Monday Mike 3: Resolutions

Monday Mike 3

https://open.tube/videos/watch/01b60078-177d-412b-8e19-ecb5f33a0ba8
The 3rd episode of the Monday Mike vlog.

Hi. I’m Mike and welcome to my vlog. As you can see from the background, I’m changing things up a bit. It’s okay, but not great. It’s made of some sort of vinyl plastic that feels a bit like stiff paper. It looks nice, but I don’t think its quite as good as a fabric backdrop. Also, the other backdrop I was using had a sleeve at the top so I could easily hang it on a backdrop frame, but with this one I had to use clamps to attach it to the frame. I’ll have to double check the price, but I don’t feel it was a great value. On the other hand, it looks okay, so I’ll probably stick with it for awhile.

I’m also changing the lighting and camera setup a bit. In the other videos, I had the ring light placed in front of the camera lens, which is fine in most instances, but since I wear glasses, there were a lot of reflections from the light on my lenses. Hopefully this new setup will fix that. We’ll see.

Today’s the 30th of December in 2019 and the New Year is just a few days away, so it’s a good time to talk about resolutions. When I was growing up, I was terrible about making and keeping New Year’s resolutions, but as I grew up I began to think of them in a slightly different way. Now I think of them more as goals. A few years ago, I made a resolution to stop drinking caffeine, but I didn’t do it at the start of the year. I waited a few weeks before I actually broke the habits associated with drinking caffeine. I stopped going to Starbucks before work. At work, I stopped drinking coffee altogether and switched to green tea. When I found out that even green tea had caffeine in it, I switched to herbal teas instead. That went pretty well for most of the year. I was pleased that I broke those habits, but eventually I began drinking coffee again, although it’s always been decaf since then. Still, I considered it a win and it gave me hope for the future.

I started smoking when I was 20 and since then I’ve made several attempts to quit, but I’ve never really been successful at it. A few years ago, I think when I was 49 or 50, I started to be more earnest about trying to quit. I kept making resolutions about it, and tried different methods for quitting, and this past April I finally managed to quit. I’ll talk about quitting smoking in a future video, because I think it’s something I should talk about. The reason I’m bringing it up now is because I want to show resolutions are achievable, even if there are missteps along the way.

I think resolutions usually fall into two categories: the year-end goals and the regularly scheduled goals. Quitting smoking and losing weight are year end goals because they are part of a process. They aren’t something that can change overnight, but you want to end the year changed from how you started the year. If you’re trying to quit smoking, maybe you started the year as a smoker and ended the year as a non-smoker. If you’re trying to lose weight, you want to weight less at the end of the year than you did at the start of the year.

The regularly scheduled goals are things we plan on doing every day or every week or every month. And here’s where we get into my resolutions, because these vlogs are one of my New Year’s Resolutions.

For 2020, I resolve to put out vlogs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ve been doing these vlogs for the past few weeks, so I guess you could call it practice and preparation. If I started the year with the camera and the resolution, I would have dithered over the camera and lighting setups, searched for an ideal backdrop, worried about this, procrastinated about that, and would have quit the resolution by the end of January because I wasn’t really doing anything.

It is tedious and it is time consuming, but it’s also manageable. Because I’ve practiced it over the past few weeks, and because each video is a chance to try something new, I’m getting better at making them. Because I’m getting better at making them, I’m pretty sure I can pull it off when I say I’ll put out videos three times a week for the next year or so.

I also have a resolution that’s a year end goal. After I quit smoking in April I started gaining weight. This wasn’t unexpected, but I was already struggling with my weight, so it wasn’t really welcomed either. I’d rather be overweight than a smoker, but it would be better to be a non-smoker and have a decent weight. When I had my annual physical in October, I mentioned it to my doctor and he told me my employer recently struck a deal with Weight Watchers and that they would pay for it if I wanted to give it a try. I’ll also talk about Weight Watchers and losing weight in future videos, but my goal for 2020 is to lose 50 – 70 pounds. We’ll see how it goes.

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The 3rd episode of the Monday Mike vlog. Hi. I’m Mike and welcome to my vlog. As you can see from the background, I’m changing things up a bit. It’s okay, but not great. It’s made of some sort of vinyl plastic that feels a bit like stiff paper. It looks nice, but I don’t…

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