Happy (belated) 2016 and My Goals For the Year

Yes, I know, we’re already a month into 2016. I’m a little behind on the ‘Happy New Year’ stuff. In my defense, though, I’ve been fighting strep and an ear infection since the 31st. No, that’s not a typo. I thought my throat was just hurting from the dry air the first week and then I thought I’d gotten a cold and an ear ache. After 10 days I went to the doctor and they said they couldn’t find anything wrong with me and said to take ibuprofen, cold meds and come back in a few days if I was still sick. They did do a throat swab and send that off. That was on Monday the 12th. Then 4:30pm on Friday (15th) rolls around and they tell me I’ve got strep and that the residual ear pain/hearing loss is probably from an ear infection that was already getting better by the time I came in to the doctor. They called in some penicillin and off I went.

Now it’s two weeks later and I’m finally over it. The achiness went away the end of last week and my sore throat was gone this past Tuesday. I finally feel up to eating normal food again and being around people. Nobody likes to socialize when they’re sick, least of all people like me: INTROVERTS! lol. I’m not a social creature by nature and being sick makes me even more of a hermit. But, I finally feel almost back to normal and I had a friend over last night. I told myself that as soon as I got well I’d reward myself with a taco, so I invited Jessica over for tacos and a movie. We watched Legally Blonde the Musical and had a great time. I love that movie/play. It’s a Broadway play that I DVR’d back in 2010 or 2011 when they did an MTV special. I saw it live in OKC, too, and it was just as fabulous.

Anyways, other than being sick it’s been an okay year so far. Got some stuff going on that I’m not ready to write about on here, but overall things have been good. I’m getting healthier, I’m fairly happy and school is going well. I’m going to write a separate post about school and all that fun stuff, so check back for that later.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this post is to set up some goals and have some public accountability. I set all sorts of goals for myself all the time, but I’m not very good at sticking with them. Mostly because I don’t write them down and then forget about them until several months later. We’ll see if this helps. My brother has challenged me to a weekly goal accountability post. Will I keep up with it? I’d like to think I will.

Anyways, here are my goals:

• Get back into exercising

  I used to work 4-5 times a week, but last term was pretty brutal and then I had to move and then I got sick, so I haven’t worked out in probably 2-3 months. Not regularly, anyways. I’ve run on the treadmill a few times, but that’s about it. I want to get back into a regular routine of weights and resistance exercises, even if it’s just twice a week.

• Run a 5K

  Last year my goal was to run a 5K. I trained for it really well and and was fairly prepared by the time the 5K came around. The only issue with this is that my friend’s son did the Color Run with us and he didn’t want to run, so we walked about 98% of it. I was kinda bummed. But, there will be more 5Ks this year. Just gotta set aside the money for when the color run comes back around.

• Eat Less Sugar, More Vegetables and Drink Lots of Water

  I was doing really well with this one last year until about September when life took a left-hand turn. My sugar consumption has increased dramatically over the past few months. Well, had. I ate a LOT of candy and sugar over Christmas, but I’ve done fairly well at not eating much sugar this past week. I’m hit or miss on whether I’ll drink enough water and my trend with vegetables will be to eat plenty of veggies for a week and then hardly have any for a month. Then plenty of veggies for a week and back to hardly any for a month. *sigh* This is a work in progress and I’m not giving up.

• Stay on the Dean’s List or Make the President’s List

  Last term I made the Dean’s List. I was pretty excited about that. My GPA is 3.69. If it had been 3.7 I would have been on the President’s List. Right now I’m struggling in one of my classes (I missed an assignment when I was sick), so I won’t be getting an A in that class and that kills my chances of getting on the President’s List this term. But if I do ace the next two terms I have a chance of making it. I’m going to try.

• Stay in Touch With My Friends

  This is something I’ve always struggled with, but I want to do better at. I’m not kidding when I say I’m not a social person. I can go days without speaking to anyone or only talking to 1-2 people. It’s just never been in my nature to be that person to pick up the phone and be all chatty with someone else. I’m that way with whoever I’m dating, but not really anyone else. Even so, I’m going to work harder to at least text my friends to keep in touch with them. I think the only person I really text anymore is Annalise and that’s only once or twice a week. I made a new friend, who I’ll call Pilot, a few days ago and we text fairly regularly, but other than that I don’t really talk to anyone outside my family.

• Update My Blogs Regularly

  I think this is a goal I have every year, but rarely keep up with. I’ve been doing pretty good with my history blog and think I’ve gotten into a good rhythm of posting on Mondays with that one. Now I want to start doing better with this one.

Right now those are the only goals I have. There’s a part of me that’s afraid of making goals because I always seem to fail or fall short of what I try to do. I guess these are my goals because I’m pretty sure I can do them and right now I’m at a point where I feel like I can’t do much more. These are simply and fairly achievable goals and I think that’s what I need right now. Some days I feel as if I’m barely keeping my head above water. I want to make more goals for myself and work harder to improve areas of my life, but I can’t help but feel like I’ll drown if I do. So, for now, these are my goals. I may add more later, but I think these are good to start with.