A Time For Everything

Image courtesy of IMGBIN.

It's 2025 -- can you believe it?

On the whole, aside from how quickly the year flew by, it was a pretty good year.

On the other hand, in reviewing my 2024 goals...I fell really short in three of five of the major categories.

The journey to being debt free goes on, and I'm making progress. Mom's house finally selling and the money being dispersed really helped. But I also implemented some other protocols that have been keeping things on track. I haven't kept reading financial books as I intended, but debt is reduced. I do plan to re-read four of the books that had the biggest impact though.

The path to health and wellness took a left turn at Albuquerque. Instead of losing ten pounds, I'm now twenty-ish over my preferred weight. My eating is far from healthy. I'm using the Hinge Health app once again and was doing both yoga and Pilates for a while, but they both fell by the wayside.

BUT

I'm getting back on track starting this month. I received a bike for Christmas, so riding my bike is a thing I can do as well.

Writing was the biggest fail, but I've accepted that my brain is not yet ready to be creative in that way again, so I will continue to fill my well with reading, watching, and listening.

Housekeeping and Home Improvement were also a fairly big fail. I have no housekeeping plan in place and didn't improve much of anything inside the house. The back yard is another matter--made a few improvements there and I mostly kept up with the falling leaves. The weather / temperature will be the biggest factor in how much more I can do.

Letters to my grandma went out more regularly and, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I met and exceeded my reading challenge. My pattern offerings on Etsy remained roughly the same...

So that's my report card on not just the fourth quarter, but my whole year as far as my 2024 fresh start goals are concerned. It wasn't great, but, sometimes, that's life. An you can start fresh at any time.

Speaking of starting fresh -- let's get to this year's fresh start goals!

Jen's 2025 Fresh Start Goals

1. Send Grandma a monthly letter...to be sent no later than the second Friday of the month. Yes, she's still alive, much to my delight and surprise. She was moved into hospice last spring, and turned 99 I think on her birthday in August. So if she makes it to August 23, 2025, she'll turn 100. That's very good news for me!
2. Read 60 books for the year. This includes the Bible (#5 on this list), so aiming for 59 other books. Quite a few will be be repeats from previous years because I enjoy them that much. And as mentioned above, there are four financial books to re-read, one each quarter. That brings me to 55 other books.
3. Home Improvement -- a) get the oven fixed, b) clean out and organize both hall closets, and c) clean out and rearrange my bedroom closet
4. Yard Improvement -- a) trim and maintain the holly hedge, b) plant flowers, c) finish tidying up the back yard in terms of things growing in the fence (we have a lot of random weed vines that I'm trying to eliminate) and kill/remove the random weeds in the "lawn"
5. Another read-through of the Bible. I've done two years of the "One-Year Bible" where you get some Old Testament, some New, a Psalm and a Proverb. I've also done a chronological read-through where you skip around and read the Books in the order in which they were written. This year, I'm reading the Bible beginning to end in the order in which the books appear.
6. Lose ten pounds. The ultimate goal is twenty, but I'm going to start with ten. Eating right and exercising is the only way to make this happen, so they don't get their own line items.
7. Self-Care -- gonna try this again. Mostly home pedicures because my feet are in bad shape as well as coloring my hair on a regular basis. But also things like crafting and puzzles.
8. Add Patterns to Etsy -- I've been saying this for years too, and last year I attempted setting up my own pattern website, but couldn't get any traction on customers clicking over from Etsy for the expanded pattern offerings, so I'm just going to stay with Etsy and get to adding. I'm going to stick with the goal of one non-hockey pattern per quarter still.
9. Take better care of my car -- regular car washes and vacuuming as well as cleaning the leather.

I looked back at the last four years of goals and I seem to be pretty set in my ways.

The new things added are Yard Improvement line item and Car Care. That's because I want to be more active and things need doing. I left off any writing related goals. I struggled all of last year to make any sort of progress and I decided to let things lie for now. The car care is probably self explanatory...

So HAPPY NEW YEAR to one and all.

All the best to you and yours.

Well, here we are again looking ahead at another year and another chance to make positive changes in our lives and further progress toward our goals.

In the meantime, Christmas and New Years Eve were both spent in traditional fashion.

Christmas Eve with DH's family enjoying good food and good company.

New Years Eve was spent selling fireworks and ringing in the new year with some very dear friends. I also met a new friend...two of our faithful fireworks friends recently had a baby.

* * * * * *

Guess what I'm doing tomorrow?? My civic duty! For the first time in a suuuuper looong time, I've been summonsed for jury duty. Not sure how it's gonna go, but I guess I'll find out. I'll let you know in the next post.

* * * * * *

And looky--DD and I spent a lazy Christmas day working on our gingerbread row houses. It's not exactly like the picture, but that's okay. I really enjoyed spending time with DD and working on this together.

I was tempted to see what, if anything, Target had on clearance. :0) Alas, I have plenty of other projects I should get back to.

