Happy New Year 2011 Style

I’ve been planning this post for several weeks now but I wanted to wait until this morning to do the actual writing. January 1st is always full of aspirations and possibilities and I don’t think I could capture that sentiment properly in mid-December.
Let’s start with the requisite look back for 2010. Last year I wrote about 5 main goals – 3 of which I did really well with, and 2 of which I didn’t make much progress on. To get the negative out of the way, UFOs just didn’t seem very interesting to me this year. The only UFO I finished was the Dribbling Drops socks (love them!). And I did very little for Rediscover What I Already Have. I used one pattern from an old book – Child’s First Sock (love the pattern, love the yarn). I did sell off some more stash (maybe 30 balls of yarn that I no longer had an interest in). I’ve noticed that the yarn I have listed for sale on Ravelry goes faster if I post the price so I need to get going on that.
And we won’t even discuss sock yarn because you can all guess how that went, right?
So, my goals for this year:

• Continue my “lose 10 pounds a year”. Last year I lost 15, bringing my total to 36.5 pounds for 3 years! This is the lightest I’ve been in probably close to 15 years. I feel healthier and I know that the changes are lifelong. Food is no longer the enemy and I can do things like bake cupcakes or go out for a decadent meal and be just fine. I am making one adjustment though – I’m upping this year’s goal to 15. I did 15 last year and I can do it again (this is combined with the next bullet).
• Continue working out. I’ve never been big on working out but I did it this year. I tried yoga early in the year but decided it wasn’t for me. Then I started walking a few times a week. Once it got into the heat of the summer I just couldn’t do it so we bought a treadmill. My love for the treadmill was far from immediate – it can be pretty boring. I finally hit my stride with that in early November (turns out podcasts keep my attention better than TV – who knew?). And then in mid-November I joined a gym. I’m now working out 3 days a week at the gym and 2-3 days a week on the treadmill. I’m building muscles and improving cardio. I monitor my blood pressure weekly and it’s been going down as well – although it was never high I like to monitor it because high blood pressure runs in my family and it’s hard to know if it’s high without checking.
• Use up 12 skeins of sock yarn. I’m still a part of Sock Knitters Anonymous and I joined Sock Stash Knitdown with the Stash and Burn group on rav. As prep for that I made sure all my sock yarn was photographed and in rav. Guess what? I now have 72 different sock yarns – enough for approx 76 pairs of socks.
  

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I knit up 7 pairs’ worth last year but I bought enough for 8 more pairs – hardly the direction I wanted to go in. I started off the first 10 months doing really well – knit up 7 and only bought 2 (and they were even a part of the 7!) but then Rhinebeck hit (3 pairs’ worth) and end of year (3 more pairs’ worth). I’m sure I’ll continue to buy at festivals (and I want to be able to as well). I’m on a small yarn kick right now so I should start off the year strong.

• Cook more during the week. We added in a lot of Sunday cooking last year (and it was a blast – awesome food and great together time). We don’t do as well with the leftovers though, nor do we cook much during the week other than reheating leftovers and the occasional pasta dish or pepper and egg sandwich. I bought a few weekday cook books last year but haven’t used them much. I need to get into the habit of planning and following through on weekday meals. I’m tired of takeout – it’s expensive and not healthy. Any suggestions for how to make this happen?
• Blog more – both for this blog as well as my professional blog. This will probably be the biggest challenge on the list but I enjoy both the writing and the connections I make with you all and truly miss it when I don’t. I’m going to have to set weekly or monthly goals if this one is going to happen.

Each year I set out to make a list of goals that is a bit more realistic than last year but still be a challenge. One thing I started on toward the end of the year that will have a big impact on 2011 is how I manage priorities – identifying the must haves and making sure they happen. For me the must haves are can be summed up as “invest in me” – continue to lose weight and work out as well as blog more. They’re the hardest to keep because they don’t come with the immediate satisfaction of, say, knitting or photographing an FO. But like most non-immediate-satisfaction tasks their results are long lasting and that’s an important theme for me in 2011.
As with every January 1st I plan to spend time doing the things I want to do all year – knitting (natch), baking (I see mini chocolate cupcakes in our future) and blogging (kicked that off strong this morning). Now that this post is done I’m off to wind some yarn and get cracking on a new pair of socks. Whatever you do today, make sure they’re the things you love.