Category: New Years

Have you ever felt like you were trying to drink out of a fire hose?

When I started thinking about what my aspirations and goals are for 2017, I began to have that feeling. I realized I was looking at everything I’d like to change and trying to fit it all in one year. I just can’t. I’ve got to eat this elephant one bite at a time. (Please excuse my sort of mixed metaphors) So, I’m going to focus on a few things in four areas of my life: my home, my blog, my person, my spiritual life.

My Home

This area is the easiest to measure improvement throughout the year. If I can create a more comfortable, efficient home, I will have succeeded. There are plenty of little things I’d like to accomplish. The big goals are:

1. Replace the old, nasty living room carpet and kitchen flooring with new wood flooring. This is also not a cheap goal. I keep saving money toward this and something comes up. Tell me you can relate.
2. Paint the kitchen cabinets and reduce the endless sea of orange oak. We’ve owned this house for three years and planned this from the beginning. Why hasn’t this been accomplished yet? Because we’ve done this before in another house and this isn’t a fast and easy job. Frankly, we keep putting it off. No more procrastinating.  2a. I’d like to replace the counter tops too, but that’s probably not a 2017 goal.
3. Lastly, my husband wants to finish the remodel of the basement. Technically, this is his goal, but I would like it too!

My Blog

I want to find the balance between dreaming big and being satisfied with reality. I need to learn so much about blogging in general (cue the fire hose). So, I guess my goals are:

1.  Be more adept at blogging skills like editing photos and editing the content errors (yeah, this takes a lot of time).
2. Learn about building a consistent blog with interesting content. What resonates with readers?
3. Find a mentor in the blogging world that can help me avoid mistakes.

My Person

I want to keep this simple. My life is too sedentary and I need to move more. I want to walk after work at least 3 times a week.  I want to eat healthier and I made some good progress with this in 2016, but I need to step it up.The holidays have been like quicksand to this goal recently.  I also want to focus on better time management.

My Spiritual Life

This is the area that I really want to focus on this year. While the other areas may add quality to my life, this is the one that really matters the most.  I will be looking for some good devotional books and I want to spend more quiet time in prayer. If you have any suggestions for a good book, please let me know.

Hopefully, I’ll be sharing with you how I’m getting along with these goals throughout the year (and hopefully by next year I’ll be able to report progress in all areas). What are your goals for 2017? Please subscribe to the newsletter on the right side of the post.

Thanks, for reading,

Celeste

A little Dr. Who humor (thanks to my husband’s decorating efforts).

I hope you had a happy and holy Christmas. We had a beautiful Christmas Eve candlelight service at church. When we sing Silent Night with all the candles lit, I always take a moment to look around the sanctuary at all the people singing in the glow of the flames. I wish I could capture that moment and relive it throughout the year. There’s peace and unity and worship. It’s one of the most beautiful experiences.

Normally I wouldn’t want to just list the gifts I received for Christmas, but this year’s gifts really touched my heart. Typically, I’m the master gift giver of the family, but this year the students out did the teacher.

My dear husband gave me two paint brush cases so I can transport them safely to classes. Who knew he even noticed that the big brushes kept falling out of the cart?

In my last post, I commented that one blogging skill I need to improve is my photography skills. The photos I took were done on a very old palm-sized digital camera. On Christmas, I opened a box containing a tripod and camera accessories. What? Then he hands me a second box with…you guessed it…a new camera. I really didn’t think getting a better camera would happen any time soon.

Compare these two pictures. The first from last week’s post and the second from my new camera. Better, huh? Now you can see the reindeer names clearly. I still have A LOT to learn, but I am really enjoying playing with my new toy.

Next, my son’s present to me was (is) tickets to The Lion King in the Spring. Ahhhh! I know!

And finally, my daughter made me a hand-made throw. How sweet is that? I will always think of her when I snuggle up in it.

The point of all this is that these gifts were very thoughtful. They are affirmations of their love and understanding of me. Each gift is a way to help me enjoy life, my painting, this new adventure of blogging, and a live musical presentation. Wow, it’s like they were saying “we support you, you go girl”  (Really, the guys would never say those words being manly men and all.)

Anyway, today I should be planning New Year’s resolutions, but I don’t really like that term. I’m thinking new year Aspirations and Goals. I hope to share with you in the next post what I aspire to accomplish in 2017:

In my home

In the blog

In spiritual growth

I hope you’ll join me in this journey. I’m still trying to work out all the “bugs” in the posts.  Please be patient.  I am reading all your comments and I am so excited to see you following. If you’re reading this from my Facebook link, you can subscribe to my newsletter on the right of this post and continue to receive new post notifications via email.

Celeste