100 things to do in 2013

I've been sort-of trying to get my mind and my life back into some sort of order now that I'm back at work. I thought I was making progress in getting things back on track after the disruption of moving house last year, but then along came the festive season, ad my will-power went on holidays too.

One of the things I've been working on over the last few days is a list of 100 things to do in 2013. I'm struggling to get to 100 and, of those that I have, I'm worried that a few of them sound awfully like New Year Resolutions, which I resolve not to make.

Whatever, I'm working through the process and have come up with a list of (almost) 100 things to do this year, including habits to get into (or get back into in some cases). The habits will be things I'll work on during the year - they aren't things I expect to start all at once in January and stick to all year. Rather, I hope that by the end of the year I'll have made progress in them.

So, to keep myself honest, here are the ones I'm prepared to talk about. Maybe even blog about.

1. Improve my eating habits to make at least 90% of my diet free of processed food.
2. Reach my target weight (lose about the same again as I lost in 2012).
3. 15,000 steps per day.
4. Complete my 2012 Project Life album.
5. Keep up to date with 2013 Project Life.
6. Eliminate gluten.
7. Do the One Little Word workshop.
8. Plan a new herb garden.
9. Start a small vege garden (along the lines of the book One Magic Square).
10. Keep the house organised (establish routines).
11. Finish the DVD from our 2011 holiday for Juniordwarf.
12. Make DVDs for Juniordwarf for events from 2012.
13. [Private]
14. Scrapbook more.
15. Get back into routines I'd started last year.
16. Regular weekly "me time".
17. Weekly meal plan.
18. Go to bed before 11 pm.
19. Blog at least three times a week.
20. Learn to make yogurt.
21. Use beautiful stationery.
22. Reduce alcohol intake.
23. Get back into yoga.
24. Sew something. Anything. Just use the damn sewing machine!
25. Keep my One Line A Day journal.
26. Buy decent walking shoes.
27. Go to a National Park I've never been to.
28. Go camping at least twice.
29. Internet-free time.
30. Ride my bike.
31. Get my bike in a rideable condition.
32. Read []
33. Read []
34. [Private].
35. Read []
36. [] project.
37. Make bread. Maybe gluten free.
38. Start DVDs for Juniordwarf's 1, 2 and 3 years.
39. Eat more vegetables.
40. Give Mrs Smyth her mix tape CD of 2011 songs.
41. Donate blood.
42. Use some of my scrapbooking stash.
43. Drink more water.
44. Revisit my Happiness Project commitments.
45. Perspective!
46. New habit: if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it now.
47. New habit: put stuff away where it belongs straight away.
48. Make a list of jobs that I can do in 5/10 minutes for when I have a short gap in my day.
49. Laugh more.
50. [Private].
51. Do parent help in Juniordwarf's class.
52. Drink more herbal tea.
53. Get a notice board for the kitchen.
54. Get a notice board for the study.
55. Decorate the study.
56. Order the new blind for the dining room.
57. Take a photo that I want to display in the house.
58. Set up a worm farm with Juniordwarf.
59. Watch the Wizard of Oz with Juniordwarf.
60. Make decent dinners on Sunday nights for leftovers for weekday lunches.
61. Declutter regularly.
62. Go to MONA.
63. Do NaNoWriMo.
64. Be more organised at work.
65. [Private]
66. Make vanilla essence.
67. Make tomato sauce.
68. Enter a photo in at least one show.
69. Submit a layout to Creating Keepsakes.
70. [Private]
71. Appreciate the small things.
72. Notice things.
73. [Private]
74. Visit every antique shop in our town at least once.
75. [Private]
76. Change my hair colour.
77. Decide what to do with the old chest of drawers.
78. Find a magazine rack side table.
79. Go on a yoga retreat.
80. Turn my handwriting into a font.
81. Write the children's story that has been in my head for years.
82. Learn some basic Italian.
83. Use hand cream more often.
84. Cull some more books.
85. Avoid footy tipping.
86. Finish The Mysterious Island.
87. Participate in a semi-regular blog linkup.
88. [Private]
89. Do a cyber crop.
90. Write to my Aunt.
91. Stand up for myself.
92. Investigate ways of making my work environment more conducive to the work I'm doing.
93. Don't buy stuff I don't need.
94. Reduce/reuse/recycle.
95. Use most lunch breaks for walking, not shopping.
96. Keep better track of my spending & the household budget.
97. Take down the not-an-Xmas tree.
98. Stop using the couch as storage.
99. Fix the things that have to be fixed, or throw them out.
100. Don't stress if I don't do everything on the list.
101. Reward myself when I do something on the list.

