It’s been about six weeks since I did my last goal check-in. Now is a good time to look at it again, since I have six or seven weeks now before our next trip, a nice long interval in which to refocus on the things I said I wanted to accomplish this year.
Goal #1 – Body: On Monday, I was 162.5 pounds, my weight having crept up away from my goal of 140 again. Back from vacation, I knew it was time to get back on track, but I didn’t have a great week. I didn’t keep my food journal, didn’t track WW points, didn’t exercise, and didn’t even eat a particularly balanced diet. Dinner one night was a plate of soy crisps and three Godiva chocolates out of a box Mr. Karen got as a gift. Last night, I supplemented my soy bar, Triscuits, and apple with some of the Ghirardelli chocolate I brought back from San Francisco. This morning, official weigh-in day chez KarenD, I was 157, back to the low I reached at the end of August. What? How did I lose five and a half pounds in a week in which I wasn’t trying? Is it real? Should I write an article for Cosmo on my fabulous soy and chocolate diet? Yes, I’m happy to be back under 160, but I’m skeptical about whether it’ll last, especially when I start working out again and build my muscles back up. No matter how I got here, I still have 17 pounds to go in the next five and a half months, months that are studded with obstacles like Thanksgiving and Christmas and something like four or five trips of varying length. I can still do it, but it’s been a lot slower going than I would like.
Goal #2 – Mind: With the The Usual Suspects book club taking a break, I’m finding it harder to take the time to sit down and read. Listening to books in the car is easy, but getting into a paper version takes more effort. I’m not sure if it’s laziness or distraction or guilt that keeps me from the page. I do enjoy reading when I do it, so I just need to pick something up and start. There’s no excuse for me to not be able to read a measly one book a month.
Goal #3 – Quilts: I’m on track with this one. I finished the small wall piece I made for my Artist’s Way friend (I’ll do an entry about it as soon as he’s seen it; I don’t want to ruin the surprise and he might be reading this), so that brings me up to four done of the seven quilts I wanted to do this year. In the “I’ll count it if I have to in order to meet my target” category, this morning I put the binding on the group baby quilt, which you may remember from this entry (well, actually I’m guessing you don’t, since I had to do a search myself to find it, so much time had passed). I was going to put a label on it with the baby’s name and all our names, but the woman who did the quilting put the backing fabric upside down. That’s the problem with using a one-way design; it’s easy to sew it wrong. My detail-oriented brain just can’t put up with any of the options I came up with for the label; if I put it on to match the orientation of the backing fabric, it would be upside down compared to the top, but if I put it on correctly in relation to the the top, it’ll look bad because all the fish on the fabric behind it will be swimming upside down. Either would be disconcerting to me, like a page printed upside down in a book (it’s a wonder I made it through House of Leaves). I’ve still got the rest of the weekend to ponder it, so maybe I can talk myself into a diagonal label or something wacky.
Goal #4 – Home: Well, no. Haven’t been following my card system for house cleaning, haven’t been keeping the house clean sans system, haven’t done any organizing, haven’t done any decorating. We are getting new windows put in upstairs, but that’s been mostly Mr. Karen’s doing. I honestly don’t know if I’m going to achieve anything close to what I want in this area for a long time. Maybe it was too much to take on and needs to be delayed until next year.
Goal #5 – Work: The albatross project continues, but I got a great review a few weeks ago and even got a raise (which I took in the form of more vacation rather than a higher salary). Not many people got a bump this year because we’re in a little bit of a profitability pinch, so that’s a sign that my boss does value my work. But this past week, I got called in to talk about my billing efficiency, so all is not extra vacation and roses at the office. To help with the profit crunch, I volunteered to take a 25% pay cut for the rest of the year in exchange for working only 80% of my usual schedule. This coming week is the first week for that, so we’ll see how that goes.
This is a little depressing to see written out like this. I’ve lost ground in the last six weeks, not doing any better on the goals I was neglecting before and letting the reading one slip, too. Still, if I finish the year even having accomplished two of the five, that will be more than I might have done if I hadn’t set goals at all. I just have to keep at it. Maybe another few pieces of chocolate will help me think of a new strategy.
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