Goals for 2011

Every year in January I come up with a list of things I’d like to do. Not ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ per se, but just stuff I need or want to do during that year. Sometimes I complete my goals, sometimes I don’t. But having them posted gives me something to go back to throughout the year when I’m trying to remember what in the world it was I wanted to do. And so, here are my goals for 2011:


Read some stuff

• Complete the Tuesday Night reading challenge of 17,000 pages for 2011
• Read these books:
• Til We Have Faces ~ C.S. Lewis
• The Stand ~ Stephen King
• As I Lay Dying ~ Faulkner
• The Lords of the Rings Series ~ Tolkien
• Outliers ~ Malcolm Gladwell
• Read whatever else I feel like.
• Keep a good record of what I’ve read so I can track my reading challenge.

Be healthier
Everyone wants to be healthier, right? So there’s some stuff I want to try:

• Reduce my consumption of these:
• Refined & added sugars
• Artificial sweeteners (i.e. Diet Coke – this is my major vice)
• Processed foods
• And since I’ve realized that fake food is just silly, let’s get rid of that too. It’s mostly gone from the house, but I think we need to purge the rest of it. Spray-on-butter, anyone? Seriously, what was I thinking?
• Oh, and I need to lose some weight. But that’s depressing, so we’re not going to talk about it today. 
• Continue hitting the gym twice a week. Since the time I spend on the elliptical constitutes a decent chunk of the actual amount of time I get to spend reading in any given week, I think I’ll be able to stay motivated.
• Milling various grains to bake bread with. This should be interesting, to say the least. But I’ve been reading that if you mill your own stuff you get a lot more nutrients and it tastes yummier. So I want to try some different grains this year and see what tastes the best and what bakes up nicely.
• Not being afraid of good fat. Eat butter. Lots of it. And eat other good stuff like coconut oil and tree nuts and animal fats. Keep pretend fats (hydrogenated and vegetable oils) out of the house.

Declutter, declutter, declutter. And declutter some more.
We have too much crap in our house. Some of it has to go! Here’s the plan:

• Go on a fabric no-buy for 2011. Ack! Rules for my fabric no-buy:
• Don’t buy random fabric. At all. No matter how cute it is, how cheap it is, or how great it *might* look on some future unforeseen project that I’ll likely never finish anyways.
• Buying fabric to finish a project I already started is ok.
• Notions to finish projects are ok
• Obviously, buying fabric and supplies to complete custom orders is ok.
• Work really hard on using up scraps this year. I’ve made a folder of good scrap projects, now I need to use it!
• Finish going through all the CDs and movies in our house, and get rid of most of them.
• One way or another, get rid of the piano in the garage
• Get rid of the rocking chair in the garage
• Take D’s grandma’s chair to be looked at. If it is salvageable, have it re-covered. If not, get rid of it.
• Decide what to do about D’s grandpa’s dresser. Re-finish it or get rid of it.
• Get rid of all the windows hanging out in the garage
• List and sell any photography equipment I'm not going to use

Community Goals

• Work with Cuthbert & Mia to finish vision/values documents for the Tet Cohousing group 
• Learn more about consensus based decision making, and implement it into our cohousing procedures
• Figure out how to successfully re-implement book club into Tuesday Nights. For some reason, our last 3 book club attempts have crumbled.

I think these all seem do-able. I guess we’ll see when 2012 rolls around what I was actually successful at!