This year is going to be big. It's not just going to be big -- I'm going to make sure it's big. This is the year I finish my graduate education and earn my doctorate. This is the year the work pays off.

For that to happen, I'm going to need a lot of discipline. New Year's Resolutions are bad ways to get you to do good things, but I'm tying my oh-so-cliche exercise resolution in with my dissertation work to create a schedule of mighty productivity. So when I come home from work, I exercise, shower, and launch right into dissertation mode. That's the theory. Let's see how it works in the field.

First tasks for the year: Become all-but-dissertation (i.e., doctoral candidate), create the eye tracking system for my LIFE grant, and get a new tattoo. Bend the bars, get out, make a star map, catch a deer.