This 2012 has been a year of big changes in my life. There’s been ups and downs like never before and a complete emotional roller coaster. I switched jobs, moved to a new city on the other side of the country, made new friends, reunited with old ones, lost my photography gear, got new one, and well, many weird and exciting things happened.

I can’t say I’ve been in complete control of my whole life, I’ve let life take some choices for me, but that hasn’t been bad either. I guess that when you don’t know where to go, letting go will take you to places you never imagined. Sometimes not having a plan can be the best plan.

From last year’s resolutions, I can safely say that I’ve accomplished my list fairly.

1. I’ve started to take track of my health checks and weight. I’m also planning on writing a simple application to keep my records and visualize the data easily.
2. On the startup ideas line, I’ve done some experiments and I’ll soon publish some of them. There’s still more to improve on that but efforts have been done in this area.
3. My third item was keep traveling going. Well, I moved to a different city all the way across the country. Mexico is a big country with different and rich cultures in different areas, so moving to the south west coast has been a whole different experience. I’ve been loving the weather and enjoying the lifestyle.
4. The last item was to write more. I didn’t achieve writing more than last year but at least I published the same amount of posts. Ahh if only I had stopped procrastinating and published this post before the year ended, I could have proudly say that I wrote more than last year.

So for this 2013 resolutions list, I’ll do the following:

Health

I reviewed all my previous resolutions posts since 2008 and saw a clear pattern of them: loosing weight has clearly been an issue. This year I’ve finally managed to do exercise more regularly by joining a gym. The results haven’t been great but at least I have more resistance and my health has been stable.

I still need to loose a lot of gained weight over those 4 years. I can’t plan to loose it all in one. What I want to do is at least loose 5kg and not gain them back the whole year.

Photography

2012 has been a very active year for me in my photography hobby. I got new gear and I’ve been using it quite a lot. I hope this year I can enter a photography course to get better at it and get some formal training or at least assist a professional shoot to learn in the field (or studio).

Cooking

I’ve been cooking for myself even before leaving my parent’s house. I’m not great at it like my friend Luis Perez, but I’m fairly good. I’d like to learn new recipes and cook more elaborated dishes. My cooking specialties right now are steak and hamburgers. I’d like to expand that. And I’m writing this as I smell something nice cooking at Luis’ kitchen.

Projects

This year I’ll launch one project. I’ve already launched one with low but nice results. I have some other projects I want to get out there, but I want to focus this year on only one. Let’s see how that goes.

Oh! I forgot to mention, the fortune cookie message in Spanish says: “You’ll take a decision about something in the near future”. Yes, I know it’s stupidly obvious, but what can you expect from a cookie? Although, sometimes what is most obvious is the least obvious (or expected).

At first, according to my last year’s resolutions post, I thought this year’s resolutions would look like the image above. Fortunately after reviewing a bit further, I did manage to accomplish 5 of 7 goals, so it’s not that bad.

• I went to Google I/O
• I got back into the open source community in Mexico giving talks in Puerto Vallarta
• I traveled several times to San Francisco
• I didn’t initiated my entrepreneurship with a startup, but I started freelancing and got some ideas around.
• I lost some weight and did a bit more exercise than the year before.

This 2011 has been a year with lots of changes. The good times have been great, but the bad times have also been very deep. It’s been a year with a lot of travelling, learnings and experiences.

For this year, I’m still having trouble setting up my goals. I’ve been thinking about this post for the past two weeks and still things look blurry. Maybe because of all the things that happened last year and I still don’t have a clear mind to see where I want to go. Right now I feel this 2012 is a blank sheet of paper. Anything can happen.

Still, I don’t like having absolutely no plans. There’s a saying that has been sounding in my head for the last months: “If you don’t decide what to do with your life, life will decide for you…and it might not be what you wanted”. So I must set a few goals at least.