Oh look, it's 2009

It's taken me a few days, but I'm finally willing to acknowledge that the calendar has rolled over and we have indeed entered a new year. And not that I had wild success with my goals for last year, but I figured, might as well go loftier. So instead of 8 separate goals, I have multiple goals divided into five categories. (Wow, do I love lists!)

Myself

• Continue with exercise, maintaining my enjoyment. At the top of things to do for this goal is to enroll in a ballet class and design the rest of my exercise around that.
• Meditate regularly. Another holdover from last year. The hardest aspect is just making the time.
• Figure out allergies and food sensitivities; adjust diet accordingly. I'm headed to the allergist later this week to see if anything turns up in this area. It's the latest idea of my endocrinologist, since my bloodwork still insists there's no thyroid problem.
  

Family

• Determine whether or not we'll have a second child. The plan now is to try again, starting in April. We have three pop-sicles remaining, and I've pretty much decided that's the determining factor. If I'm not pregnant after three tries with this donor, I'm done. I haven't quite figured out how miscarriage(s) might come into play, but that's very much on my mind.
• Make sure Scooter gets the support he needs at school and at home. This will start with a solid IEP in February. Even more crucial will be the transition to first grade with a new teacher. I'll also be working on a sensory diet for him at home, since I remain convinced that the better able he is to handle his sensitivities, the easier other things will be.
• Develop a range of go-to recipes. I've already started this, particularly with some crockpot cooking, but my goal is to have enough easy-to-ccok dishes in my repertoire to cover four or five nights a week in a month without repetition.

Home

• De-clutter. This is a slow-and-steady kind of goal. My plan is to devote an hour a week, in segments of fifteen or twenty minutes, to surfaces and drawers and just all of the stuff that has somehow taken over. I will never be an "everything must go in its place" kind of person, but I would like to cut through all the excess papers and such that we've now moved a couple times. I fully expect that I can spend an hour a week (and occasionally more) on this every week of the year and still not get to the end.
  
• Organize my desk and work area. Another task that will get an hour a week. Once I get it under control, I will try to maintain it with fifteen minutes a week. Then I can use a little of that "extra" time to tackle the papers mentioned above.
• Start some green projects in the house. Trillian and I have a mental list, which I hope to commit to paper, starting with some windows. What we tackle after that will depend greatly on finances, so we'll also be focusing on...
• Focus on reducing, reusing, recycling, rethinking. We've already started re-appropriating items for new uses and just not buying things without debating if we really need them. This year, I hope to bring Scooter into this more.
  

School

• Finish my comps. Brought directly over from last year. I am taking leave until August, so I can't officially take my last set of exams until after that, but I hope to set them up for September and October.
• Submit my thesis proposal. Just the next step after comps, but one I'll need to get done soon after, especially if I might be taking maternity leave.
• Use NaNoWriMo for thesis writing. It's not the intended purpose of National Novel Writing Month, but the timing will be just right for me to try to get as many words down as possible. My plan is to pour out various starts and stops, thoughts as they come to me, the ideas that are unsupported as of yet. Then I can take bits of it and prune it into shape while chasing down the appropriate references.
  

Online

• Restart The Mouse's Kitchen. I've been having a lot of fun in my physical kitchen and really want to share some of it with others. Since I'll be working on recipes anyway, I can post my favorites. I'll also be writing about coffee, because we've been having some fun on that front too.
• Post a minimum of five times (here and the Kitchen combined). I've had plenty to say, but have made it here only once a week or so. When I do post on my food blog, I'll link to it from here, at least for a little while. I'll be devoting an entire post to my plans for these sites in the next couple days.
  
• Work on two sites under my real name. Not linking to them here. One is a family site, and I don't update nearly often enough. The other is a parenting site Trillian started, but hasn't had time to tweak as she would like or to add new content regularly. I'll be writing there and monkeying with in the background.

Now let's stand back and watch how quickly I forget I ever planned these goals.