Sunday, February 2, 2014

February Resolutions

January flew by and it's time to make resolutions for February! I posted here about my January resolutions and how I fared with those. 

These are the things I want to accomplish in February:

  • Read The Fault in Our Stars
  • Spruce up the guest bedroom for special visitors (who are coming in March!)
  • Watch four Oscar-nominated movies
  • Make one project with my Kreg jig (I think it's gonna be based on this one)
  • Bonus: Learn the basics of American politics (like, um, who the Senators are for Texas and what the heck the majority whip is).
Do-able, very do-able. The movie-watching one may seem like a piece of cake, but that one is actually quite daunting. I'm not a movie watcher. The four I think I'm gonna do are Dallas Buyers Club, Captain Phillips, American Hustle, and August: Osage County (I know that one isn't technically nominated for Best Picture, but there are acting nominations so I'm counting it).

Saturday, February 1, 2014

January Resolutions: How'd I Do?

Instead of making whole-year New Year's resolutions for 2014, I decided to do monthly resolutions this year. I made three (and a bonus) resolutions for the month of January.

Get up at 5 am every week day
I did pretty good on this one. The last week of January I didn't keep up with it, but it was because I was going to bed too late. I really, really enjoyed having the extra time in the mornings. I didn't do as much of the blogging and reading I wanted to because I found I had to really do active stuff n order to just not fall back asleep. I did get cleaning and ironing and laundry done, so that's awesome. It was really, really hard for me to actually get out of bed (though it always is, whether I'm getting up at 5 am or 6:30 am), but once I did, I was glad to not have to just rush to get to ready for work. I'd like to try to keep it up in February. 

Read The Interestings
Done! Read and then reviewed here

Get our entryway looking like it's part of a house where people actually live
Done! I really like the way our entryway looks now. I wrote about it here (note: the pictures are terrible in the post because that tiny little light-less room is really hard to photograph). 

Bonus: Run three times each week 
I counted this as a bonus because I already work out Mon-Tue-Thu and Wednesday evenings are taken up with a committee meeting. That means I would have had to run every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in January to achieve this, and I knew life had a very good chance of getting in the way of a very specific requirement like that. I am really happy with how much I've been running though. I ran 15.7 miles in January, and I'm up to running 1.5 mile straight. My fastest time is a 11:59 mile. This is not a fast time in the world of running, but it's great for me. In December, I was still running a 13:00+ mile, so I know I'm getting stronger and making progress.