Ryan's First Snow and New Year Goals

That most benighted year 2020 is finally OVER!  Let's all work on making 2021 extra super totally amazing and fun, k?  There's a lot of superstitions that what you do on January first sets the tone for the whole year so you shouldn't do things like laundry or take out the trash.  So far today, I've done a yoga workout with a focus on BALANCE (I think that might be a word to focus on this year), and I bought a couple of books because I just can't stop doing that.  So let's start the new year off right here and have a look at a scrapbook layout:

Aww, Ryan was so tiny!  The pictures were taken in March 2017, when he was just a month old.  That polar bear onesie was one of my favorite things I bought for Ryan clothes-wise and he only got to wear it a couple of times, so I'm glad I have these pictures to remember it.  I used my all-time favorite SU! color, Baja Breeze, and the longtime favorite Ski Slope DSP.  I bought like a zillion packs of it and love it every time I find a place to use it in my scrapbooks.  The letters on "snow" are from the Mod Alphabet, which I've had forever but rarely use because even a short title takes up a lot of space, but I liked it on here and it inspired me to do my journaling in a circle on the other page.

Today's color palette:  Baja Breeze, Real Red, Whisper White, and Early Espresso.

Supplies:
Stamps:  Back to Basics Alphabet, Festive Flurry, Mod Alphabet
Ink:  Early Espresso, Real Red, Baja Breeze
Paper:  Baja Breeze, Early Espresso, Thick Whisper White, Ski Slope DSP
Accessories:  circle punch, Festive Flurry Framelits

Okay, so, on to the goals portion of today's blog post!  I posted my 2020 goals here, so let's revisit those and set some intentions for 2021. 

1.  2020 goal: make 200 pages (100 two-page layouts).  Later I amended this to 100 pages, thinking that we were supposed to get to Germany in April and I'd get a job, but then the pandemic hit and everything when haywire.  In the end, I DID achieve my original goal and finished the year with 208 finished pages.  Woo! 

2021:  I have a tentative job offer for the arts & crafts center here, but it is currently shut down because we're in lockdown until I think mid-January.  So I'm going to leave this goal TBD for now until I can get started on the new job and establish a schedule and figure out what might be reasonable here.

2.  2020 goal:  organize and pare down pictures...once again a fail.  I am consistent with not reaching this goal, so there's that.  I did fairly well with organizing as we took new pictures throughout the year, but I did not go back and work on older photos.

2021:  I almost always make something fun for breakfast on Sundays (muffins, waffles, what have you), so every time I do that, I'm going to take my fun breakfast in the computer room and spend 30 minutes or more working on organizing the pictures.  If I can do just that little bit of time once a week, then I should be able to make some good progress by the end of the year.  Wish me luck.

Reading:
2020:  no goal for reducing the size of my TBR pile (good thing, because it grows ever larger), so I just tracked what I did read.  I read 86 books and 2 novellas; I did not track the zillions of kids' books I read to Ryan at bedtime every night ; )  My favorite book from 2020 was Liza Mundy's Code Girls; it was an incredibly fascinating look at the role women played in WWII and it inspired me to read several other nonfiction books about the war, especially female British agents working in occupied France.  I also read two books about WWI because I didn't really remember much about it from my history classes and I'm a giant nerd.

2021:  I liked what I did last year, just tracking what I was reading and not trying to pressure myself into shrinking my TBR pile, which seems to grow no matter what.  So I'm going to do the same thing this year.

Cross Stitching:
3.  My goal was to get to 40% done on my huge Scarlet Quince project.  By the end of December, I had actually just passed FIFTY PERCENT on it!

I'm thrilled with the progress I made on this one.  I also finished several other small cross stitch projects, and I managed to get to 50% even with putting this aside for a couple of months while we moved.  So my goal for 2021 is to get to 65%.  I recently bought a whole bunch more SQ patterns but I'm making myself wait to start any of those until this one is finished.  Better get to stitchin'!

Fitness:
2020 was my first full year of doing Missy's fitness cult and I have lost over 30 pounds since November 2019.  I did gain a couple of pounds at Thankgsiving that I have yet to work back off, but I'm still in a lot better shape than I was and pretty happy about it.  My one specific 2020 fitness goal was to do a full chaturanga (like a slow tricep pushup) and guess what?  I CAN.  I did one during my yoga workout this morning.  There's still room for improvement, and I'm going to work on that, but I CAN DO IT!  So I think my 2021 goal is to continue to improve that chaturanga and maintain my weight loss.  Get rid of that bit of Thanksgiving fluff ; ) but otherwise just maintain.  Doable!

So that's my start for 2021.  Best wishes to you for the new year!