A New Year

It’s the most wonderful time of the year….the beginning. It’s a clean slate, if you will, a time to start again and look froward, not back. Resolutions are expected, and although you may have the best of intentions, how many times have those promises to yourself gone unfulfilled? I look forward to January first every year because I feel like it is a true beginning. I make silent resolutions to purge the things I no longer need, organizing the things I intend to keep, eat healthier, exercise, and the mother of them all…..lose weight. Ugh!  Now, starting this “new beginning” on the first of the year is so unrealistic. There are always holiday leftovers that call to you, tempt you, and you know you must be polite and listen.  How can you possibly throw away good food [that’s bad for you] when you have been told all your life there are children starving in other parts of the world? No, you must not waste anything. So, you devour any and all temptations that will cross your path on the way to success. Armed with the idea that you will not be accused of waste,  you eat your way through your refrigerator freeing up the space that will allow you to stock the healthy stuff. Brilliant, right? Yes folks, January first sounds good, but let’s keep it real and start that diet on the day every diet starts….Monday. So, January 5th it is. LOL

Even though one of my many New Year’s Resolutions will include losing weight, the biggest promise to myself [as well as to my husband and family] will be to finish up old projects. I need to tackle all those unfinished projects and decide if I should create all those ideas that never came to fruition. I cannot tell you how many projects I started where I suddenly packed it in, packed it up and shoved it on a shelf with the idea of one day [preferably a rainy day] revisiting it again. Uh, yeah….well the shelf is now full because all those unfinished projects are still there! I’ve now realized that by not following through, with even the simplest of things, I was giving up. I was quitting! I was raised by parents who always followed through. Someone once told me that when something needed to be done, my family just did it. I grew up with the motto that “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.” By taking pride in what you cooked, baked, built, the way you looked and even the way you spoke you were taking pride in yourself. Somewhere along the way I started to half-ass things, so this is going to be the year it stops.

QUICK STORY: My husband is not as much as a perfectionist as I can be [my reality check], and I have accused him from time to time of half-assing things. I still need to work on my delivery and timing, and knowing when to bite my lip, but thank the Lord he has a sense of humor and a big heart. Now, one morning as I lay in bed, recalling a dream that was fresh in my head, I rolled over and exclaimed that I had dreamt about him. It’s amazing how fast he can think that early! He looked at me, grunted and said, “Oh what happened, did I quarter-ass something?”

Now that you have had a good laugh, the bottom line to this post, no pun intended, is that I should be a better me. Boy is that going to be a process! I look forward to the ups and downs, taking two steps forward and hopefully only one step back. I do hope I will have done well by the end of 2015. Although I wonder how many “Mondays” will have marked a new beginning. Then again, isn’t that what Mondays are for?

H A P P Y   N E W   Y E A R !