I'm looking forward to the New Year. I remember when I was a teen there was that MTV video by U2 called "New Years Day". For economists, the New Year starts with the annual meetings where thousands of economists agglomerate in some cold dreary city to meet and laugh. The Winter Quarter then starts at UCLA and I'll be teaching MBA's Micro economics and later in the quarter I'll be teaching freshmen "environmental science".
I have some big hopes (career wise) for 2015. I hope that my book manuscript is accepted for publication at a strong academic press. I hope that some of my new working papers get cleaned up and submitted to some good journals. I hope that some of the half baked ideas I've written down can be developed into new working papers. I'm also thinking about making some big changes in my life that will help me to achieve some goals that up to now I've haven't been able to reach. So, the New Year does focus my mind on resolutions and achieving medium term goals.