That's a pretty full list - as I was writing this post, the final few things came into my mind, so the list is now complete. Yay! There should be ample blogging material there for me to achieve #19 at least.

If you have a similar list for 2013 on your blog I'd love to read it - just leave me a link in the comments section :)

Now I'm off to get all my stuff off the couch.

it's been a busy year

Regular readers of this blog (if I still have any left) will notice that this is my first post in over three months.

I'm not really sure where to take this blog now. In 2011 I achieved my goal of blogging my 365 Project every day, and earlier this year I managed to post semi-regularly, which dropped down to almost never.

As the year went on I felt like I didn't need to blog like I did last year. It wasn't as important, and there was no real incentive to do it. So I didn't.

Part of me says maybe it's time to get rid of it. I don't really see myself as a "blogger",  I don't interact with a lot of people's blogs (and those that I do are mostly people I know personally), and I'm not really into the blogging "scene".

On the other hand, I like having this space. I can post things when I want to get something out there, or share stuff with my family, friends and readers (and any random strangers who happen to pass by . . .)

The upshot is I'm not sure. If I do keep it, I want to try and post more regularly than I have this year.

So while I'm thinking about it, here are some of the things I might have posted about this year if I'd been blogging more often.

First up, we moved house in October, so from the time we made the offer on the new house in July to now, when things are almost as we need them to be in the new house, my life has been mostly packing, decluttering, getting a house ready to sell, more packing, moving, unpacking, moving stuff around, more unpacking, more decluttering. And that has resulted in me being six months behind in my Project Life album for 2012, among other things.

Just some of the packing that had to take place

 Following in Slabs' footsteps, both Juniordwarf and I started our own radio shows on the local community radio station.

We opened the bottle of Millennium Ale that we'd had sitting around since, well 1999.

I had a hair cut after about nine months of not being bothered to pick up the phone and make a hair appointment. Goodbye long hair (again).

 We chased a rainbow up the river.

 Juniordwarf turned six.

 We made the occasional visit to the Two Metre Tall Farm Bar, and Juniordwarf enjoyed the puddles.

I participated in the Walk To Work Day photo competition and my photo collage made the Top 20. I also participated in a 10,000 Steps pedometer challenge and (just) met my goal of 1 million steps in ten weeks.

My boy picked me some flowers

Juniordwarf continue to improve his swimming.

We had a weekend in Launceston to celebrate our wedding anniversary

Re-enacting our wedding. What?

Family snapshot

We saw a baby monkey at City Park

The Chairlift at Cataract Gorge

Stopover at Holm Oak Wines . . .

. . . and Moores Hill

Willow Court Open Day. This is the Barracks.

I got to know Mrs Spider (with seven legs), who resided on my kitchen window, until I had to move her so that we could fit the window screens, and sadly she never came back.

We got some chickens. Say goodbye to the vege garden.

A new local market was set up in December and I was the lucky winner of their first email prize. It's a great idea and I'm looking forward to seeing the market grow in the new year.

Merry Xmas from Juniordwarf!

Yes, it really is Xmas.

And that's the past six months in a nutshell.  As to where I go from here, well I'm still thinking.

Happy New Year everyone :)

stuck in a rut

I have a confession to make.

I’ve crashed and burned. 

It isn’t easy to commit this to writing, since last year I was so proud of myself about finally finding the spark I needed to get up and start exercising and having started to do the work I want to do to within myself.

 

When you make a public statement about what you’re doing, it’s supposed to make you more accountable and more likely to follow it through. This clearly hasn’t happened for me.

When I started running in December, I knew there was a risk that I wouldn’t stick with it over the Xmas break. I accepted that, and I told myself that I wasn’t going to beat myself up about slacking off for a couple of weeks. I still knew I wanted to do it and I was starting to feel better, even though I had a long way to go. I thought that would be enough to make the feeling last.

Only it didn’t. And it hasn’t been a couple of weeks any more. It’s been over a month. And now I am starting to feel down on myself about it.

