Resolved

Ah yes...it's the New Year, and that means another attempt to get this poor, abandoned blog up and running with some semblance of regularity, to say nothing of a cohesive theme and all that. All in all, though, I don't feel too guilty. 2010 was a pretty good year. There were some disappointments, but I learned a lot, and feel like I've come out ahead, in the end. It's certainly not one of those years where I'd say "good riddance!" and do my best to shoot the year in the ass as it walked into the history books (see: 2001, 2008).

If I had to give 2010 a name, it would have been the Year of the Plan. I think I learned a lot about planning for the goals in my life and I saw the success of some of them. Some plans failed to materialize the way I envisioned, as well, and I think I learned how to better plan because of them. Back in September, I was reading a book about goal setting, and one of the statements the author made was that people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in one day, and underestimate what they can accomplish in three months. He added that a year was too long of a time frame for most people to think about, and led to procrastination. With all this in mind, I made a bunch of goals for the last quarter of 2010. I accomplished a few, made progress on a few, and didn't even get to some. All in all, though, it ended up being very helpful for me. So, in the spirit of accountability, I'd like to share my goals for Q1 2011:

Physical/body goal: Lose 10 lbs
To accomplish this, I will continue doing WW, but will also modify it slightly and lower my carb intake. I'm starting to notice that my carb intake is inversely proportional to my mood. And I like being in a good mood. I'm also going to add a second dance class and keep up my gym attendance.

Career: Finish a draft of the alpha-pinene paper aka The Thesis
Seriously. This damn thing follows me around like Marley's ghost. It's time to scratch it off the list.

Social/emotional: meet more people
This one's a continual challenge: find more single people to hang out with. All my married/committed friends are wonderful, but I am the third wheel on some occasions. I'm thinking about seeking out a singles group of some stripe to make this happen.

Creative--lots of goals
I want to move sewing back up to the front. There's dance costumes that need making, street clothing that needs making, and all number of smaller things I need to finish. I have a long-promised Spaceman that WILL get out of my closet this quarter, and you can pretty much shoot in any direction in my stash closet and hit a sewing project in some stage of completion. It'll be like spring cleaning, but for finishing. I also want to read more--so I'll add that I want to finish 3 books, too. Finally, writing. I want to write a bit more. I write for my job, so I tend to get all my word-smithing Joneses met that way, but the net result is that my own work doesn't get attention (see: Thesis). So I've taken some steps to build a space for that, and wish to post something here every other week. (at least) We'll see how it goes.

What about you? What did you learn in 2010? Any plans for 2011?

Whew! That's everything. For this quarter.