About that New Year Thing

It's the start of another new year. I have a long history of making New Year's resolutions and then failing to achieve them, but it still doesn't stop me from having a desire to start fresh and make changes as we swap in a new calendar for the old.

Last year was so dominated by the wedding and all the planning involved that it feels a little strange to not have one big project to focus on this year. I'm actually not mourning the loss of wedding planning or wishing for more DIY projects or anything like that; it's just that I don't have one big thing to obsess over so now I have space to figure out where I want to focus my energies.

I've read on a few blogs this week about the idea of One Little Word: selecting a word for the year to be a point of focus and reflection throughout the year. As far as I can tell, the idea started here and has now boomed into all sorts of internet craziness (you can pay to take a One Little Word online class?) I really like this idea though, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

For 2011, I think my word is intentional. Throughout the course of a day/week/month/year, I do all sorts of things without thinking about them. And thank goodness for some of that--imagine if I had to think carefully every time I brushed my teeth! But there are a lot of things I do that really deserve more thought and care than I give them. And there are many things I would not do if I was a bit more intentional in my actions.

In particular, I want to be more intentional about

• How I spend my time. I always feel like I don't have enough time (don't we all?), but let's face it: I waste an awful lot of time staring at my computer and doing nothing useful at all. That's time that could be spent exercising, cooking, crafting, reading (books, not facebook!), volunteering, exploring the corner of the world I live in, or millions of other things, not least of which is spending more quality time with my wife. In fact, even updating this blog more often would be a million times more productive than refreshing my facebook news feed or checking to see what the most emailed NYTimes articles are today.
• How I spend my money. I'm pretty frugal, but there are certainly things I spend money on that don't really bring me much happiness but still waste money. I'm trying harder to skip spending money on the candy bar that I only want because I'm bored or the Chinese food that we only want because we're too lazy to cook and instead save that money for something we actually want (and sometimes that something turns out to be Chinese for dinner!) And maybe, just maybe we could go to Target "just to pick up a few things" and not end up spending $100? I'm pretty sure we don't actually need to buy every random limited edition Reese's product ever made, for example...
• What I eat. I tend to go in spurts of eating healthy followed by long stretches of eating mostly crap. Don't get me wrong--we cook dinner at home most nights and don't eat a lot of pre-packaged foods by American standards, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. Like vegetables. I heard they're good for me. So this year I'd like to be more intentional about eating more vegetables, eating fewer processed foods, and trying new recipes. I get caught in food ruts, but between all the cookbooks I have and all the recipes I've bookmarked online, I think I should have plenty of new foods to keep me busy in the kitchen this year!

How about you? Do you have any goals or resolutions of sorts for 2011? And do you have any recipes you'd like to share? I'm looking for new ideas!