Goals/Resolutions for 2014 – March Update

   Rose’s List of 2014 New Year’s Resolutions/Goals:

To be fair, only a few of my resolutions are book related. Here they are in no particular order:

1.   Walk Maddox at least once a day, every day. For those who do not know, Maddox is my 1 year of Doberman puppy. To say he is full of energy is an understatement.  I have taken him for an off leash walk around our walking trails in our community. It takes about 45 minutes. I come back exhausted. He comes back spritely and with an exuberant spring in his step. So yes, I am also considering a treadmill for my doggy. He needs more exercise than one 45 minute run can give him. Ummmm all I can say is that I DID walk the dog yesterday…that’s good, right? Poor Maddox…
2.   Ride Kissy (my horse) at least 10 hours/month.  I did a 30 hours in 30 days challenge last June and the difference in my horse was astounding. I would love to ride that often all the time, but the shorter days are really a drag on my time. (Although the arena has lights, so perhaps the shorter days is a poor excuse.) The biggest hardship with riding my horse is the long congested commute. It takes usually a little over an hour to get to the horse barn. Since I get home at 5 and want to be in bed by no later than 10, that is pushing it. I have not met this goal at all. I am recovering from a shoulder injury and will hopefully start riding again soon.
3.   Speaking of bed, I am making my bedtime of 10pm a priority. In fact, I really want to make my bedtime 9 since I get up at 5 and that way I could get 8 hours. We shall see. Right now I am setting 10pm as my bedtime and well, its 10:14pm as I type this so go figure.  Soooo…..it is 10:03pm and I am only on questions 3.
4.   Give up the soda. I am one of those people that has to drink a coke every morning. It is my morning coffee. Well, this past year has seen me gain over 20 pounds, so I am definitely going to be cutting back on the soda.  I do not know if I can ever give it up completely, but right now I am weaning off of it. Let’s not discuss this one.
5.   Working out more and getting into better shape. Round is a shape, right?
6.   Finish writing 2 books. Self-publish 2 books? Because I could say that I would do just one. Lets add more work on there.   I am at least writing again.
7.   Improve my Netgalley ratio. Doesn’t every blogger have this goal?  I have not read any books on netgalley, but I did request like 10 new titles. FML
8.   Read 50 new books this year. Scaling it back a little from last years goal of 100. That was tough!  Okay, finally something I have been doing okay at I have read 12 books so far this year! YAY me!
9.   Get my home library organized and on my goodreads shelves. I am doing this with hopes of preventing duplicate purchases. I just get so excited when I see a book on sale for $1.99 that I immediately click! I do not want to miss out on such a steal, right? But then it turns out that I usually already have at least two copies of the same book….go figure!  I have almost all of my books properly recorded on good reads. YAY!
10. Use night time moisturizing eye cream. Because you can have silver hair, but no one likes wrinkles around the eyes. Or at least that is what I have been told. I really just want to avoid dying my hair, so I am holding off as long as possible… lol. So I choose to focus on my eyes right now and the hair can go hang. er something… …So I bought this, as last month, I ran out. But I have only used it a few times. Why is something so easy so difficult????

    So how did ya’ll do on your New Year’s Resolutions? I am curious to hear how everyone else is doing at this point in the new year. I plan to revisit my goals every month or few month in order to hopefully keep them in my mind and achieve more than I would otherwise. Or to make me feel even worse for failing…either way…

   Julie’s List of 2014 New Year’s Resolutions:

I think this is a great opportunity to reflect and focus on my book blogging-related goals for this upcoming year. 2014 will see a lot of changes in my personal life, and so my book blogging life should evolve and mature as well. In 2014 this blog will turn one and I’m excited to see how this year will turn out 🙂 So as you can see I kept my goals more book and blog related rather than personal, so I don’t know if a monthly update will make sense for me here. I might participate quarterly if there isn’t much new to add on a monthly basis.

1.    Catch up on review books and improve Netgalley ratio. Reduce the number of arcs I request. Technically, I can say I have made progress on this goal. My Netgalley ratio is MUCH improved. But the reason for this is I went through and submitted feedback for books that I was approved for a long time ago, back before Amazon kept your personal documents and back from an earlier Kindle device that died, so I didn’t have those books anymore. I went ahead and submitted a “sorry I didn’t review this” type of feedback comment, and when those got counted, my ratio improved. Now my new goal is to do this at the end of each year. So if I haven’t read books I requested in 2013 by the end of 2014, chances are, I won’t be.
2.    Catch up on my purchased but unread books. Try not to buy too many more books to add to this list. *cough* Um, not much progress here. The move made it impossible for me to get any reading done for like two months! I’ve only been able to do audiobooks, but haven’t had any time to sit down and read. I am tracking TBR challenge books on a Goodreads shelf, so hopefully I’ll have a better update next time.
3.    Increase interaction on this blog with thoughtful posts and fun chat topics. CHECK! Woot! Our discussion posts have been successful and I’ve really enjoyed reading all the comments.
4.    Visit more blogs and comment. I always return comments but I want to increase commenting on all the blogs I subscribe to. I have been doing this. I try to comment on all discussion posts from blogs I subscribe to, and even some review posts for books I’ve also read.
5.    Get more bloggers to participate in our That’s What He Said Meme. I think we have a few new people participating, but I’d like to see more consistent participation.
6.    Learn more cool bloggish stuff from challenges like Bloggiesta. Still need to do.
   
7.    Use the library more. I typically get audiobooks from the library, but the wait list is usually too long for the books I’m wanting to read right now. I need to try for non-book club books. So far I’ve only gotten ONE book from the library.
8.    Increase scheduling of posts in advance and decrease need for last minute posts/updates. Also, write reviews as soon as I finish the book, instead of waiting a few weeks when things get busy. I’ve been trying to get my posts done at least 3 days in advance, but sometimes I’ve even gotten them done up to a week in advance. That’s really been helping me with the busy move schedule.
9.    Keep up with the reading challenges I signed up for. There will be a separate challenges update post (probably quarterly) for these.
10.  Make more bookish friends. Yay I’ve met some more cool bloggers and it has been really fun 🙂

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