New Year’s Resolutions

It’s not quite the New Year, in fact, it’s July…. Not Christmas in July, but close: New Year in July. Today’s my birthday (so it’s my New Year) and I’ve always liked to use my birthday as a time of reflection. A time to re-group, re-assess.  A time to review my mental checklist of things accomplished and set new goals.  I used to have a goal to learn a new skill or have a new experience each year, but I lost track of what particular skill I learned each year and so I’ve abandoned that idea — not the idea to learn or experience things, just to keep track of them.

Looking back: This past year has been a complete whirlwind.  Another surprising year of my ever-changing, ever-wandering lifestyle.  I was supposed to spend this past year in Iraq, but I ended up in Indonesia.  I married my love, which is a wonderful blessing, but getting married is no small life change.  My ideas and plans for the future have had to be reconsidered and adjusted.  I am learning to think about things differently and not to mention that starting off your married life separated by 5000 miles is no easy task.  These are all good things (except the being separated from my hubby).  Change is never easy though, even good changes require a period of adjustment.

Looking forward: The exact details of our future like where we are going next are uncertain.  Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t like that.  (I wrote another whole blog post about this and haven’t published it.  I’m not sure if I will… but maybe I’ll be up to it after things get sorted out.  Writing it was more of an exercise in stress relief for me than anything else.)

But since this is my birthday and I’m taking this time to reflect and set my New Year’s goals, I’ve decided that I’ve been pretty bad at this blogging thing and I’d like to get better at it.  I think of ten things each week that I’d like to blog about and then just never get around to it.  So I’m going to start out easy and set a goal of blogging twice a month beginning in August.  Beware if you’re planning to follow – the topics will likely be wildly random.

As I mentioned, there’s been a lot of change in my life this year and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about changes, new chapters, and cleaning house (literally and metaphorically).  So another goal I’m setting for myself this year is to apply these ideas of change, new chapters, and cleaning house to multiple areas of my life.  We all accumulate junk in our lives in various forms from emotional junk to junk email to actual physical junk.  I’m going to focus on cleaning up the junk I’ve been carrying around with me over the next year, so that next year when the hubby and I set up our home together there isn’t any junk in the way.

Two goals doesn’t seem like enough, so I’m going to round out my New Year goals with one more.  I’ve recently started taking online Photoshop and digital photography courses and really enjoy learning and building on my rudimentary photography skills.  It’s helped to remind me of my interest in photography.  I don’t consider myself to be very creative or “artsy”, but when I look through that viewfinder, I feel creative.  So my goal is to complete these classes and really work on my skills, if for no other reason but that I enjoy it.

So those are my goals.  Feel free to keep me accountable if I’m not actively working on any of them.  🙂