Broken Resolutions and Unfinished Crafts

The first week of the 2024 is over and all I have to show for it is a pedicure and a ten dollar bill from winning at Bingo. Considering it costs five bucks to play it’s not a win big enough to celebrate. But the popcorn was free and the company was good so there’s that. I never played the game before moving here to the continuum care campus but as the saying goes, “When in Rome do as the Romans do.” Side note here: Does anyone else find it interesting that that idiom was first found in writing in 1777 and we still use the phrase today? Supposedly it was a quote spoken by St Ambrose and written in a letter by St Augustine about napping in the middle of the afternoon. I’m almost sure the phrase back in that era in Rome also referred to pigging out at decadent parties and a few other things that one would not put in a letter to the Pope. But at my age I might have a foggy memory of the allegorical paintings I studied in art history class back in my youth and I could be a half century off on when the Decadent Movement was at its height in Rome. I hate that I can remember obscure paintings like the one above but I forgot to buy baby aspirin when I was at the grocery store yesterday.

If you are a long time reader of this blog you know I’m not fond of getting pedicures and have only been getting them for a few years of life. I resent the time and money spent and trying to make myself understood when I say things to indicate that I want the cheapest pedicure they give but still end up paying $50 plus a tip. Once it was $60 and I have no idea how that happened!

Finally, after getting my first ingrown toenail---that, by the way, cost over $300 to treat!----I have a pedicurist I like. The foot doctor’s office has one under their umbrella of services and you have to have their recommendation to get on the client list. They don’t push polish, did a great job, it only it took a 1/2 hour and the charge was $40 plus I tipped her $10. They call them medical pedicurists and they are trained to look for issues like ingrown toenails, fungi and other potential issues we don’t want on our feet.

The new year came with a couple of new resolutions but already I fell off the wagon of carrying them to the goal line. But before I share that part I want to ask if anyone has done the Swedish Death Cleaning? A few years ago there used to be a blogger in our circle of bloggers who did it---Judy gave away everything she didn’t use anymore, finished up all her unfinished projects and drastically de-cluttered her mobile home then deep cleaned it thoroughly. The idea is to make it easier on your family when you die. The name gives me the willies but I saw clips of the Swedish Death Cleaning TV series and from what I saw it was a kinder, gentler version of Mari Kondo's show.

I live with a lot of guilt over not downsizing as much as I could have/should have when I moved. And with the turning of the new year I made up my mind that I need to do something about that. I’m 80-fu*king-two, after all. But that notion lasted about a half a week when I couldn’t decide where to start. So instead I planned to finish up a few craft projects. One was a cashmere scarf that I started seven years ago but life got in the way and I stopped working on it. Picking it up now it took me three days just to figure out where on the complicated pattern I left off. I finished it but if you look close enough you'll see my skill level has gone down hill.

Next I tried picking up a project I started on circular needles and after a night of working on it I gave myself permission to rip it all out, put the yarn in my stock box and declare that I don’t need to know how to do everything. That felt good too. My mom did beautiful sweaters on circular needles and even though I've done a lot of knitting over the years I never liked holding the circular needles. 

Next up was either a half done knitted teddy bear or a cut-out 3” velveteen teddy bear to construct or a cross-stitch that only has a one inch square left to do. The cross stitch I started back in the1960s when my brother was hospitalized after his appendix burst and I’ve only worked on that cross-stitch when someone in the family was hospitalized. I no more than put the kit case by my La-Z-Boy when it spooked me out, thinking if I start working on it someone will end up with a medical emergency. I listened to my inner voice and put that project back where I found it. 

The next day I completely failed at my resolve to finish up all my unfinished craft projects when I bought some yarn on impulse to start something new, a sampler of knitting stitches. I might be 82 but I’m not dead! I thought standing in front of the yarn bins. And maybe if I make a sampler project like I did when I first learned to knit as a teenager it will turn out to be a good thing, like putting a period at the end of the last sentence in a book. Ya, I'm not taking any bets on whether or not this will turn out to be my last knitting projects.

