Goals New and Old

As the year wraps up, time to do that whole "look back, look ahead" thing. 2009 was a pretty good year for getting things done, as I look at my original goal  list:

• Buy house - Obviously, this didn't happen, but we made a darn good attempt.
• Decluttering - Progress has been made, though we still have plenty to get rid of.
• Financial - Did quite well on this, meeting our savings target more often than not.
  
• Health - Excellent progress on getting back into shape, though I don't seem to have lost any weight.
• Food - This one was up and down. I certainly didn't try three new recipes a week as hoped, but there were a fair number of new ones during the year, and I was reasonably steady with blogging. Still haven't taken that cake decorating class.
• Reduce size of Amazon list - Early goal which was scrapped, since we have been planning on moving and it didn't make much sense to buy more stuff.
• Household upgrades - No real progress on this one, though we did replace Dave's laptop with a netbook.
• Reading and writing - Late additions. Writing has been going great. Over the past few weeks I have been getting back into the habit of reading, which feels even better than I thought it would. Still at a stage where it needs nurturing, though.
  

In sum, we did pretty well with a lot of things. Those things I didn't get done were mainly those that involved spending a lot of money, so that's possibly just as well.

For 2010 I am going to make a few changes. For one thing, I am pretty close to giving up on the house hunt. The Boston real estate market is starting to look like Caradhras, and we may be stuck in Moria for a while (why no, I don't like Worcester). If one falls into our lap, we'll take it, but I am sick of the stress. I am also going to take exercise off the list because it has gotten back to "habit" status. So here are 2010's objectives:

• Food stuff - I am less obsessed with trying new recipes than I was a few years back. At this point I have a library of "tried and trues" that can take us for over a month without a repeat. Setting a  goal of one new one per week, and since I've canceled most of my cooking magazines after various disastrous redesigns in '09, this should be a good way to get more out of my cookbook collection.
• Reading - Aiming for a not-very-ambitious two books per month. 
• Finance - Maintain savings rate, and pay off D's credit card.
• Writing - Post-NaNoWriMo, been doing a lot of thinking about this. I've been getting a lot done lately, even if a bit too much of that has been due to recent insomnia, and I like enough of what I'm doing to feel that it's worth continuing for a while. This may turn out to not be realistic, but while feedback comes in on book 1 of Empire, I am going to try to blow through a first draft of books 3 and 4, NaNo-style. I am entertaining major doubts about the project's saleability, but I want to finish the damn story, even in rough form. I can then start that masochistic practice known as agent-hunting. I would also like to return to that NaNo project; I skimmed through it the other day and I am pretty happy with the story's core; time permitting, I will attempt to turn it into a proper draft.
• Finally, a new goal for the first year of the '10s. I have gotten appallingly, embarrassingly sloppy about missing people's birthdays. In 2010 I will get my act together enough to at least send my dear friends and family a damn card. 

So that's it. New year is right around the corner!