New Year's Resolutions

I know it's a little late in the month to be making resolutions. I promise I made them prior to New Year's Eve, I just hadn't gotten around to going public yet. Here we go. Deep breath...

In 2009 I will quit cracking my knuckles.

Now this is not a habit that bugs me, in fact, I barely notice that I do it. But it drives B up the wall, and so way back in November, he used it against me as a bargaining chip. He said he would quit smoking if I'd quit cracking my knuckles. I thought this was a bit unfair, since he's been swearing he wants to quit since the day I met him, and I have never once proclaimed any desire whatsoever to stop cracking my knuckles, but I really really want him to quit smoking, so I said ok. I claimed I wanted to save him from lung cancer. He claims he wants to save my fingers from arthritis. I told him that's a myth.

In the last two weeks, I've realized that I crack my knuckles constantly. I had no idea. I crack them at work. I crack them in the car. I crack them at derby practice. I probably started cracking them around the time I stopped biting my nails, because now that there's a moratorium on the cracking, the nail biting habit seems to be back. One knuckle is refusing to cooperate and constantly cracks itself now.

Other than that I've been pretty good. He's not doing too badly either. He's trying to replace cigarette smoking with pipe smoking and then wean himself off the pipe. I offered to teach him to knit because I read this study that says knitting helps people stop smoking, but he politely declined. So if you see us sitting out on the porch together, I'll be the one biting my nails, he's the one smoking the pipe. Does quitting a bad habit count if you just replace it with another one?