Resolutionary: Halfway through

Being this the first day of the seventh month of the year two thousand and fourteen, and as such being a halfway point between the beginning and end of said year, I find it appropriate to give another update on my New Year's Resolutions. I'll just make this a quick post, as I'm just giving updates on them all. I'll say up front that EFY is helping out a ton with many of these.

1. Exercise a little every day, even if it means taking a walk for 30 minutes on a treadmill. I used a pedometer for the first few weeks I was doing EFY and found that I was averaging about 15,000 steps per day. 2,000 is about a mile, and I've heard that a good goal for someone trying to lose weight is to hit at least 10,000, so I feel like I'm doing fairly well with that.

2. Unless I'm specifically out with friends, stop eating so much late at night. Doing well so far! The only real exception to this is pizza night for EFY, but I'm taking care to not splurge... for the most part.

3. Read at least one new book a month. Ehhhhh... could be doing better. I still have the original books I checked out from the library back in January that I need to get through... That time between when EFY finishes and when school starts up is going to be super valuable.

4. Start up a media production of some kind. Working on it. My brother and I have created a company based mostly off of his DJ equipment/experience, but we have plans to expand to much more than just audio production.

5. Do my best to enter into a relationship that is leading towards marriage. Working on it. I'm meeting new people all the time, and while EFY is taking up a lot of time that I would use for social activities I'm definitely keeping my eyes open.
I mean, sometimes I feel like this is how I come off to girls when I'm trying to flirt:

And I'm really hoping that it's not actually that. But I'll save that topic for a future post.

6. Write at least one blog post per week. Working on this still. (Obviously.) Got some ideas of future posts already, so I'll do my best to make some time to get them written.

7. Watch the movies in my library that I haven't seen yet. Again, EFY is kinda in the way of free time, but since I've stopped buying movies for a while I'm slowly catching up.

8. Go to a convention of some sort. Going to be taken care of this week! I just mentioned in resolution #6 that I have plans for future blog posts, and one of them is going to be about FantasyCon, which will be this Thursday through Saturday. Kind of a funny story as to how I'm going, but I'll save that for the post itself.

9. Be more outgoing. EFY is helping in more ways than I can imagine. More so with this than my mission, I feel. I'm thrown every week into a situation where I need to get to know anywhere from 6 to 12 boys who are under my care for the week, then in addition to that I get to know just as many girls (or more, if we were to use last week as an example). I get to know multiple other counselors, and all of us have the responsibility to teach and guide these youth toward gaining a testimony of the Gospel. I don't know how I could do this without being outgoing.

Even if this is all I'm doing to be more outgoing, it's more than what I usually do, and I'm happy about that.

10. Be happy with myself. This is going along with the previous resolution, as well as #1. I can already tell I'm losing some weight, if only a little bit at a time, but I'm already feeling better health-wise. And the fact that I'm helping out dozens of others get closer to Christ... now THAT feeling has no comparison. This is seriously the closest I've felt to being a missionary, and it's similar in many ways. I think the only difference is that my "investigators" are already members of the Church, for the most part, and we're working to solidify the testimonies they already have.


 So that's where I'm at so far with my resolutions. I've now got six months to go, and I feel pretty confident with how most of them are going to be able to finish them all by December 31.