goals for 2009

so i know i'm a bit late on posting my goals for 2009, but i've given up on making goals on new years day -- those goals were always broken before i had a chance to give them a good run. so now i've figured i take the month of january to evaluate things, think through reasonable goals, and begin to implement them. goals that have been kept thus far (by the end of january) are ones that i will continue through the year. does that make any sense to anyone other than myself? if it doesn't, just humor me... :)

and you can humor me first by enjoying a picture of our puppy at Christmas time :) he's grown quite a bit since then... but this one is too cute to pass up!



so, back to the point: my goals for this year.

1) keep the house straightened on a constant basis. not clean as in dusted, vacuumed, swept, 24/7, but straight. as in... no piles of clothes, mail, ads, coupons, wii supplies, etc. basically, the idea is that if someone were to show up at our doorstep, we wouldn't be embarrassed to let them in our house without first frantically running around to pick up. (note to self: we don't have kids yet. what's going to happen once we do?!?)

2) balance our finances and take care of all bills on the last weekend of each month. we keep up with it on a regular basis, but the more often we can transfer money into savings and keep stocking up our nest egg, the better the interest rates, which means the better our future!

3) plan meals out for a week at a time. this should help tremendously with grocery bills as well as with planning ahead for meals (aka not eating dinner at 7:30 at night, which makes ryan very excited!). i've been using future girl's meal planner and it's been wonderful. we can transfer meals from one night to another, write down all the ingredients needed to make it, and any notes needed (i.e. take the meat out of the freezer, etc.)



4) this one is inspired by WhatKnot and her flickr set tracking her progress. complete one project a month out of the stack of craft books i have... and the new ones i got about a month ago from Chronicle Books. Haven't you heard? I'm one of their newest reviewers. *squeal!!* yep... you heard me right. the books arrived right after Christmas, and i could have sworn it was Christmas all over again :) i'll be reviewing the books on here and completing projects from them... maybe even giving away a book or two once i'm done with the reviews, so stay tuned! and lest you think that i'm already behind with last month, i completed last month's project on saturday, just in the nick of time :) i'll be sharing pictures of my progress in a later post.



5) lastly... i want to hold myself to updating the blog at least twice a week. i know it's not much compared to what some of you hard-core bloggers do, but with work being so busy, it's about as much as i can handle right now. so stay tuned to see what i'll be doing :) and who knows, i may just surprise you (and myself!) by blogging more :) i do enjoy it... i just can't always motivate myself to turn my computer back on after being on it for 8+ hours a day at work :)

so hold me to them, ok? i'll need all the accountability i can get :) pictures coming soon of the first craft challenge accomplishment!