Sunday, January 4, 2015

I resolve to change

I want to have a personal way to keep track of my new year's resolutions, which include plans to:

- Simplify. This encompasses a lot of things, some personal and some for the household. It involves things like getting rid of things that aren't needed, being more organized at the house, and doing anything feasible to make a complicated life as simple as possible. My guess is that this goal is going to be the most-discussed aspect on this blog.

- Better myself and my family by cooking and eating better. Expect recipe ideas for our CSA share and from my favorite cookbook ever (Skinnytaste), comments on those recipes, self-flagellation on how much food we purchased and didn't eat, and similar.

- Purchase no clothes, shoes, or purses for a year. That started on Thanksgiving. I plan to add at least one new thing to that list each month. December was scarves, which were initially excluded from the clothes category. I hope to try to make paper towels the January addition, but I have to work a little to convince my husband. It might be modified to be "no more than one roll a month."


As there are people who don't care about my progress, this blog is a simple way to capture my journey without boring my friends and family to death. I am not making any commitments to post regularly or to keep it interesting for the sake of potentially non-existent readers. This is the best way I could think of to create a public record that will keep me honest about what I'm doing while holding me accountable.

So far, a whopping four days in, I'm sticking with my resolutions! :)

Progress under the simplify category has included these things:

- The game closet is cleaned out and organized. We have gotten rid of games that haven't been played in years and made room for the new games Aidan received for Christmas (one of which was sent from the Colorado Barrons that we're trying out tonight). We made room in the closet for all of the outside toys so that they are no longer in Aidan's room. This makes it much easier to keep up with where they are, gave him more space in his bedroom, and has the added bonus of preventing Aidan from getting in trouble because he tries something like, I don't know, stopping a ceiling fan with a baseball bat - a trick he could learn from his uncle Richard. While I was working on the closet, I finally gave up on finding missing puzzle pieces (also known as "cat toys") and threw away the puzzles that will never be whole again.

- We have several glass-front cabinets in the kitchen that I set up to look gorgeous when we bought our house. Now, I'm taking steps to arrange them so that they're appealingly functional rather than only pretty. Work in progress, but I'm getting there. And I already like the results of the one cabinet that's done.

- Since I'm not buying clothes, I'm unsubscribing from all promotional emails that always tempt me to shop. I think I've unsubscribed to all of them, but as new ones come in, I'm requesting removal.  I think I was getting about thirty a day, only one or two of which were even interesting to me, so the removal has made checking email much faster and efficient, especially since only a handful of people I care about actually use email!


We're trying a new recipe tonight to use some of the cabbage from the CSA. Cabbage, quinoa, ground turkey, bell pepper, onion, and seasoning are simmering in the slow cooker now. Here's hoping for good results.

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