Monday, January 2, 2017

The Annual Odometer Reset

Happy New Year Everybody!!


I hope y'all had a safe and happy celebration. I spent New Year's Eve mostly working on setting up a new server for my websites. Midnight came and went in the midst of a lengthy tutorial from CatMan on Secure Socket Layer and https Security Certificates - he's a hopeless romantic, that one.

Over the past few years I've developed a little ritual on New Year's Day of resetting the odometers on both my bike and car. (Well, for the car you don't actually reset the odometer, just the little "trip tracker" thing, which I use to track my annual mileage - but you know what I mean.)

Anyhow, resetting the bike odometer generally involves a somewhat lengthy and drawn out battle with the bike computer.


Is it just me, or does it seem like the smaller the device is, the more complicated the instructions are?


Truth be told, I'm not really very goal oriented when it comes to tracking things like mileage, but I do find it fun to look back and see how many miles I rode and compare it to the number I drove.

So, without further ado... I present my miles for 2016:

I logged 2,645.4 miles on my bike last year... that's about a hundred more than 2015 and not too shabby, if I do say so myself!


Meanwhile, I drove only 537.9 miles... which is about 100 less than the year before. Yay!


And yes, that's the total mileage on my 1990 Honda Civic. I can't decide if that's evidence of great frugality and environmentalism, or simply a person who has no life! Either way, I think it fits nicely with my goal of keeping my little car alive until such time as the internal combustion engine becomes obsolete.

As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that resetting the odometer is a good metaphor for the new beginning that this time of year offers. While I certainly didn't accomplish everything I wanted to, I did make great progress on many fronts, and now it's time to start anew with a clean slate.


And since it's a gorgeous day out there, I'm hoping to start writing on that slate right away with a nice bike ride before the cold weather returns tomorrow! Maybe this will be the year that we'll finally work our way up to the big 65 mile loop!

So I'm curious, do you have any metrics that you track from year to year? And what do you hope to write on your slate this year?