Nablopomo for January 2015: HABIT

Time for a new theme for a new month and year.  From this month's email:

January's NaBloPoMo Theme: HABIT!
It's that time of year when you look at your habits: which ones you want to break, which ones you want to keep, and which ones you need to start.

It can be overwhelming if you go about trying to build or break a habit alone, but NaBloPoMo gives you a built-in set of cheerleaders. By setting the habit of blogging daily, you also end up picking up new readers as well as new blogs to read. NaBloPoMo is so much more than a writing challenge; it's also a supportive community.

So let's cheer each other on as we work on our habits this month. We'll be delving deep with blog posts, looking at what we do well and what we need to start doing. And hopefully, by the end of January, the resolutions you've made will be firmly in place, ready to kick off a wonderful 2015.

You can read more about the new NaBloPoMo theme on our opening post.

Follow over the jump for the relevant text from Form Some New Habits With January's NaBloPoMo.

The web page rephrases the email more colorfully, although not as directly.

This is the time of the year where people look at their habits and decide which ones they want to break or new ones they want to build. Sometimes they have sufficient motivation and support to actually form a brand new habit or get rid of a detrimental one. Other times, their resolutions fizzle out around the same time they're packing up the Christmas decorations.

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful? Accountability. When we think other people are watching or cheering us on or helping remind us, we tend to do a better job of sticking to our internal promises. Is it a form of guilt? Probably? But it's a pretty powerful one.

And we can use it to our advantage with January's NaBloPoMo. This month we're going to be talking about habits. We're going to take a good, long look at our bad habits and figure out how to break them, and we're going to choose a few good habits (hey, like daily blogging!) and stick to them. We each have a built in set of cheerleaders: I'll cheer you on if you'll cheer me on.

So take a deep breath, get prepared to delve deep, and get ready to write.

This is a good theme for me, especially this month.  As I wrote in U.S. home ownership rate and me, my wife and I bought a house and are moving there Monday.  The new location alone will require a new set of habits and alterations to old ones.  For starters, I'm moving out of a walkable neighborhood to a car-dependent one, although I suspect I'll try to walk to the nearest market, which is a mile away, when the weather warms up.  I'm sure that will be reflect in my future driving updates for Ruby and the new car with more miles driven.  It will also show up in my gas price updates.  I won't have the corner station around the corner anymore.  I will be in town two days a week between now and the first week of May, but I won't be able to walk down the block and look down the street any more.  I'll have to find another station to measure retail gas prices.  The list of changes just because of location goes on and on.

Speaking of which, the new house is in hilly terrain not suitable for bicycling.  That affects my ongoing resolution to buy a bicycle.  I could ride one from my current residence to work, but the landscape and new route to work just makes that impractical.  Sigh.  As for another resolution, buying a membership to the Detroit Zoo, that's still on the list.  I want to support a local cultural and scientific institution while getting my exercise and entertaining my wife and me.

My wife and I have also made a resolution to lose weight and get in shape.  I'll have to figure out other means of doing so besides walking to run my local errands.  I'll have other resolutions, but they'll have to wait until we move.  Priorities.

Hey, look, I managed to write about today's prompt after all: "What are your resolutions for the new year? Tell us how you picked them."  At least I described why I dropped one of them!