Goals: The January Review and The February New

Report on progress towards my yearly goals:

Fitness and Physical Appearance:

1. I will weigh less on January 1, 2016 than I do on January 1, 2015 by at least 30 pounds.

No change.

2. I will average at least 70,000 steps per week for every week of 2015. (This may be too low to achieve #1 above, so I'll adjust if necessary.)

According to my fitbit, I missed my goal be several miles. Week 1, I averaged 11,859 steps per day. Week 2: 10,141; Week 3: 6,262, and week 4: 8,308.
I'll need to step it up. (sorry.)

3. I will be stronger and more flexible and more fit.

Nope. But all is not lost. I sill have my legs. I can walk.

You may recall I downloaded a fitness routine "for beginners." Hah. I am low-impact walking (quickly) back to Leslie Sansone.


Finances:

1. We will owe less on January 1, 2016 than we do on January 1, 2015. (I have a specific number in mind, but I'm not comfortable sharing that here.)

Unfortunately, life happened. We will get it under control fairly quickly, though.

2. I will cook two new vegetarian meals a month until we find six we can put into the meal rotation.

Yay, finally, something went right! I made two vegetarian chilis. The second one was awesome and we'll keep it. 

link to recipe. I have to confess, I omitted the jalapenos and added corn and sweet potatoes. (or yams, whichever one is orange.) And yes, I ate mine over pasta. So good.

House:

1. I will declutter and organize the following areas:

a) Christmas and Holiday items. (Under the basement stairs, china cabinet, basement shelves.) I want to get this done this month. I am comitting to spending at least 15 minutes a day on it--except for days when I work more than six hours.

done.

b) Home office: papers, files, office drawers, command centre.
see February goals

c) Basement storage and recyclable area.
see February goals

d) Sell/Donate the boxes of books in the garage.
not yet. In the Spring.

2. Decorate the front and back hallway and the stairwell. (ORC Challenge starts April 2nd)
Talk to me in April.

3. Fix the bathrooms!
Not yet.

4. Begin the process to wire the house properly.
Not yet.

5. Spend one on one time with each child once a month.
My daughter and I went shopping for jeans and then out for hamburgers.
I didn't do anything specific with my son. 

Goals for February.

1. I just enrolled in a life-coaching course called "Re-discovering You." It's a 28 day challenge in self-improvement. My goal is to do all my homework every day.

2. Sea Change (Leo Babauta's course) switches focus from Meditation (from which I bailed completely, by the way) to healthy eating. I will come up with a plan for that, shortly. The first thing I'm going to do is stop drinking Diet Coke for the month. (Good thing it is a short month!)

3. A Simple Year, another course I am enrolled in focuses on "Busyness" this month. My goal is to do all the reading--and only those assignments I feel may be of value to me. I do not feel like my life is over-busy. (At least, not right now. It will be a different story starting in May through to September!)

3. Laundry seems to be a huge problem. I am not sure what it is. Are we not doing laundry frequently enough? (likely) or do we have too many clothes? (also likely)

sorry for the weird blur

So, I think I need to tackle the frequency problem before I can assess the second problem. I know that my clothing situation is under control: and I am pretty sure that my husband also has a reasonable number. So, the goal is for me to put one load into the wash every morning and have it transferred over at supper and folded and put away in the evening. Something like that.

4. Clean the basement!
The first area I need to address is the laundry room.

5. Paperwork.
Ugh. I have been stashing papers in a drawer of my desk for, oh, about a year. I don't mind doing this at all: I know where papers are if I need them. BUT. It is getting full and a lot of them are likely no longer needed. This is good prep for taxes, too.

6. Complete all homework assignments for Joshua Becker's decluttering module in A Simple Year.
  a. declutter car
  b. declutter two living areas in your home.
            bedroom's done!
  c. clear all functional surfaces.
  d. implement a "living with less" experiment.
  e. begin tackling a hard to declutter room or area. (see basement, above.)

7. Take one small step towards writing my Canadian History curriculum for children.

Whew. That's a lot. Almost too much for such a short little month!