At the beginning of 2001, with considerable fanfare, I launched the "Someday is Now" society, a group of 188 readers who had responded to a call for volunteers willing to devote half an hour a day, six days a week for one year, pursuing a personal goal.

We all have items on our life's to-do list that we keep putting off, telling ourselves we'll get to them someday — skills we want to learn, books we want to write, household projects we want to complete and so on.

But most of us keep shoving "someday" into the future, to that ever-receding day when we have more time.

So the idea was for members of the SIN society and me to carve out that time in order to make slow, steady but ultimately significant progress toward our goals, which we posted online.

My goal for the year was to take up the piano and learn it well enough to play a solo on "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" at the "Songs of Good Cheer" concerts in December.

My solo ended up being a bit shaky, but the idea proved sound. Of...

Throwing this question out there: When you are away from work -- as I am today, technically -- do you reply to or ignore your job-related email?

I tend to, in part because it will only build up to an unmanagable amount by the time I'm officially back at my desk and in part because it seems courteous to respond (if only to say "thanks, I'll take a closer look at this when I return from vacation).

And I ask because I'm a little stunned that not one of my son's teachers has shot back even so much as an "on vacation" message in response to a query I sent on Saturday asking specific questions, in each case, about the possibility of him doing some make-up work over break.

But perhaps I'm expecting too much of the pedagogical class expecting them never to fully untether during the school year. What does Judge Commentariat say?

I'm putting together my "year in preview" click survey of reader predictions for 2015. What questions -- along the lines of "Will Mayor Rahm Emanuel be forced into a run-off?" "Who will be the GOP presidential front-runner in December, 2015?" and "Will Jay Cutler be the opening day starter for the Bears?" should I ask?

Every year, fellow Tribune columnist Mary Schmich and I conduct a reader contest related to our "Songs of Good Cheer" Christmas-themed singalong programs at the Old Town School of Folk Music — stories, parodies, trivia, something related to the season.

This year we asked for new lyrics to either "Frosty the Snowman" or "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," a pair of similar, somewhat cloying pop songs that rose up the Billboard charts more than 60 years ago. We suggested that readers put these characters in a contemporary setting.

And, as they have for the last 16 years, readers responded enthusiastically. We chose five winners out of scores of entries, gave each winner a pair of tickets to last weekend's sold-out events, and invited them onstage to sing their entries along with Old Town School executive director Bau Graves, one of the superb musicians who share the stage with us.

Each entry was virtually an op-ed column in and of itself.

John McHugh of Green Oaks put Rudolph under the...