2009 New Years Resolutions

As usual, I have 5 resolutions for 2009 that I plan to do my best to live up to.

1. Write an iPhone application


2. Limit myself to 2 Greens+ chocolate bars per week - You may remember that I have a bit of an addiction to these


3. Exercise at least 5 days a week


4. Straighten the house each night before I go to bed - I started this habit a few days ago and I like it so much I want to make it a regular thing


5. Visit 2 new places this year - I make this resolution every year. I think it's a good one.

2008 Resolutions - How did I do?

Just about a year ago today, I made my annual list of 5 New Years Resolutions. No point in making them if I don't go back and see whether or not I lived up to them. So, let's take a look...

1. Chew my food thoroughly - I remembered to do this only intermittently and didn't remember until now that it was a resolution I had made.


2. Walk my dog twice a week - If you go by a weekly average, then yes. There were 2 months in there where I walked him every day. During the cold weather though, he was lucky if he got even 1 each week. So I didn't really stick to this one either.


3. Plant a vegetable garden - Yes! I did do this! Of course, I planted it too late and now everything appears to be completely dead, probably from frost. But it still counts!


4. No more hitting refresh buttons on websites, email, and RSS readers - Oh my goodness, did I really say that? Yeah, didn't stick with that AT ALL. But I am better than I was a year ago. There are only a couple of things that I check compulsively now and I don't exactly do it all day long like I used to.


5. Travel to 2 new places this year - I don't know. Does Charlotte count? I don't think I can really say I did this. I've been too worried about money to take a real vacation anywhere. I went to New Hampshire last January, which counts, but that's only one new place.

So...wow, terrible. Usually I stick to at least 2. This year I can only say I really stuck to one, and the result of it is a giant outdoor litterbox for the cats (which may also explain why nothing is growing in my garden). I will say though, that with the exception of the 5th resolution, I made significant progress with regard to all of them.

I haven't come up with my resolutions for 2009 though. Maybe I need to aim lower, huh?

2008 New Year's resolutions

It's a new year and my favorite holiday. The day when I like to reassess what is most important to me in the year ahead, and commit it to paper. Or, in this case, to a blog post. So here it goes – my New Year's resolutions for 2008:

1. Chew my food thoroughly. I eat way too fast. Chewing is the first phase of digestion, and is just as important as the rest.


2. Walk my dog twice a week. I have finally managed to walk him weekly, and he has a big yard and a dog door, but he really needs and deserves more excitement in his life.


3. Plant a vegetable garden. There is nothing as delicious as food you grow yourself. And it should save some money too since produce in the mountains seem rather pricey.


4. No more hitting refresh buttons on websites, email, and RSS readers. It's one thing to check in on my favorite sites. It's quite another to lose hours a day hitting refresh over and over just in case something changed.


5. Travel to two new places this year. I make this resolution every year. I'm already off to a good start since I flew into New Hampshire late last night.

Have a joyful and prosperous 2008!

When resolutions no longer serve me

My good friend and yoga instructor Jill in Seattle once announced to our yoga class that if anyone ever needed help sticking to a commitment, like a New Year's resolution, they should talk to me. I love any excuse to make resolutions because it's a good way to assess what my goals are and it's a good exercise in personal discipline.

I don't always stick to my commitments, as evidenced by my failed attempt to give up my compulsive web statistics checking. But I normally stick to about half of the resolutions I make.

This year, I made 5 New Years resolutions:
1. Make one new raw food recipe every week
2. Fast for at least 24 hours once per month
3. Travel to two new places this year
4. If SideCar (a small vegan grocery in Seattle) sells it, buy it there
5. Stop eating when I'm full

I've already completed #3 with a trip to Peru and a weekend road trip to South Carolina. I stuck to #4, even when it meant I didn't have toilet paper because SideCar was closed for the night, but had to give it up when I moved to Asheville. And I'll admit that I actually forgot entirely about #5 until just now, although I think I've naturally moved away from that bad habit over the last few months.

But the first two resolutions have opened my eyes to a new way of thinking. I made a conscious choice to give these up because they were no longer serving me.

I fasted once per month through September. Then October came and went, and I just didn't see the point. It's not that there is no benefit to fasting. It's just that deciding to not eat for 24 hours seemed arbitrary to me since I don't actually know much about how to fast. More importantly, I feel like I am doing a whole lot of amazing things for my health that I do know about and that I know are benefiting me. So I stopped fasting.

The weekly raw recipes have been a lot of fun. But as I get healthier, I find myself craving simpler foods. The fancy recipes stopped being fun at some point, and started to feel like a time-consuming burden. So that's it. No more weekly raw recipes unless I happen to feel like trying something new.

The purpose of my resolutions is to improve my life in some way. So if a resolution is holding me back, then out it goes. Hopefully, that will allow room for something new and useful.

I hate computers and other positive thoughts for the new year

One of the best parts of my job was having a really great laptop with tons of power, disk space, and a team of people ready to fix anything that went wrong with it Monday through Friday.

My beloved iBook has been a modest but trusted friend for over three years now. Over the last few months it has gotten slow and crabby. Programs hang and webpages take so long to load that it is sometimes completely unusable. But what did I care? I had my work laptop to fall back on. No longer.

After arguing with my iBook for a good two hours this morning, I finally decided to reboot. Now it won't even start up. It really showed me a thing or two with that one.

So here I am, at home with nothing but free time to do whatever I want. And no computer. No computer??? There was a time when that was just normal life. Now I can't imagine a single thing I would want to do that doesn't involve using a computer for something. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Hating computers while at the same time being totally addicted to them isn't the healthiest of combinations.

This post was going to be about my list of New Year's resolutions, so I will prove to myself that I can continue to live life even without my beloved iBook by posting them, as planned. Here they are:

1. Make one new raw food recipe every week
2. Fast for at least 24 hours once per month
3. Travel to two new places this year
4. If SideCar sells it, buy it there
5. Stop eating when I'm full

Not sure how I'll buy plane tickets to travel to new places, find out how to fast without killing myself, or check the bus schedule to get to SideCar without the all-knowing, all-seeing internet, but I'll have to muddle through.

Wishing you a happy and healthy 2007!