A Time For Everything

Image courtesy of IMGBIN.

It's 2025 -- can you believe it?

On the whole, aside from how quickly the year flew by, it was a pretty good year.

On the other hand, in reviewing my 2024 goals...I fell really short in three of five of the major categories.

The journey to being debt free goes on, and I'm making progress. Mom's house finally selling and the money being dispersed really helped. But I also implemented some other protocols that have been keeping things on track. I haven't kept reading financial books as I intended, but debt is reduced. I do plan to re-read four of the books that had the biggest impact though.

The path to health and wellness took a left turn at Albuquerque. Instead of losing ten pounds, I'm now twenty-ish over my preferred weight. My eating is far from healthy. I'm using the Hinge Health app once again and was doing both yoga and Pilates for a while, but they both fell by the wayside.

BUT

I'm getting back on track starting this month. I received a bike for Christmas, so riding my bike is a thing I can do as well.

Writing was the biggest fail, but I've accepted that my brain is not yet ready to be creative in that way again, so I will continue to fill my well with reading, watching, and listening.

Housekeeping and Home Improvement were also a fairly big fail. I have no housekeeping plan in place and didn't improve much of anything inside the house. The back yard is another matter--made a few improvements there and I mostly kept up with the falling leaves. The weather / temperature will be the biggest factor in how much more I can do.

Letters to my grandma went out more regularly and, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I met and exceeded my reading challenge. My pattern offerings on Etsy remained roughly the same...

So that's my report card on not just the fourth quarter, but my whole year as far as my 2024 fresh start goals are concerned. It wasn't great, but, sometimes, that's life. An you can start fresh at any time.

Speaking of starting fresh -- let's get to this year's fresh start goals!

Jen's 2025 Fresh Start Goals

1. Send Grandma a monthly letter...to be sent no later than the second Friday of the month. Yes, she's still alive, much to my delight and surprise. She was moved into hospice last spring, and turned 99 I think on her birthday in August. So if she makes it to August 23, 2025, she'll turn 100. That's very good news for me!
2. Read 60 books for the year. This includes the Bible (#5 on this list), so aiming for 59 other books. Quite a few will be be repeats from previous years because I enjoy them that much. And as mentioned above, there are four financial books to re-read, one each quarter. That brings me to 55 other books.
3. Home Improvement -- a) get the oven fixed, b) clean out and organize both hall closets, and c) clean out and rearrange my bedroom closet
4. Yard Improvement -- a) trim and maintain the holly hedge, b) plant flowers, c) finish tidying up the back yard in terms of things growing in the fence (we have a lot of random weed vines that I'm trying to eliminate) and kill/remove the random weeds in the "lawn"
5. Another read-through of the Bible. I've done two years of the "One-Year Bible" where you get some Old Testament, some New, a Psalm and a Proverb. I've also done a chronological read-through where you skip around and read the Books in the order in which they were written. This year, I'm reading the Bible beginning to end in the order in which the books appear.
6. Lose ten pounds. The ultimate goal is twenty, but I'm going to start with ten. Eating right and exercising is the only way to make this happen, so they don't get their own line items.
7. Self-Care -- gonna try this again. Mostly home pedicures because my feet are in bad shape as well as coloring my hair on a regular basis. But also things like crafting and puzzles.
8. Add Patterns to Etsy -- I've been saying this for years too, and last year I attempted setting up my own pattern website, but couldn't get any traction on customers clicking over from Etsy for the expanded pattern offerings, so I'm just going to stay with Etsy and get to adding. I'm going to stick with the goal of one non-hockey pattern per quarter still.
9. Take better care of my car -- regular car washes and vacuuming as well as cleaning the leather.

I looked back at the last four years of goals and I seem to be pretty set in my ways.

The new things added are Yard Improvement line item and Car Care. That's because I want to be more active and things need doing. I left off any writing related goals. I struggled all of last year to make any sort of progress and I decided to let things lie for now. The car care is probably self explanatory...

So HAPPY NEW YEAR to one and all.

All the best to you and yours.