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[[underlined]] Things to Cultivate [[/underlined]]
a) Calmness, self-possession, gentlemanliness
b) Writing
c) Friendships--write letters, entertain, call on people
d) Drawing
e) Music
f) The Art of Living
g) Original thought and initiative in business.

Each New Year's Day I'd usually set down objectives like this and while I never attained them, I think they did help me to operate my life a little better than I might have otherwise.  Here, once more, I exhorted myself to pursue these aims relentlessly and not to be discouraged if I slipped occasionally--that Rome wasn't built in a day.

On Sunday, giving Willie a chance to sleep until 10:30 a.m., Bab and I took a ride and a walk on the misty Peninsula where we met Maurice Guynes out looking at the migrating swans with his field glasses.  It had been a warm and rainy holiday season, setting an alltime record.  At that point, we'd had just two-tenths of an inch of snow so far.  When Bab and I got home, I put down in my diary, six more objectives for the year:

1) Invent a good, practical DC voltage converter
2) Invent a small locomotive rheostat
3) Publish at least five articles
4) Get a locomotive picture published
5) Get a fiction story published
6) Get a funny picture published

I note that the last two were the least important because my work from then on came preeminently first, but they would be fun to try if I could find time.  Item #1 refers to what was better known as a "DC transformer," and was an unrealistically difficult objective for such as I, but it would appear that I was unfazed by it, nevertheless. I'm not sure just what #2 refers to. As for #3, I think I achieved some or perhaps even all of this.  A photograph is referred to in #4, I think, and was not achieved.  Nor were #5 and #6, not only in 1932, but to this day.  However, I had had two or three cartoons published in the ORANGE PEEL while in college.

In January, we had several contacts with Lenore who had married a young civil engineer named Bill Anderson and they were living in Erie with Bill out of work.  Over the phone, Lenore told Willie she was getting discouraged because she believed Bill wouldn't get a job in the current year either and they hadn't enough money to get their 1932 auto license.  We had them over for dinner on the 16th and learned that Bill had been jobless for two years and they'd been living on her income.  He'd done just about everything he could think of to get a job but being a civil engineer had made it especially hard.  Shortly after that, Lenore had us over there for dinner.  We enjoyed them.