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!

Back to life, back to reality - 2011 style

Well blogging friends, welcome to 2011. Hopefully we've all safely arrived by now. I'd like to say this will be the year that we will buckle down and secure our blogging fame. But it probably won't be.

To my family, who are eagerly awaiting the Auntie Blogging, I do intend to get back to New England Christmas (complete with candle pin bowling!), but not tonight.

Becky and I rang in the New Year with red plastic champagne flutes, alcopops, and some intense competitive humming (Cranium) in the company of her lovely Wisconsin-based family. There was watching of the ball-drop (an hour delayed, naturally), toasting, kissing, eating, and all of the appropriate festivities. But then of course it was the weekend, and the rest of our vacation continued.

Now, the eve of January 2nd, feels like the real New Year's, in a much more mundane but realistic way. We've replaced champagne with diet pepsi (for me) and water (for her), extended family with our furry babies, and excessive quantities of holiday foods with our bare refrigerator. And tomorrow we will set our alarms for uncomfortably early hours and trudge our way back into the city that never sleeps, except of course when more than a foot of snow falls and then it hibernates for several days.

2010's contents felt pre-ordained (even if monumental) at the end of 2009. We got engaged in mid-November and knew that a good chunk of 2010 would focus on wedding festivities. We already had reservations for our major vacation of the year, and we knew that our other travel would be exclusively to the midwest for wedding planning and various other pre-ordained family functions. In most other ways we anticipated, it turned out correctly, that 2010 would be a year of stability for us. Perhaps in fact the most stability that we have had in any year since we met, and maybe the most stability that we will have for a few years to come too.

2011's contents are murkier. We've chatted about various goals, know we want to have a honeymoon, know we'd like to focus on being a bit healthier and on spending less time on the computer (but fear not, also blogging more! unfortunately for you, like most people, we have a history of failing at new year's resolutions), know we want to have a spring Ocean Grove weekend and a fall Vermont weekend, and know we'd like to someday find some more solid career direction. These and others are among the general partially formed plans we have all along declared for the post-wedding period. But, ready or not, 2011 is no longer some hypothetical distant post-wedding future.

I guess it's time to make it happen.

Welcome to 2011, welcome to Monday morning.