit 220 pounds. That is, get rid of 40 pounds of fat and replace it with 30 pounds of muscle.
• Medical
  I want to have laser eye surgery done this year.
• Personal
  Although I love what I do, it's not always fun being the hardest working guy in show business. I have worked almost every day that I could for the last five years, and I don't want to do that any more. So my resolution is to take off Saturday or Sunday every week — where I'll do no programming, BME work, or BME/work-related posting (barring emergencies). I need to take time for myself to paint and read and to spend time with my family and friends.

Well, that's about it. We have visitors tomorrow, Phil gets back in a few days, and within a week or two I'm sure 2006 will be running smoothly. Now I'm going to go and read a book.