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:
- 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. So yeah, Maddox is getting walked, however he still needs more exercise than I can provide. I did finally get a treadmill. So now I need to train Maddox to walk on it as well as take him for walks outside.
- 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 currently unable to ride at this time as I have separated my shoulder and possibly have a labral tear in my shoulder. So no riding for a while for me. This is frustrating. I did have someone else work with Kissy on her fear of tarps. As in the big plastic blue tarps. She will not come with 20 feet of one if she thinks you want to touch her with it. She also will not tolerate being ridden while the rider is carrying a flag. So, start with desensitizing her to the tarp and I am pretty sure that the flags will follow easily enough. I asked the trainer to get Kissy to simply touch the tarp or possibly walk across one. He did better than that. Check out the video below. This is after he worked in the super hot Texas heat for two and a half hours:
- 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. Okay so I am currently working two evening shifts this weekend from 3:30pm to Mid, so yeah, about that bedtime….
- 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. Wait, why am I giving up soda? I recently experience one of the very worst headaches of my life!!! It took a hotpack and an entire can of Dr Pepper (along with 2 advil) to get me headache undercontrol. Yes, I am a coke fein, but it was the Dr to the rescue (it has more caffeine.)
- Working out more and getting into better shape. I have lost 5 pounds, so yay me???
- Finish writing 2 books. Self-publish 2 books? Because I could say that I would do just one. Lets add more work on there. This is depressing.
- Improve my Netgalley ratio. Doesn’t every blogger have this goal? Yeaaahhh, about that…I read two netgalley books this month.
- Read 50 new books this year. Scaling it back a little from last years goal of 100. That was tough! Okay,I am only one book behind schedule… I think.
- 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! My library is a mess. A complete and utter mess.
- 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 have been doing really good on my nightly moisurizing ritual, as well as applying sunscreen daily. Go me!
So what about you? How have you been doing on your goals, new years resolutions for the year?
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 🙂
- Catch up on review books and improve Netgalley ratio. Reduce the number of arcs I request. So my Netgalley ratio is still improved from when I submitted “sorry I didn’t read this before it expired” notes from all the books I no longer had access to. But since then I went and requested a few more titles. *Hangs head in shame* so it is a little worse again.
- Catch up on my purchased but unread books. Try not to buy too many more books to add to this list. *cough* Still little progress. First the move, then I got pregnant, so my reading time at home is minimal at best, and non-existent most of the time. We’re either busy, or I’m napping. So all I do is audiobooks on my commute. That doesn’t help my TBR at all. But, I haven’t been buying as many books lately. Well, one or two here and there when there’s a great sale on an ebook.
- 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. I’ve also started the “share the love” round up and people seem to be enjoying those as well.
- 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 increasingly getting better at this. I’ve reduced the blogs I subscribe rto by email, but I try to comment at least weekly and more often for those bloggers I’m closer to.
- Get more bloggers to participate in our That’s What He Said Meme. I’m happy to see we have about a handful of people participating each week, but I’d like to see more.
- Learn more cool bloggish stuff from challenges like Bloggiesta. Still need to do.
- Use the library more. I’ve gotten 6 books from the library so far this year, so not too bad.
- 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 a couple of days in advance. My goal is more than a week in advance but that doesn’t always happen. I do usually schedule reviews a few weeks in advance though.
- Keep up with the reading challenges I signed up for. There will be a separate challenges update post (probably quarterly) for these.
- Make more bookish friends. Yay I’ve met some more cool bloggers and it has been really fun 🙂
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I’m sorry to hear about your shoulder, Rose and a bummer that is cutting into your ride time with Kissy. I’m glad to hear someone has been working with her though to help her overcome her fears.
I’ve really enjoyed the discussion posts, ladies and I’ve been trying to tweet them out to my audience because you’ve been bringing up some great topics lately. Keep up the good work!
Terri M. LeBlanc recently posted…Book Review #28: S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
Thanks so much Terri! I got the results back from my Arthrogram/MRI and I do have a tear in my shoulder, but it does not require surgery. Everyone at the barn is going on the last big trail ride of the summer because the owner of the stable is going to be having foot surgery. I want to go so bad. It is this Sunday. I am off of work and I LOVE when we haul to this huge cattle ranch and ride. Its great. There are awesome trails and waters to play in and I had a great time the last time I went with Kissy. I am thinking about going, but just having my boyfriend help with tacking up and “stuff.” (He has a horse and rides, too.)
And thanks for sharing the love!!!!
It’s crazy the year is half over already! Sounds like yall are making some good progress on a couple of those. Yay! I didn’t really make any this year and so should have. Nice to have some goals to work towards even if they need to be tweaked along the way 🙂
anna@herding cats & burning soup recently posted…Photo-a-Day Challenge Wrap Up!
Thanks, Anna. I like keeping my goals in mind even I do not achieve them. It helps me to remember what I wanted to focus on when I get a little lost.
#4 is an interesting one (Rose). I also use soda as my morning pick me up (I don’t drink coffee at all). I used to drink regular soda, but when I started working on my weight loss I switched to diet. Now I prefer the taste over regular and I had no problem losing over 50lbs and now maintaining that loss, while drinking diet soda 🙂 I even have an occasional regular, as long as it fits into my calorie goals for the day.
My sister did totally cut out soda (she was already drinking diet at that point), because she read somewhere that diet soda can cause weight gain (huh??). She hasn’t lost one pound because of cutting it out though, snort. She is saving money though, so she has me on that one :p
I could NEVER switch to diet. I think I would be one that need to either limit my regular soda intake or eliminate soda all together. I could never do diet. I hate the after taste. I think that is funny about your sister, but yeah, she has you on the money. Soda is soooo expensive. I have been thinking of trying to switch to tea since it still as the caffeine. I really need to get a handle on this.