It’s been about two weeks since the magically fresh start that is The New-Years-Eve. Seemed like a good time to go over my resolutions and see how I’m doing so far.

Schedule my life with structure and intent: wow, this has been a toughy because what I didn’t anticipate was just how much momentum life has! I think I’m going to be done with a project on January blah blah but then it turns out that there was this part of a project that wasn’t anticipated and also we have to wait for so-and-so (one of my favorite people, btw) and before you know it January blah-blah has passed by. That forward momentum of just the one project puts pressure on the other projects that are also needing some attention.

All of that has been working together to make it a bit difficult to schedule my life still. It sometimes can feel like I’m going 150 mph - which is simultaneously exciting and scary!

That being said, I have started to schedule time off around the holidays - that way as I am committing to projects this year I will automatically consider more reasonable deadlines. Trust me y’all, it is not fun to be at Thanksgiving dinner and working. Takes all the fun out of the pumpkin pie (which I would have sworn was impossible).

Write more: I have been writing a lot recently, albeit technical stuff. But I love to write technical stuff so it’s been rewarding. When I was publishing textbooks in Mexico back in the 90’s (five total on learning English as a foreign language) I found my tech writing mojo and really have fun writing “to teach”. Right now the tech stuff is all crochet and knit related, but the concept is the same!

Socialize: the other day I was coming back from Fedex (not only do all the employees know me there, a lot of the regular customers do too!) and I stopped by a friend’s house for coffee – and by “coffee” I may or may not mean an adult refreshment, and took some time to get caught up with everything in her life. Granted it was only 45 minutes, but 45 minutes with a 3-D person can go a long way to re-energize me!

Tomorrow is my late mom’s birthday, and usually I go to a cheesy local Chinese restaurant to honor her (sounds odd I’m sure – full explanation here), but this year I thought it would be fun to cook oriental food from scratch, right down to the homemade miso soup. And instead of keeping all the goodness to myself I have invited a few people over too. 3-D people – inside my house! Hooray!

Not hoard: I was very happy to recycle a bunch of cardboard boxes (I counted 17 that were stacking up in my studio). One reader commented that it was more likely that cardboard boxes would become our national currency instead of vacuum cleaners. Not sure I agree so I recycled the boxes and if I die just be sure to dig up the back yard, there may or may not be a vacuum cleaner buried back there. I’m just saying is all.

I also chose the bar area in the family room to start my new year off with clean surfaces and organization. Baby steps y’all. I feel the need to reiterate here that my house is perfectly presentable as is, and would never be considered to be on Oprah as a “before” place. That being said, the bar area seems to be a great place to throw the car keys, the wallet, the cellie, the stereo owner’s manual, etc, and before you know it, it is a minefield of uncategorized “stuff”. So I took an hour the other day put everything away, dusted, cleaned the mirror, etc, and wow, it made the room look so. Much. Bigger!



My plan of action is to just keep tackling the flat surfaces of the house as I go and eventually (I have all year, right?) the place will be nice and organized and this will MAKE me get rid of any extra stuff and face my hoarding tendencies.

So my question to you is, it’s January 13th; do you know where your resolutions are?