It’s school holidays, so nothing is normal and my routines have been disrputed. Slabs had some time off after Xmas and I’d been going to work in my own time, leaving Slabs and Juniordwarf to do their own thing. Now Slabs and I are both back at work and Juniordwarf is shuffling between home days, grandmother days, daycare and vacation care. It’s starting to get complicated.

On the first day of vacation care I had to pack Juniordwarf’s lunch. It felt just like a school morning and all the stresses and anxieties of last year started to come back.

Up until then, despite falling off the wagon, I’d been feeling fairly relaxed. But that day, I could just feel myself sliding back into my old stressed ways.

I feel like I’m edging back towards the familiar.

Someone once described to me the process of change as being like trying to divert a river from its course. The water has forged its course over many years. The longer it has followed the path, the deeper and wider the course is, and the harder it is to make the water flow a different way.

I imagine it slightly differently. 

I see myself picking my way along a steep, deep, dry river course, where water hasn't flowed for a long time, with many loose rocks all the way up the embankment. When I try to make my way out of this channel, the challenge is to find a solid hand hold or a foot hold, rather than a loose rock.

And now, having made such great progress starting to scramble up that river bank, I find more loose rocks than firm hand holds. I feel my grip loosening and my footholds failing. 

Sometimes it seems like it would be easier just to let go and slide back down, in a mini-avalanche of rocks.

There is comfort in the familiar. 

I know that river’s course well. It’s safe and unchanging. There are no surprises and there’s nothing to fear there.

I’ll look back up at how far I got this time and wish I hadn’t let go, but part of me will be secretly relieved that I’m not still perilously clinging on in unfamiliar territory.

I’ll know that from lower down there are no more risks of falling, so I’ll be safe.

I’ll keep working my way along the riverbed, picking out the easy course. Sometimes I might stumble on the loose rocks, but that won’t be as bad as falling from a great height.

But where is the riverbed leading me? Nowhere new. To a place I don’t want to go to any more. Not upward and out of there. 

But upward is the way I want to want to go.

So why won’t I start climbing again? Is it that I’ll simply move along the river bed until I find a place that looks like it might be easier to climb up? Is that what the spark that I got last year was – an easier starting point?

Or will I have to tell myself that there isn’t going to be an easier starting point, and that here is as good a place as any to try again, and begin the climb all over again?

But . . . if I don’t let myself fall now, I won’t have to have that conversation. If I hang on to where I am now, and keep reaching out until I find the next hand hold, then maybe I can keep going.

I just need to find whatever it is that got me started to push me that little bit further so I can find the next thing I need; to stretch my arm out just a little more to grab hold of the next hand hold.

I hope I find it soon.

P365 - Day 266 - waiting

Today I went back to my counsellor. I booked this appointment a few weeks ago, because I thought I could use some help working through some of the stuff in the Self-Esteem book. I hoped that she might be able to help me step outside myself and develop a more objective and accurate picture of myself than I currently have.

But other things have intervened since I made the appointment, and there were more immediate things that I needed to talk about today.

I’m glad I went. 

I really needed to talk. 

I needed someone to help me to put things into perspective and to suggest some things I can do right now to make me feel better.

That’s what I got, and I do feel better.

P365 - Day 156 tread lightly

It was World Environment Day today, and the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens held its annual TreadLightly EnviroFest. 

Last year was the first time I attended, and I had a wonderful day exploring all of the stalls and activities, and listening to the speakers. I learnt a lot and I came away with a lot to think about.

This year was a bit different, and I went with Juniordwarf, Lil Sis and Mum. Despite the winter weather, we had a great time. Juniordwarf was very excited to be able to take his Aunt and his Nanna to show them his favourite place in the Gardens, the ‘Cold House’ (technically the Subantarctic Plant House, but it’s about four degrees (Celcius) in there, so his name is perfectly apt).

I caught some of the amazing Peter Cundall’s talk on growing vegetables in Tasmania.

This gentleman is an absolute inspiration. I remember seeing him on TV when I was much younger in the days of Gardening Tasmania, and used to watch him regularly when that show morphed into Gardening Australia.

I own a beautiful first edition copy of his Year Round Gardening book, published in 1985 (which I was able to find in a second hand bookstore after lusting after the copy held by the Library) and I enjoy reading his articles in Organic Gardener magazine. 

