Here’s to another fantastic year! Here are some of my New Year’s Resolutions, in no particular order.

1. Lose 20 pounds and get back into shape.
2. Replenish the old art supplies and start painting and drawing again.
3. Finish the children’s book with Sara. Illustrate it.
4. Get refocused at work and outline goals, separately.
5. Train yourself to be more of a morning person. Get to sleep before 3 AM and wake before 9 AM. Get 8 hours of sleep a night (HA!)
6. Reorganize all music, movies, and photos.
7. Travel! Book the European cruise for 2011. Setup the vacations for Ireland in Spring-2010 and Oktoberfest in Fall-2010.
8. Go skiing. You haven’t been skiing since eighth grade. It’s about time.
9. Pay off ALL student loans by Dec 2010.
10. Buy the building and open the restaurant by the end of the year.
11. Stop double-booking yourself with everyone. Make better use of your iPhone’s planner.
12. Leave weekends in the summer open for the beach house and boating/fishing/etc.
13. Replenish the Emergency Fund.
14. Start cooking more. Take the advanced class at the Restaurant School.
15. Participate in the 3sixty5 project.

Keep me on top of these. I may edit them in the next few days (probably just by adding a few more). Happy New Year!

So, this site crashed back in the summer, and I really didn’t care. For years, I have struggled to give it a face, to figure out exactly what I want it to be. And I still don’t know. But I recently brought the ole’ art easel back up from the corner of the basement where it was collecting dust. I hope to get back into a few things (drawing, painting, photography) and figure maybe I can share it on here. But then again… check back in a year, and this still may be the most recent post.

** I erased all of the syndication posts I was sharing out.  Why bother duplicating a post?  I’ll add my Google Shared Items to the side for anyone interested.

Wow. This sounds scarily possible: SPOILER ALERT!!!

Here comes a slew of championships! Billy Penn has been placed atop the highest building in Philadelphia once again. The Curse exists no more (but does this count?).

Keeping alive a centuries-old tradition – with a Philadelphia twist – a beam was hoisted to the highest point of Comcast Center today, topping off Philadelphia’s new tallest skyscraper.

There was a small tree at one end of the beam, which had been signed by workers and those gathered for the ceremony, and an American flag at the other.

Between them was a statue of William Penn, the city’s founder. There is a myth that Philadelphia’s sports teams will not win a championship as long as a building “rises above Billy Penn” on City Hall, said Bill Hankowsky, chief executive officer of Liberty Property Trust, the Malvern company that is building Comcast Center.

He was referring to the controversy two decades ago when One Liberty Place, also built by Liberty, became the first to break that barrier.

“We don’t believe in the myth, but to be safe we’ve added the statue of Billy Penn,” Hankowsky said.

Yippee!

Want a visual as to where the home prices are headed?

I think I am safe in the Philadelphia market, as I have read and heard that the Philly market is desirable and sustaining growth. (FYI, Jay Lamont hosts “All About Real Estate” on WPEN 950 on Sunday mornings from 10 until 12. I recently setup my computer to record it for me since I’m usually sleeping or busy. Very informative, great guy) Anyway, when dealing with the Real Estate market as with dealing with Real Estate in general, the saying’s the same: “location, location, location”… to compare a local market nationally sometimes does not make any sense. The Philadelphia market is still hot, says I.

The Jersey shore, on the other hand, has cooled off. But having acquired 300% equity in the house over the past 4 years, I think I can handle a down period for a little while. Back to work… Thanks Josh, for the clip. Interesting visualization.

Too bad social network sites weren’t the fad when I was at Penn — would have made stalking that much easier. Kudos to Penn Masala. Funny, yet probably very true.

Philadelphia sports franchises are cursed. We haven’t won anything in 23 years in professional sports. For a four-sport town, that’s 92 years without a Championship. The Phillies are the losing-est team in the American history of professional sports. It’s pathetic. Everyone has their favorite curse that somehow is supposed to explain just why we can’t get there.

My favorite is the Curse of Billy Penn (my emphasis):

The Curse of William Penn is an alleged curse, sometimes used to explain the failure of professional sports teams based in Philadelphia… Atop City Hall at Broad and Market Streets in Center City… stands a statue of William Penn, city founder and original proprietor of the then-British-colony of Pennsylvania (meaning “Penn’s Woods”). By tradition—though not by law—no building in the city rose above this statue, until, in March 1987, a glass skyscraper called One Liberty Place opened just three blocks away. One Liberty Place dwarfed City Hall by 397 feet (121m)…

Philadelphia sports teams had just before then enjoyed an enviable run of success: the … Phillies had won the 1980 World Series and the 1983 National League pennant; the … Flyers had won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1974 and 1975, and were a regular presence in the finals (to wit, 1976, 1980, 1985, and 1987); the … Eagles had appeared in Super Bowl XV; and the … 76ers had won the championship in 1983, as well as making the finals in 1977,1980, and 1982. …. Construction on One Liberty Plaza began in 1984, one year after the last championship season in Philadelphia.

Unlike other “curses” that seem to strike particular teams (Boston Red Sox’s Curse of the Bambino, Chicago White Sox’s Curse of the Black Sox…), this evil is said to have struck four professional teams in the same city, and has now drawn “first blood” with an untimely death.

I have a solution.

Move the Billy Penn statue.

It’s simple. Hear me out. The new Comcast Center is presently being built. Besides housing the owners of two of the teams franchises, it will be the largest building in Philadelphia. Construction is still going on. So move the statue. Yes, the statue of Billy Penn. Move it. Top off the Comcast Center in style and break a quarter-century curse.

The logistics are there. The statue weighs 27 tons. And I did a little research on helicopters (when I say little, I mean I searched Google once). The Heavy Lift MI-12s (HOMERs) can apparently lift 36 tons in flight… so it must be possible to move this guy.

And what do we put atop City Hall in Billy Penn’s place? How ’bout that Rocky statue that has a hard time finding a home. What Philadelphian wouldn’t mind throwing tax money towards that?