Happy New Year!

Twenty-eleven (or two thousand and eleven) is here! We rang in the New Year with fireworks and Rock Band and perhaps one too many Cosmos (Ash pours with a heavy hand).

I have some new goals for this year:

1) De-clutter house and pare down belongings (I won't say we have "too much stuff" as that is Stephen's mantra, but I will say that I do have a lot of things that I am hanging onto for sentimental reasons and I think I can let them go. I did that quite a few months ago with a huge rubbermaid tub of sweaters - many of which were over 20 years old. It was fun reminiscing about all of these jewel-toned angora sweaters, where I wore them, when I bought them, etc but I really did not see myself ever wearing them again so off they went.
2) Exercise! I haven't exercised at the gym regularly in a long time. Much of it had to do with the shoulder pain I had. PT has helped immensely but I wonder if the chronic ache is just something that I will have to live with as I really do not want to be on anti-inflammatory indefinitely. Anyway, as part of this goal is to train for the Rock'n'Roll 1/2 Marathon in June. I am doing the walk/run portion so no plans to have to run the whole 13 miles. Wish me luck!
3) Read. It seems that I barely read any books this year outside of book club books. I do read a lot (I am a news junkie and am constantly reading/viewing MSNBC, CNN, The Star, King5, as well as sites like Huffington Post and Gawker.com. However, these do not seem to be measurable reads. I guess I really should take them into consideration when I think about how much I have read throughout the year.
4) Dinner! With hockey practices 4 nights a week, we have severely slacked in the meal planning/preparation in this house. I think because a lot of the things I make are not make-ahead-type meals that can easily be reheated, it has made it difficult to feed the family short of going to Subway two nights/week. I have a few recipes ready to go so we'll see how this works out. Mostly I am worried about Cars ending up eating cheese sandwiches since he is so picky. And Stephen gets soooo irritated that Cars will not try new things. This will be a challenging goal.

I think those are about all of my goals. I still am thinking about working but less so since I am keeping very busy volunteering at the school. Maybe next fall?