I missed most of what he actually said about growing veges (other than that cauliflowers need the trace element molybdenum and beetroot needs boron and that you should sow beetroot seeds yourself, not buy seedlings).

What really got my attention was the man himself. He is 84 years old, but you’d never know it. He said that there was nothing wrong with him at all and the last time he went to the doctor for an illness was over 40 years ago.

He puts his good health down to a healthy lifestyle – most specifically gardening, which is all the exercise he needs (he asks ‘did you ever see a happy jogger?’), and growing his own food. 

I compared myself to him. I lead a rather unhealthy, overweight, sedentary lifestyle, and rely almost solely on others for my food supply. This winter I’ve been constantly sick and have felt rather uninspired and, well, just bleh. Yet here was someone more than twice my age bursting with an energy and enthusiasm I can only dream about.

It certainly gave me something to think about, because I’ve noticed when I’ve made a real effort to improve my diet, such as focusing on fresh, non-processed ingredients and cutting out things like wheat, alcohol and coffee, it’s made a noticeable difference to how I’m feeling, my attitude and energy levels.

And that begs the question why haven’t I stuck with it, if it’s made me feel that much better. I don’t know the answer to that and it’s something I intend to work on.

But that aside, back to the Festival, the other speaker I saw was Paul Healy, who writes about sustainable gardening and raising chickens in the Mercury's Saturday Magazine. He breeds Barnevelder poultry, and he brought a couple of these beautiful birds with him to the Festival. Juniordwarf was a bit wary of them, so we didn’t get too close, even though they are apparently a very placid bird.

Last year I listened to all of Paul’s talk on sustainable gardening and other issues around food and the environment, and got a lot out of it. This year I only heard a bit of what he had to say, but that was still interesting.

He was talking about the principle of feeding the soil, rather than feeding the plant. He said that if you feed the plant, you are forcing it to take in everything you give it, regardless of what it actually needs whereas if you feed the soil, the plant will take what it needs and leave what it doesn’t need. He said plants have a sort of intelligence in the sense that they ‘know’ what they need.

I’ve heard a lot of people say to feed the soil. I never really knew why, but this made perfect sense.

Paul referred to a book called The Living Soil, by Lady Balfour, published in 1943, which he says is the soil ‘bible’ and should be your first port of call for more information about this type of gardening. It is out of print, but the State Library has a reference copy.

The other thing I didn’t get to find out as much as I’d have liked to today is Peak Oil,  which is an issue that doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention in the climate change debate, where everyone seems to be focused on the proposed carbon tax.

It’s an issue that really frightens me when I think about the implications, but I won’t go there today – it’s a whole other blog post, or more. I might even rant a bit. I don’t think I’ve done a ranty blog post yet.

In the mean time, I think it’s time to use the inspiration from today to actually do something. 

P365 - Day 145 it's all too much

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I’d come to the realisation that ‘life is now’. It’s not something that happens once you’ve worked out what you want to do and how you’re going to do it. Although I was feeling pretty unwell that day, I appreciated having some uninterrupted time to think about things and be a little reflective for a while.

I came up with the ‘life is now’ mantra, which I think I’ll turn into a nice wall plaque or something for my crafty space to keep  it at the front of my mind.

After that day, I had a couple of ideas about what I needed to do and where I wanted to go from here and I was feeling quite positive about it all.

Only real life interfered and pushed all that stuff to the back of my mind, where everything that is ‘on hold’ sits.

Right now it seems to me that I can’t even do the simplest thing to make my life easier, and that I’m hell-bent on sabotaging everything. I don’t have time, I don’t make time and I can’t be bothered anyway.

I’ve lost count of the number of time management, how to prioritise, how to get things done, how to manage your life, secrets of organisation books and websites I’ve looked at, how many times I’ve seen a great idea and thought I want to do that, how many times I’ve started something that’s fallen by the wayside . . . you get the idea.

Every time I see a new book or a new website, I think, yes this is the one that is going to work for me. And what happens? I read the book, print out all the worksheets, start to fill them out, maybe even start to do one or two things, and then it all gets too hard and I slip back into my old ways and life goes back to normal.

I don’t know if it’s because my life doesn’t immediately change as a result so I don’t think the strategy is working, or if it’s because it’s just so hard to break an old habit and replace it with a new one.

