Building on the Foundation

Happy New Year, everybody!!  Last year was the first year I used this blog to post publicly about my personal goals.  While I know full well that the Wider World at Large probably couldn't care less than a scrawny rodent's posterior about one person's ramblings and musings, well, it's my blog. Plus, I found that posting every month on my progress was a very useful method of keeping myself accountable, so here goes for 2014.

As I worked through the "try something new every day" challenge I wrote about in the previous post, I found myself stretching beyond my usual comfort zone.  And the kicker was, I liked it.  I kept each day's "something new" on the teensy side since I believe in small, manageable, concrete goals as opposed to generic ones like "I'll eat better this year."  That's a worthy goal, to be sure, but it helps me more to say, "I'll have at least 5 servings of fruit and/or vegetables every day."  Setting specific goals like "5 servings" made me grab a handful of baby carrots and "something new every day" made me use the pretty things I so often "save" for company until they get dusty and useless.  With that foundation in place, here are my 2014 goals/resolutions/schemes:

The FlyLady system has revolutionized my approach to taking care of our home and I've made big strides in keeping the house more organized, which has had the lovely side effect of making me a calmer person.  Right now, I have my morning and evening routines and I work the daily "mission" (which every week includes family and "me" time, so more yay! there), but there are large chunks of the system I haven't managed to work into my routine.  I hope to change that this year.  So the goal is to add the weekly FlyLady "zone cleaning" to my routine of taking care of the house. 

In the same vein, FryDaddy and I got serious about our finances this year (Christmas shook us a little, but we're back on the financially-astute horse) and I plan to continue that as well in 2014.  It's great to see our debt load shrink, and I want to see that sucker get noticeably smaller this year.  So my goal is to put $5,000 toward our debt this year. (That's in addition to regular payments, of course.)

Exercising has become a much more "everyday" notion for me, and that's the third thing I plan to continue.  Just before Christmas, I started the "Couch to 5K" program and already I'm less sore and, while I still huff, puff, and gasp doing a gentle jogging lap around a flat parking lot, you start where you are, right?  So the goal is to participate in a 5K race.  (I I don't have to run the whole thing, but I have to finish.)

Now for the uncomfortable part.  See, a large chunk of my 2014 resolutions involve something that's a bit embarrassing - confessing.  See, I write about television and I co-host a movie show.  Yet, there are so many movies - really good ones - that I have never seen, at least not all the way through in one sitting.  The same goes for books.  I'm a reader - I often have two books going at the same time, and I usually read 3 - 4 books a month, but I'll also get swamped in work and not pick up a "fun book" for a couple of weeks and there are many, many classics I've never read.  In the past, it's been hard to admit that I have what I consider to be pretty massive holes in my experience, but as I've said in this post, I've come to accept that you start where you are.  Figuring movies are much, much shorter than books, I decided I can handle two movies every month and a book every two months.  (Keep in mind these are all in addition to the movies I see for the show and the books I read for my book club [wonderful group of women, BTW] or that I just come across and want to read for pleasure.)  So the goal is to read:

• Beloved (Morrison)
• Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
• Light in August (Faulkner)
• A Passage to India (Forster)
• The Three Musketeers (Dumas) and 
• Walden (Thoreau). 

No particular order and, please, don't bother replying that you're shocked that I haven't read these.  You start where you are, remember?

For movies, I picked classics from a number of genres, plus a few that I just really wanted to see and never have gotten around to. The goal is to see (again, no particular order and please don't gasp and clutch your pearls):

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (science fiction)
• Apocalypse Now (war drama)
• Bad Day at Black Rock (Western noir)
• The Dark Crystal (family)
• Giant (drama)
• Godfather (crime drama)
• Godfather Part 2 (crime drama)
• Harold & Maude (comedy)
• Ikiru (drama, Japan)
• The Iron Giant (family)
• Mame (musical)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Western)
• Moneyball (sports drama)
• Psycho (horror)
• Raging Bull (sports drama)
• Raise the Red Lantern (drama, China)
• Red Beard (drama, Japan)
• Rent (musical)
• Stagecoach (Western)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical)
• Sunrise (silent drama)
• Top Hat (musical)
• Touch of Evil (film noir)
• The Wild Bunch (Western)

Ambitious, maybe.  But that's what the first week of January is all about!  I'll check in soon and I'd love to hear what goals you're setting and achieving this year!