I've got this mighty urge to get a bunch of pets for the sole reason of bestowing upon them unfortunate names. What names, you ask? I thought you'd never.

• Strategy, a Corgi (Welsh)
• Jarvis or Jeeves, an English Bulldog
• Agamemnon, a Guinea Pig
• Town Drunk or Village Idiot, a Dachsund or perhaps an English Sheepdog
• King Cobra, a playful Tabby or runty parakeet

The last two I'm particularly fond of. So much so, in fact, to actually be considering getting a pet after ditching this apartment for a proper house. But then I come to my senses and remember that I should never be trusted with the life of any creature, lest the original owner's looking for a slightly-more-humane alternative to euthanization.

Well, it's 11:30 at night, and I am in my bed, lights out, trying to write this. I don't particularly know why it's so difficult for me to keep up a blog, but a quick glance at my posting history will confirm that this go-round's been no better than the last.

Perhaps it's because I'm such a private person. That, and I don't particularly think anything that I, or most folks, have to say is actually worth the few bytes it wastes on a server somewhere. I have no facts to share, no little solution to enlighten some frustrated Googler.

But I'm in the technology business, dammit, and that means I can't care about privacy. Not my own, anyway.

So here I am, trying to force one out. Why? Because I decided that would be a thing that I do this year. The fact that I brushed off three I'll-do-it-tomorrow's for this should hopefully be a good sign, but I suppose we'll see.

Anyway, my actual point: my New Year's Resolutions. The fact that I actually call them "resolutions" should not fool you into believing that they are things about which I am resolute, things that I am resolved to accomplish. No, rather they're the same things I always want to do, but just plain don't. Yeah, I'm definitely on the busy side, but I'm even moreso lazy, which keeps personal progress far and away from actually doing any progressing.

So then, without further ado, here are things I'd like to accomplish this year, in no particular order:

• Maintain this blog. Yes indeed, that's actually the bulk of the reason why I forced myself to write tonight -- because I couldn't bear the thought of writing a blog about resolutions that include writing the blog being pushed off until some other day.
• Purchase a new WRX or GTI. Now, I hate (hate) when folks do the "I really want this or this other vastly dissimilar thing" thing, especially with cars, but consider: I deeply respect (read: love) both these vehicles, but they represent two very different things for me. The WRX is my past, my slightly over-the-top teenage dream car. The GTI is my future, my sensible but enjoyable working-professional-mobile. I will have one or the other and be pleased as punch either way, and I will do so within the year (hopefully within the half-year).
• Gain 20 pounds. I'm lazy, but my metabolism kicks ass and I often forget to eat, so I'm plenty thin. Unfortunately, I'm also built like an eighth-grader, a byproduct of a sedentary desk life. (I love what I do, but all it's doing for my body is collapsing the ol' carpal tunnel.) So I'm after twenty pounds of brand new muscles. That really only makes me about average when all's said and done, but I've always liked normal. Shouldn't really be difficult so long as I can keep myself motivated. But you know, in retrospect, I watched  like ten seasons of Friends over the course of 2009, and I could have easily just sat there doing curls or something at the same time. Shame on me.
• Fully record three songs. For shit's sake, I've got so many parts of songs all over the place, you'd think I'd be able to just string a few end-on-end and check this from the list. But no, I want these to be full-on, recorded-with-the-intent-of-finishing-a-song songs, rather than the extra-elaborate 40-second demos I usually cough up. I'm not saying I want to finish the album, just something to show for a decade of serious music-making.
• Get a house? Probably a pipe dream, but it was so real last year (I literally had to give up while I had offers in because my job collapsed) that it's hard not to think of doing it again soon. It's thrilling, and I loved the prospect of having something totally my own that I could devalue on my own terms use my hands to improve. I come from a whole family of carpenters, so I guess it's a sort of innate torch-carrying desire that puts me in that kick. Either way, my rommate and I probably won't be renewing the lease on the apartment again, so I may look into a rental. And why a house? Because I love instruments and cars, and this downstairs-neighbor/work-free-garage life is stifling both those things for me. I want drums, dammit, because I have never encountered anything that I can do so wholly without thinking and not make a fool out of myself. So, that said...
• Drums. We're talkin' like 7-piece maple-shell jazz fusion kit with a Pork Pie snare and Sabian AAXs all around. Glitter silver, man. Seriously. I would drive my WRX (that I own) back to the house (that I also own), write a quick day's-summary blog (in keeping with how good I'd gotten at maintaining the blog), and drum out (on my brand new sparkly silver set) some of my own songs (already recorded at that point, natch) with my newly-muscled arms (as might Hercules). It would be the coolest. And also probably totally unlikely, considering that's the sum of all things that I could possibly hope to happen in a single year, but still awesome. This, do note, is totally dependent upon buying a house actually happening.

