January

January is treating me well so far. Work is good and we are starting to pick up on the number of samples coming in. This is nice, since it means I don't have to sit around bored out of my mind all day long. :) I know...it sounds good, but trust me...eight hours of nothing to do is not fun for very long.

My family is well...at least mostly. Shane hurt his back Friday morning while he was still in Philadelphia. Poor thing had a day of class and then no sleep and then had to fly home. He is feeling better now, but I am not sure how much skiing he will be able to do next week. We are still excited about going though. He says that it will be nice, even if we spend the week with a nice bottle of something and a stack of movies. :) Which is all we did after he got home yesterday...sans bottle...but the movies were fun. I think we watched four or five movies before we finally went to sleep.

The other reason the ski trip will be fun is that my mother-in-law and I are going to get to work on the embroidery for the quilt we are making together. I am excited! Also, I plan to take a cross-stitch project that I have been working on and some knitting. Lots of crafting and cooking and having fun...yay!

I am still reading my way through my stack of library books and I am being good. I have not checked out any more yet. I need to finish the three I am reading first. And maybe the other two as well, we'll see. I did take a picture of the big one I told you about last time.

The book is titles 30,000 Years of Art and weighs 12 pounds. It's dimensions are 12" x 12" x 3". Lovely book! Full color photos of each piece of art on each page with descriptions, etc. I really would love to have this one. And it is pretty cheap. Only $32.97 on Amazon. I was so surprised. I assumed it would be priced like a textbook...around $100.00. Yay. Maybe I can get it soon. :)

Let's see...what else. My diet is going well. I have lost about 4 pounds this week. Don't worry, that is normal for South Beach. It will slow down. I fudged a little bit this weekend, but I will be good again all week so I can move onto Phase 2 in time for our trip. It is hard to have fun and eat yummy things on Phase 1.

I will take tons of pictures during our trip and post about it. Also, I hope to take some pictures of our quilt project to show our progress...or lack thereof...whatever happens. Pictures from our garden should be in the offing. The bulbs should be sprouting anytime now and I will be taking pictures regularly to show you all the prettiness. Shane and I also picked out the plants for my planted boxes and started a list for the vegetable garden. I can not wait for spring!

One last thing...a nifty blog. I am kinda behind the times, but for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, A Year of Crockpotting is the best. Last year she cooked every day with her crock pot. I wish I had known about it when she started, but Stephanie has archives of every post and every recipe is complete with pictures and instructions for the things she made, as well as review from her and her family. So many wonderful things to eat!

Work and Plans and Stuff

The plans I have made for the new year are going fairly well I think...at least some of them are.

I am doing a lot more reading now and some of the books are even educational. I will post a list later of what I am reading and what I think of it, but for now ... I want the big one! I checked out a book called 30,000 Years of Art. It is giant and pretty and I could seriously maim, if not kill, someone with it without trying too hard. I will weigh it one of these days and measure it and shock you.

Other than that, I have been riding my exercise bike and will be starting the South Beach Diet again this weekend. It will be hard to do the worst part without Shane around to be my enforcer, but at least he won't have to listen to me whine. For those of you who live in a cultural vacuum or just don't pay attention to this sort of thing, the South Beach Diet is, for the first two weeks, basically no-carb and no-fat. After that it is just low-carb and low-fat. This is very difficult for me, since those are my favorite types of food. So I suffer ... but I have not learned to suffer in silence. Poor Shane. But, as I said, he will be out of town for more job training and will only have to listen to me when he gets home. I think that I will only do Phase 1 for 1 week this time, since we are going to Idaho with my in-laws the following week and this is not the easiest diet to do when travelling. I will still try to stick to it as well as possible, and we will be doing lots of normal cooking since the condo has a full kitchen, but I don't think I can be 100% faithful to the rules. And in case you are curious, the reason I do this even though I hate it is that it is effective. Yes ... a diet can be effective. Although, I believe they prefer to view it as a lifestyle change ... but I just keep changing back after a few months. While I am following the rules, even if it is only mostly, I lose quite a decent amount of weight and can keep it off. Last summer I did it for about 2 months and lost 20 pounds. I only gained it back over the holidays while I was being a disgusting pig and living on candy and the cookies I baked. Naughty. But I want to get back on track now. I have gained back about ten pounds that I want to get rid of again, plus the 20 left that I did not finish last time. My goal weight is 150. I will keep you informed of my (hopeful) success.

While in Idaho I will be working on the embroidered quilt squares with my mother in law and, hopefully, some new knitting patterns. I may get a set of circular needles and learn to make hats and socks. That would be super fun. It may wait until we get home though. I also plan to take a cross-stitch kit that I have been working on forever. I pick it up and do a little and get side-tracked and put it away and repeat that once every few months. I am progressing very slowly, but it will be gorgeous when it is done.

Work is proceeding along as normal and we are all waiting to find out what the new owners of the business have planned. I work for a small lab and we were bought by a large company that employs 1,400 people and has labs all over the east coast and Midwest. This means there are lots of things they may do to improve our operations, but it also means that they will take their own sweet time doing anything. So many vice presidents-in-charge-of and so much paperwork and so many conference calls. Ugh ... I am glad I am not the manager. I am merely the lowly secretary in charge of faxing this to him and mailing these to them and keeping track of conference calls and appointments and so on and so forth. Busy times, but hopefully all the fuss and nonsense will pay off for the lab and our clients.

On an exciting note, in the next few weeks our garden will start sprouting. We spent several weeks in the late fall planting 2 large bulb beds. The bed by the house is all irises, which won't be up for months yet, but the bed by the road is full of all sorts of different bulbs. Some of them will be blooming next month, which means I am going to start watching for tiny green points to start poking up soon. I promise lots of pictures. This makes me want to read The Secret Garden again ... I think I will read it tomorrow. Yay!

Plans for 2009

I won't call these resolutions because everyone knows resolutions always fail within a month or two. So I will call them plans. The big plans I have are for getting in shape and eating better, reading and crafting a lot, working on the house and garden, and spending more time with family.

I was doing really well at eating better and exercising regularly over the summer. Really well. I lost 20 pounds. Unfortunately, I fell off the routine and have actually gained a couple of pounds back and lost what progress I had made in my exercising. So I want to get back into working out a little every day and not eating so much junk.

I plan to read more this year, especially 'worthwhile' books and classics. I plan to start a reading list of the books I want to read and keep a journal of what I do read. I also want to follow a plan to read the Bible in a year. I may even copy the great idea the ladies at The Common Room use and post my month's reading here for your enjoyment. I love reading their lists. I always see books that I want to read as well as old favorites. I also want to do more crafting this year. I want to get better at the things I do now like crochet, knitting, and cross-stitch. I want to try new things like the embroidery project I have planned with my mother-in-law.

I plan to get a lot of work done around the house and yard. We have a lot of projects that we want to accomplish. These include building my herb garden, planting a large vegetable garden, building some shelving in the garage for better storage, and continuing to clean and landscape the yards.

Finally, I am planning to spend more time with my family. With the changes at my job, I will have more vacation time, so I want to have long weekends with both sets of parents, more camping and hiking, and more time with Shane. I hope to get him interested in letterboxing and I hope we can spend lots of time relaxing together in our time off.

What are some of your plans for the coming year? Anything new to try or old that you would like to start doing again? I wish you lots of luck and a year full of prosperity and good times.