It’s not uncommon to think about New Year’s given its close proximity to the 31st of December. Even Merle Haggard sang ♫ If We Make It Through December ♪ I mean you’d have to die to miss that. Hold that thought, I got coffee brewing. This here, this posting on one of my many blogs, is one of the reasons I don’t make resolutions. I make them in December and they don’t make it through the end of the month.

Many a year I have said I am going to learn to play an instrument, the piano, the guitar, a harmonica and what do I have to show for all those “I’m gonna’s” zippo, nada, nothing.

Oh yeah, there’s this one, “I’m going to quit posting on facebook and do all my writing on my blogs.” That lasts maybe one post.

I start stuff all the time, I don’t need New Years’ to do that. I learn from the best in starting stuff, Ed Norton would roll up his sleeves a dozen times before he’d eventually get started. I even call that early initiative part, my “rolling up my sleeves part.”

My problem is I have a grasshopper mentality. What do grasshopper’s do, they hop to it all over the place, one to another. That’s me. I start something and half way through I’m off to doing something else. What I need is someone to advocate for the things I start so that I see them through to completion. Like a coach or something. You wouldn’t think that a man who completed 59 courses (self-study and tested) in 60 days would have that problem, would you?

Have I mentioned that I am nearing 80. To that end I say, I have had my day in the Sun. I have overcame some obstacles, I have accomplished other aspirations and I have failed at a lot of efforts. So, I don’t have a bucket list. I’m through doing, but I do have some finishing up to do. And if I don’t finish them, so be it.

I have, say, a half dozen or so maladies that anyone could take me out. I’m not going to list them, they are not a woe is me list. Just a recognition that I see the end is coming. And if I die, I die, but it won’t be because I had this or I had that. People die at 80 all the time. I once heard a doctor explain it this way. “Your heart has so many ticks and when it stops ticking, you stop living.” I like that explanation. I’ll go with that.