Here's an early New Year's resolution:

I hereby resolve not to keep promising to blog more often. I'm going to blog when I feel like it.

Like now.

Saturday at Monkey Grind. I'd be making a futile attempt at the NY Times crossword puzzle, but they're having some technical difficulties at nytimes.com, so Plan B.

I'd be working on my novel, but I'm at a bit of a creative crisis point on what direction to take next. I've completed drafts for Part One and Part Two, which present the three main characters from the points of view of two of them. They are concurrent, covering the same period of time. I'm trying to decide what to do with Part Three. Can I go on in time, or do I need to give another concurrent view from the third character's POV? If I go on, do I need to start right where I left off, or should I skip ahead in time? And whose POV should I use? While I mull these things over, I'm concentrating on doing some short story revisions, and I've made another early New Year's resolution:

I'm going to get my first story published in 2007.

Some people at work have created a writing blog and invited me to participate. It's mainly just some writing exercises or prompts. The first one was hard, and it was fun, but it didn't exactly inspire my greatest work. The second one I pulled out of the textbook we used in my writing class at UW. So far, no one has completed it except for me, and although it's not brilliant, I think I created some very interesting characters, and I might work with it to expand it into a story.

I have the week between Christmas and New Year's off from work, and I'm planning to do some writing every day that week. (No, that's not a resolution, just a plan.)

This past week was such a high. I felt so positive and upbeat at work, had a good checkup with my doctor yesterday, and watched two really good documentaries, An Inconvenient Truth and Wordplay. If work keeps going the way it went this week (which it surely won't, but I can dream, right?), I'll get used to waking up every morning and jumping out of bed because I can't wait to get to the office. Two members of my team told me that I'm doing a great job as manager, and my boss told me the same thing. The things I'm doing seem to be working out really well. In the first half of 2006, before I became manager, we lost five people on my team; since I became manager, not one person has left. One of the things I committed to when I interviewed for the position was to stop the bleeding, and I'm really proud of the result so far. I know that at some point someone will leave, but just to go five months without a single team member leaving is a great accomplishment.

So my doctor told me to stop taking Metformin for the next month and to come in for a new blood test in January. I'm hoping the numbers will be much better than in July, and maybe I will be able to stay off the Metformin indefinitely.

And one more resolution:

I'm going to be at 175 lbs by the time of my trip to San Diego on February 10, 2007.

You heard it here first.