First of all, my holiday vacation in Southern California: AWESOME. Weather was beautiful (70's most of the days, rained one day only, sunny, just gorgeous. As my brother would say, a shitty week in paradise. Food was plentiful. This is where the problem comes in. Despite several attempts to rally myself, I did quite poorly controlling my eating for the past week and a half. My mother cooked a lot, including loads of Christmas cookies, a full turkey dinner complete with several meals of leftovers, a prime rib roast, and scads of other food. We ate, and ate, and snacked, and snacked, and ate some more. Whew! When I finally weighed in last night after a long day of traveling (and, to my credit, a big meal of beer cheese soup in a bread bowl to weigh me down), I had gained about four pounds. Ouch. Now, we did manage to get some exercise in, doing my least favorite thing ever: running. My husband and I ran/walked (well, he ran much more than walked; I probably ended about half and half) over about a 3-mile course near my parents' house several times during the trip. I hate running. More than pretty much anything except evil people and the Oakland Raiders. It sucked. Bad. But it probably lessened the damage.
The celebrity deaths coming in threes, within a few days of each other? Weird. James Brown will be much lamented. The hardest-working man in show business made a few mistakes during his lifetime, but for the most part his musical contributions greatly outweigh the downs. We'll miss him. President Ford was overall a good guy. He didn't really have a chance to strut his stuff, sort of shooting himself in the foot with his pardon of Nixon. But I think he did the right thing, and he was certainly a good person outside of the Oval Office too. He will also be missed. And then we come to yesterday's surprise: Saddam Hussein. Shall I break into "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead"? The only thing I can think of that would have been more fitting is that they should have handed him off to the Kurds to let them have a little fun. Saddam will not be missed, and I hope Satan is toasting him over the fires with a long fork. I sincerely hope Iraq can get past all this and enjoy a little peace in the new year. They deserve it. As do our servicemen and women all over the world.
New Year's Resolutions? I guess I need a few. Let's see...
1) The weight needs to come off. I didn't manage to celebrate Christmas at 170 lbs like I had hoped. Oh well. It's time to start over. I need to make the goals easy again so I don't get disappointed. We'll start with a short-term goal of 170 lbs or less by the time my Spring Break rolls around in mid-March. The long-term goals would be 160 lbs or under by the end of the school year (end of May) and 150 lbs or under by the beginning of the next school year (mid-August).
2) In order to accomplish the weight goals, I must have exercise goals. This resolution is to get back to my two-a-days. I haven't quite gotten back into a good routine. I need to work out in the mornings doing primarily cardio for a hour every weekday (on weekends we hit the gym once a day for either cardio or a couple games of racquetball). Then, in the afternoons, I need to either get to the weight room at my school to lift and do more cardio for another hour, or get in the pool before swim practice. That is the only way I'm going to reach my weight loss goals. I simply have to do it, no ifs, ans, or buts (or butts, either).
3) I need to be better about grading papers promptly. Especially towards the end of this past semester, I would grade the easier, less time-consuming assignments first, saving the more complicated stuff for later. By the time I'd get around to it, I'd have several hundred papers to grade and no time to grade them in. It meant taking up a lot of time I would have spent with my husband and my dog at home, to grade papers instead. I'd like to avoid taking so much work home this semester. So I need to make better use of my planning periods and the time I have available after school. I will try to make sure that I grade everything that was turned in that day. When they turn in projects, I will set a number of projects to grade each day, and the rest of the time will be to grade the normal homework the girls have done.
4) I will try to blog more regularly, primarily about the eating and exercise but in general about life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff ("That's 'pursuit of happiness'." "Well, all your S's look like F's." "It's stylish. It's in, it's very in." "Well, if it's in...").
5) This one's an annual resolution that I rarely make good on, but I must include it again, as tradition if nothing else: I need to get better organized and get things cleaned up and put away. I love to make lists (like I'm doing now!), but I rarely follow through on them. My house is a disaster, as is my classroom at school. I need to get everything in some semblance of order. I have good reason to do this at home: my parents expressed an intention to come visit during my Spring Break in March. Nothing like imminent "Mom" to make you want to clean up the house! At school, it just helps to find everything easier, like handouts and homework that got turned in. I'm not quite sure how to go about doing this. I guess the first step is to pick a room to start in, like the guest bedroom/kayak storage closet. I need to clean out that room and figure out a better way to store some of our kayaking and outdoor gear. Since that's the room my parents will be staying in, it's a logical place to start. Hopefully if I can organize that room, it will be a springboard to the rest of the house.
You'll note that the last resolution, the organization, is the one for which I don't really have a concrete plan. That's because I am not by nature an organized person and never have been. So I suspect that will be the one that causes me the most trouble. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
For anyone who reads this blog, either regularly or just passing through, I wish you the most wonderful of new years. May you have peace, health, prosperity, and a lot of fun. God bless you and your loved ones in this holiday season.
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