New Year - Old Goals

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm not one for New Years resolutions - I've come to the conclusion that if I'm going to change something about myself or my habits, it's best to start trying RIGHT NOW instead of waiting for a kickoff date. But I know that they really work for some people, and I won't lie - I use January 1st as an opportunity to evaluate my current goals and adjust tactics.

So, in the spirit of reflection, let's take a look at one of my lagging projects that I finally finished recently - pillowcases!

For Christmas of 2012, I decided I would embroider pillowcases for some close friends and family. I successfully completed a couple and shipped them off to the recipients before I had a chance to take pictures, but here is one that I completed in time for Christmas and didn't deliver until November 2013:

Here are a couple that I completed late and delivered later:

And here's one that I didn't complete until just recently and was able to just hand to the recipient immediately:

The moral of this story? My goal last year was to get this blog up and running. This year, I'm going to be consistent about it. Fingers crossed, I'll get 52 posts up over the course of the year. The vast majority of them will be finished crafts. Dare I say that I will complete 52 projects this year??

Stay tuned - we'll see :)

Oops.... July Goals

Well, I certainly failed at August! After being relatively dedicated to blogging twice per week throughout July, I just kind of dropped off the face of the planet. I don't really have an excuse - I just.... stopped. But no more! Back to twice per week for me!

Let's do a quick review of July's goals. I decided that I would score myself out of 12 (1 point per goal per week) with a total possible score of 15 (with my bonus items). Here's how I did:

• Get in the groove of posting on your blog
• Four weeks in a month, three weeks worth of posts, so I'll give myself 3 points here. Oh, and I definitely accomplished the bonus (travel posts for Boston and California), so I get a total of 4 here.
• Get back on board with Couch-to-5k
• I wanted to get to week 5, but I only got halfway through week 4. And then stopped entirely. I'll give myself 3 points here, and I didn't register for a formal event, so no bonus.
• Budget budget budget!
• Ha. Hahahahaha. This really failed. I feel like budgeting is the real-life version of college studying. Each person has to figure out their individual techniques, and there's no way to figure it out than trial and error. July was an error, BUT I think I discovered a method to gradually reduce my dependence on my credit card. So I get a measly 1 point here, with some major hope for the future.
• Summary
• All told: 8/12. 67%. Technically a failing grade, but I'm going to look at it as getting 2/3 of my goals accomplished, which isn't too bad. Hopefully September goes better!

September goals:

(After struggling to recreate my July image, I've given up. Maybe perseverance should be a September goal?)

• Crafts
• The whole purpose of this blog was to burn through my halfway done crafts. Let's get three of those lingering crafts out of the way. That means I get one freebie week to make something new and fun!
• Success looks like finishing the big three lingerers (I know what they are, but no spoilers for yo : D ). Failure looks like having two or more left to do at the end of the month.
• BONUS: Finish the fourth lingerer.
• Games
• I'm starting a new project that involves playing A LOT of video games. This may seem like a bit of a waste of time to a lot of people, but it's a personal goal I would like to accomplish. Anyway, I'd like to get going on these.
• Success looks like playing through three games over the course of the month. Failure looks like not finishing at least two.
• BONUS: Get some pre/post filming done.
• Friends
• I moved to Seattle almost 8 months ago, and I haven't been good about making new friends or even keeping up with the friends I already have here. I'd like to work on that this month.
• Success looks like hanging out at least twice with new friends and at least once per week with existing friends. Failure looks like not connecting with new friends and not making an effort to see existing friends.
• BONUS: Get them all together. Cocktail party, maybe?

So, those are my goals. Do you have any goals for this month?

BOSTON!!!

So I've kind of dropped the ball on getting my regularly-scheduled posts out for the past week, but I feel like I have a relatively decent excuse: I was on vacation!

I have a couple of friends living in Boston right now, so I took advantage of my job's generous paid time off policy to take a long weekend seeing a corner of the East Coast I'd never seen before. You might recall from my goal list that I hope to visit all 50 states in my life, and on this trip I knocked a whopping THREE off the list!

I spent most my time in Boston, but went to Rhode Island for Corgi-palooza (a friend of a friend was performing and I wasn't about to pass up on that opportunity!) and Connecticut to visit a friend who is an RA at a summer camp there.

Here are some pictures of my adventures. Unfortunately, I am terrible about taking pictures, so I managed to leave without getting any pictures of me with my friends, but I did get some good shots of some historical places in Boston!

The East Cost has the most healthy hydrangeas I've ever seen. Look at the colors! 

Park St church 

The Old Corner Bookstore (one of the oldest publishing houses in the country) is now a CHIPOTLE.  Sad.

This is the guy who rode with Paul Revere. Frankly, I think he's bitter Longfellow's poem wasn't about him.

Ok, I lied. I got ONE picture with one of my friends. CHEESE!

This sums up Boston for me - history in the heart of a gorgeous city. 

Hot and humid though my trip might have been, I had a ton of fun and can't wait to go back!

First Monday Post!

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was going to start blogging twice per week. This was to give me more structure and to encourage myself to spend more time working on my blog (for example, I really hate the color scheme, so the more I look at it, the more I want to change it!).

My Monday posts are going to be more of my self-help stuff. I'm a 20-something college grad who has very little idea what is going on in her life; I'm happy to report that I have a job that I adore, but that's about all that I have figured out. So this is going to be a way to prove to myself that I am slowly but surely "figuring it out."

It's lucky that this first Monday post has landed on the 1st of the month, because I've decided to start setting monthly goals! (Edit: Turns out, even if you have a post scheduled to publish, it won't publish if it's set as "draft." Eh, you live and learn, right?) There is a lot of research on how important goals are to a person's well-being, so in the wake of my post-graduation collapse (of body and mind, I must say), I realized that unless I set goals for myself, I'm going to just stagnate.

So I have a list of discrete goals for myself that I'm trying to work toward, but those are more long-term. I need short-term goals to keep me going. To that end, I'll be setting three goals to focus on over the course of the month. Analyst that I am, I'll have metrics by which to measure my success so that at the end of the month, I can say whether I succeeded or failed in a given month. Oh, and there's also going to be extra credit for each goal. Because I like bonus rounds.

So happy July! Here are my goals:

• Get in the groove of posting on your blog
• There's a reason that you started this blog. Don't give up on it!
• What does success look like? The August goal post being the 10th post since this one.
• What does failure look like? Fewer than 8 posts over the course of July. Shame.
• BONUS: Travel posts from California and Boston!
• Get back on board with Couch-to-5k
• I started this program in May and loved it, but then I skipped a couple work outs, and that was the end of that.
• What does success look like? Completing Week 5 of the program by the August goal post.
• What does failure look like? Failing to make running a habit over the course of the month - not getting through 5 weeks of the program
• BONUS: Do research on/register for an organize 5k.
• Budget budget budget!
• I am kind of a failure at personal finances right now. I mean, I'm not totally broke, but I find myself running thin or relying on my credit card near the end of a pay period. I can do better.
• What does success look like? A written list of every expenditure over the course of the month  (extreme, yes, but I'm sick of feeling poor when I make a comfortable amount of money). From this, I should be able to draft a reasonable budget, complete with timeline within a month. 
• What does failure look like? A credit card bill with the same balance as last month.
• BONUS: Allocating small amounts to save toward larger purchases (dresser, drill, bedroom rug)

So that's what I hope to do with the next 30 (Edit: 29) days. I'll let you all know how it goes. Wish me luck!