* * * * * *

Christmas Day was lovely. Santa and the fam were good to me. And we FaceTimed with the Brown-Eyed Girl and her soul mate to open gifts.

There was really no one "best" gift, but I was the recipient of this:

I've been hoping for this bad boy for a couple years now and now it's finally mine. I can't wait to buy some of those "plump-when-you-cook-em" franks and see how well they turn out. Thanks, Mimi!!

* * * * * *

And I'm going to sneak in a quick and dirty 4th quarter goals report....as per my 3rd quarter report, no grades again, and just an update (the full list is to the right):

1. letters and postcards to Grandma in Denmark still going out regularly
2. didn't finish the book; didn't even think about the book
3. my Hinge Health routine has been back in place
4. far surpassed the reading challenge goal
5. writers group duties happen when they happen :0)
6. no new patterns to Etsy shop except for customer requests
7. not much self care going on except the Hinge Health
8. no home improvement projects completed
9. no writer education happened
10. ate like crap--looking at you 2024 to make those changes
    
11. housekeeping was hit or miss, but looking forward to 2024
12. we're still blogging every other week; it's working for me
13. no articles for my writers group
14. didn't study the Personality Strengths
15. got through the whole Bible, with only a couple of missed days (which were made up immediately)
16. no more Goodreads habit

My Fresh Start Goals for 2024 will be along in two weeks.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Here's to a great 2024 for one and all.

Image courtesy of IMGBIN. 

I probably could have written this in November or October for that matter.

My attempts at getting back on track with most of the non-writing goals were thwarted.

I struggled more with mental health (as a result of Mom's death) this quarter than I thought I would. I never felt sad, per se, but I had periods of days when I just really felt blah.

I've also been in learning mode and taking in a lot of information and processing it. It took me some time to realize that that had/has also contributed to my feelings of blah and general tiredness. 

There were some external stresses that contributed to my struggles as well, so making extra things happen took a back seat to getting the basics taken care of.

One of those external things was learning that my shadow aka Rayna had cancer. Needless to say, some of my focus turned to making sure she has a good end of life experience. As of right now, she's still with us. However, I think she's taking a turn and it's not going to be much longer before we say our final good-byes. 😢

Even before her diagnosis, I'd planned on taking some half-days off to do yard work once the weather changed. Post-diagnosis, those days became even more important. Rayna likes to be outside but often won't spend a lot of time in the yard without me. And I'm not always keen on being out there.

But after being house-locked for most of the summer when being outside was a break from the stress going on inside my house, I looked forward to fall and cooler temps. Also, once Mom passed, I'd vowed to throw open all the windows and air out my house once the weather turned. I never got to do that as fully as I had hoped. Maybe in spring.

All that to say I spent a lot of time keeping my sanity in check and very little time doing chores, exercising officially, or cooking healthy meals.

But this post is supposed to be a review, so let's review the final quarter of 2022. I'm going in order of the list on the right side...

1) Grandma continued to receive missives from me. I'm all that's left of her daughter, so yeah. I'm even getting more consistent with it. Finally.

2) No exercise other than upping my average daily step-count and doing yard work, although that tapered off after the first real cold snap. I'd hoped to get back to yoga or riding the elliptical, but I just couldn't carve out the time, and I didn't really have the energy these past couple of months.

3) Honestly, I don't know how long cooking & eating healthy lasted this year. And once Mom moved in, that fell completely by the wayside in favor of more carb/calorie heavy meals. She needed them. After that, food was a comfort. Thankfully, I only gained about five pounds. Then lost a few and gained a few. *sigh*

4) Housekeeping just never really got off the ground for me, no matter how much I wanted it to.

5) I kept up (mostly) with my writers group duties. There's a lot of improvement there to be made here, but I think a list of tasks will help.

6) My one book got published and once Mom passed, I worked consistently on the next hockey book. But consistency was mainly wrought in five-minute chunks just so I could "stay in the manuscript" (on a daily basis) as the saying in writer circles goes. That faded the farther into December we went.

7) I didn't spend a lot of time on learning the craft of writing. I spent money on virtual conferences where I can go back and watch at my leisure, but not much time doing so.

8) I added a few things to the Etsy inventory, but didn't double my stock as I'd hoped/planned.

9) The one thing I have done and will always do is READ. Reading is almost as necessary as breathing to me. In fact, I read about 80-ish books this year.

10) I got back on the Goodreads horse somewhat right after Mom passed, but then slowed down again. I don't think I solidified anything really.

This year (2022) will always be the year that everything was knocked off the rails by Mom's move to Texas, her illness, and her death, so I don't know that I can rightly grade myself. Especially for the third and fourth quarters.

I did what I could when I could, and I made it through the year. That, in and of itself, is a success.

As I've mentioned in a couple of previous posts, it's time to rethink writing and to decide what my plan is going forward.

As I've done for the last umpteen years, I'll post my fresh start goals at the beginning of January.

Have a great week and I'll catch you Thursday.