(I know, I know! It’s flawed logic. You don’t put on that extra 15 kilos overnight, so you can’t expect to lose them after one session at the gym.)

Here’s an example of what I mean: I want to drink more water during the day. I make it as easy as possible for myself by taking a full water bottle to work so I don’t even have to go to the water cooler. And still some days that bottle can sit in my bag, right next to my desk, all day without me having a single drink from it. I don’t think I could make it any easier, unless I got one of those beer caps with the tubes running straight into my mouth.

So if I can’t do something as simple as drink water, what hope do I have of doing anything that actually will get me to where I want to be?

I’m feeling quite disheartened about it all.

All I can think of is that for me to be able to work out where I want to go and how I’m going to get there, I need to get out of the real world for an extended period, sit down and work this all through. I can’t do it while I’m tending to my day to day responsibilities. It’s too much. I don’t have time.

A week in a secluded retreat, with no phone, no contact with anyone, days to think and write, quiet uninterrupted nights, blissful silence. Wouldn’t that be great?

It would, but it’s never going to happen.

Still I keep thinking to myself, if only I could somehow get to that place, then I could sort myself out and things would be better. I could work out which dreams I want to pursue and which ones aren’t me any more.

The result is I don’t do anything, and things stay exactly the same, and I keep wishing they could be better.

This week, however, I’ve read two things that give me a glimmer of hope that I might be able to find a way through it.

The first was a comment in (yet another) book about decluttering (from Simplify 101), which was the very simple and very obvious premise that you have to actually do something. All the reading in the world won’t help if you don’t get out there and start doing it.

That is: to create change, you must take action. Or in motivational speak ‘if nothing changes, nothing changes’.

And to do that, you have to make a commitment to take action, and then do it. And doing it once and sitting back and thinking ‘that’s it’ doesn’t work either. You have to do it again the next day, and again the next day.

It’s not rocket science is it? And I bet every book I’ve ever read says the same thing. I’ve certainly heard it many times before.

But what am I going to do? There’s so much I want to do, so much I need to do and so much more I don’t even know that I want to do yet. It’s all too much. I really need that week-long retreat to work out what I want to do, so I can work out where to start.

Really?

Since the retreat is not going to happen, at least not now, if I want to do this stuff (a lot of which is just vague ideas of future plans, goals, dreams and hopes), I have to do it within my day to day life. That is, now.

I actually have to make time to do it. Gretchen Rubin came to the same realisation when she was embarking on her Happiness Project. 

And since changing everything at once is way too much (and I don’t know what ‘everything’ is that I want to change yet) and is completely unachievable, I need to take one step.

I need to make the time to take one step. Surely that’s not too hard.

And here’s the second thing I’ve found helpful. An email from the Planning Queen (aka Nicole Avery, who runs the Planning with Kids blog and has just released a book called Planning with Kids).

She said what she did was focus on the things that made her grumpy. Being grumpy was making her day worse and dragging everyone else down too. But if she could find the things that triggered her grumpiness and work out something she could do to deal with those triggers, in a 15 minute timeframe, which would be manageable in a busy day, she wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed or be as grumpy.

One of her examples was not having cluttered bench tops.

I totally relate to that. Just the fact that the benchtop is cluttered seems to make me (more) tense and anxious. It makes preparing meals more difficult and is a particularly unpleasant sight first thing in the morning, when I’d rather still be in bed. Looking at a clean benchtop is somehow calming. It makes me feel like things are under control, even if they aren’t.

Cluttered benchtops are definitely a grumpy trigger for me.

It seems to be a common thing among organisation books and websites that clearing your benchtops (and kitchen sink) at the end of every day is a great first step to making your life more manageable. I made one of my resolutions earlier in the year to wash up and clear up every single night, and I stuck with it for a while, then it fell away.

So today I’m returning to that resolution. It’s the one thing I commit to do every day, starting today. I will do it every night immediately after dinner or, if I’m putting Juniordwarf to bed, as soon as I’ve done that.

This is my first step. It’s action.

And to make sure I stick to it, I’ve made my own version of Juniordwarf’s rewards chart. I made a resolution chart earlier in the year as part of my Happiness Project, but I always kept it in my journal or somewhere else out of reach and always forgot to look at it or update it.

It’s now in full view. I hope this will make me more accountable and that by taking this first step, I'll be inspired to take the next step.