And that's pretty much it. This year could wind up pretty expensive, but there's no point in working if you aren't putting those earnings to use.

And that's that. I blogged.

That would be me. I am the Idiot Chef.

First, as a side note, I have so far hardly had a single on-topic (in the context of this blog) thing to say yet. Last was women and self-perception, now it's cooking. Not even anything important about cooking, really. Can I bring design into this at all? Music? ... Cars?

(and then I departed to eat my Idiot Cooking)

(... and, after eating, promptly forgot all about the draft I'd saved)

So I've returned, and I'm admittedly not thinking much about food. I really only started to write this because I was waiting for something like a gallon-and-a-half of water to reach a boil on my apartment-issue electric stove. You'd think in that time I'd have written a lot more (the water really did take its time), but, like I said, I didn't have much to say.

Here's the gist: I want to become a competent cook, an idiot chef. Chefs, you see, are a rung or two higher up the culinary ladder than cooks, so a bad chef and a competent cook can see about eye-to-eye. Idiot chefs get a slight advantage due to an assumedly better vocabulary.

Where do I stand now? I'm not an idiot cook, thankfully, but perhaps just a regular cook. I don't get butterflies when making meals, and fairly regularly attempt new dishes. These, fortunately for my roommate and I, are more often than not met with some degree of success. So maybe I'm a solid "pretty good cook."

Anyway, I want to become a bit better than that, and then plateau. I don't need to impress anybody with my cooking. I mean, so far as I can tell, just the fact that I'm a guy that has has actually made stromboli from scratch gets me some bonus points. I'm not even Italian! And I made stromboli!

Tangential mini-story: I did not have a rolling pin when I made that stromboli the first time, so I had to resort to the only thing around that was both cylindrical and structurally integral. What did I choose? A glass. Like, a drinking glass. I have never, ever been so careful doing something so basic as rolling in my entire life. If that glass broke, its pieces would have found a new home in my hands, and I use those for, you know, everything. I mean, I'm a designer, so I'm on the computer all day at work. I'm also a musician, so I rely solely upon them (and occasionally my feet, but that's beside the point) in my primary leisure-time activity. If I lost the use of my hands, I would be out of work and terribly bored, neither of which I'd consider acceptable baggage for a stromboli to carry.

But, in the end, the stromboli was alright. And, assuming you care at all, you'll be happy to know that a rolling pin was promptly added to my tiny cooking arsenal, at the same time as was a meat tenderizer which I have never used and probably never will. I like tough meat.

And now you know something trivial about me.

An accounting firm whose site I'm designing for Zorebo wants a series of rotating images and phrases (kind of like those memed-to-death motivator posters, but without the now-expected sarcasm). The catch is they want them to be of nature/animals, but they have to be about things like innovation. You know what's hard to think of once you've had one failed idea you thought would be perfect? Absolutely anything else.  A note to those who could potentially be in my shoes: don't bother looking for a photo of an otter breaking an oyster over a rock; their arms are just too short to make the grade.

As a rule, I don't blog. I suppose that rule is now moot, however, as this is about as much a blog as one can have. To answer the implied "about," I'm a web/graphic designer, light PHP/MySQL/JS developer, and multi-musician. I work for myself (Vector Bridge) and others (Zorebo, Tooling University) illustrating the internet. I'm also in a band called Nae Sae and/or Shooting Cupids, in which I very slowly make songs all by my lonesome. This will likely be filled with nonsense tangentially-related to the aforementioned topics, with a bit of auto-enthusiasm thrown in for good measure.