With a new year comes new responsibilities, projects, goals and the inevitable roadblocks that prevent us from getting to each. At my job it seems every time I learn something or become familiar with a process or workflow it changes or is on a backlog for change. My goals for 2014 include reading more, putting a lot of my hobbies on hold to allow for progressing on several household responsibilities and projects, being a more patient and understanding husband, get healthy (again), be more generous and take more photos and maybe learn photography along the way. I know, very much like my job, challenges are going to get in the way of all of these areas and I know that instead of getting from point A to point B I’m going to end up somewhere between C and D but I guess the goal is to end up better, smarter, more humbled and more mature than the year before, no matter the route taken to get there.

I got out of the house early this morning, threw on a long-sleeved thermal, a flannel shirt and a thick hoodie with intentions of clearing my back porch of leaves and raking my back yard. 45 seconds into clearing the back porch I realized my work was in vain because the thick layer of leaves that covered my porch were frozen solid. Not slick or icy, just frozen and unmoving. I did the best I could and moved on to the yard where I didn’t make any more progress – everything is frozen. I made a small pile of leaves built from what loose artifacts I was able to gather from the porch and the surrounding area and called it quits – not worth my time and effort. It’s not supposed to get this cold in East Tennessee and it’s supposed to get even colder.

Keeping up with staying productive, however, I snapped this photo – photo 4 of 31 for my first creative project of the year – a 31 day self portrait exercise. If I make it to 31, my hope is to turn it into a 365 day project. I’m probably going to post these photos (or at least some of them) to the blog about once a week but I’m going to post them daily at Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr while trying to keep them off of Facebook and Instagram.

Anyway, the intention is to make me use my camera every day and thus far – 4 days in – it’s been pretty cool. Here’s to hoping I can keep it up!