Dark Month Activites

I often joke that after the holidays, Bostonians hunker down for a few months of cold, snow, ice, and darkness, emerging sometime after Easter.  Street cleaning begins again, leaves and flowers return, and people spend more time outside beyond waiting for the bus or walking the dog.

It's these months of shorter days and chillier nights that I should take advantage of Jason time.  I'm staring at a few piles of books that I must have found interesting enough to purchase but not interesting enough to read.  I should probably work my way through these at some point soon so I can purchase more books to ignore.

The magazines are piling up again as well.  Many of them are poker magazines that just aren't "must-reads" for me anymore.  I browse them, sure.  But I haven't played much these days.  I should probably add that back to my list of dark month activites.

I could also always purge my possessions and just start selling stuff.  I wonder how much I can get for a broken Sony 5 MP camera.  Or a 3.1 MP that takes pictures onto mini-CD's.  OR a rolled-up area rug.  Or

I probably don't need folders full of notes from focus groups I conducted between three and nine years ago.  Nor do I need cassette recordings of these projects.  But, I still have them.

I'm also feeling grossly undereducated on movies these days.  I canceled my Blockbuster Online a few months ago, and have sat in movie theatres so infrequently over the past year that the movies now being released on DVD are unfamiliar to me.  These days, I pretty much entirely skip the movie section of my Entertainment Weekly.  I need to become interested once again.  Perhaps I'll rent a few PPV movies or grab some off itunes.  It's just so easy to stick with what's in the DVR list that I rarely go beyond it.  I need to shake that up.

This is all temporary, though, as it's already mid-January, and I have two pretty exotic trips planned between now and Memorial Day, both of which I'm very much looking forward to.

Softball also begins in a few months, which will be fairly time consuming for a while.

One of these trips and getting ready for the softball season are my main motivating factors to drop some weight and workout.  This is a great time of year to accomplish this as well.