Until Next Wednesday…  ©

                                                                 My Seven Year Scarf  

*The painting above by Thomas Couture is titled: The Romans in their Decadence. (French: Les Romains de la décadence) First shown in Paris in 1847.

 

The New Years Resolution 2023

This time of the year I’m programmed to think about New Year’s Resolutions. Yes, I’m one of those dinosaurs who has been making them (and breaking them) since my early teens. That’s a lot of years. In this century, however, I jumped on the One Word Mantra Movement instead of writing resolutions and that worked great for me in the early years of my widowhood. The idea is to pick a word that expresses your intention for the coming year, an inspiration to apply to your life. “Believe” was a common one back about 8-10 years ago but “Bravery” was my first one word mantra. It worked to chant it  under my breath when I was doing things alone for the first time after my husband died. After 3-4 years of using different one word mantras I expanded to a one sentence mantra like “Be the peace you seek.” which you’ve got to admit is better than the Resolution that made my list of New Year’s Resolutions more years in my life than any other: “Take better care of myself.” I’ve been making and breaking that one since I was fifteen and I finally decided it wasn't working because I needed to be more specific.What does 'take better care of yourself ' even mean? Resolutions need to be filled with more red meat than that.

Not having a clue what I wanted to do this year I did some research online and ran across an article titled 65 Rewarding New Year's Resolutions for a Healthy, Happy Life. Most of those suggestions, however, have made my resolution lists in past years. It’s a boring list of 65 that includes stuff like “Chili Out” “Practice Mindfulness,” “Quit smoking” and “Drink less Alcohol.” For a minute and a half I considered their “Get in a body positive mind-set.” Then I decided that would take more effort than I’m willing to do (and probably a few hours on a therapist’s couch). The only suggestion that almost made it to my resolution list is number 47 which was about quitting multitasking: “Multitasking doesn't make you more efficient, but it does stress you out, says mindfulness expert Pedram Shojai, author of Focus: Bringing Time, Energy and Money into Flow.' If your focus is fragmented, you'll likely find yourself getting anxious as new items come up when old ones are still incomplete,’ he says. Instead, he suggests, organize your activities into chunks of time, such as kid time and cooking time, and then commit to being focused in those allotted minutes and see what happens. It'll help stop you from overthinking everything." Right now as I write this post I’m listening to a book and doing laundry.

Another article I found on making New Year’s Resolutions was titled 12 Inspirational Mantra for the New Year and it has stuff like:

She who is brave is free

The body achieves what the mind believes

In my words, thoughts & actions, I choose kindness

Seek the sweet moments in every day

That last one really appeals to me even if it is just a rehash of the gratitude journey I kept the year after Don’s stroke as per Oprah’s popular fad in 2000. Looking for something positive every day help get me out of the depression the aftermath that his stroke caused in our lives.

But one article on New Year’s Resolution seemed to be written strictly as click bait and it was just a word search image. The first four words you find will be your mantra for 2023. I found care, break-through, money and power on my first try but I didn’t like them and I kept looking and found change, purpose, love and alignment. This is a lazy man's way to pick a resolution so why bother? I’d never pick my resolutions that way but I'm not above using the idea as blog fodder, so there you have it.

Every year when I write a post about resolutions I get a lot of comments from people who don’t make them and/,or think it's a silly idea, a waste of time. Writing them is outdated, I'd agree, but I still think there is value in taking stock of areas in your life that you want to change or work on improving over the next months and that’s all New Year’s Resolutions have been for me. For most of my life I've had an end of the year ritual of reviewing old resolutions written for the year that's ending and beyond. Then on New Year’s Day I’d record a new list in the front of a brand new journals. 

I destroyed volumes and volumes of diaries and journals when I move here 14 months ago, just keeping the ones from my pre-teens and teen years---my naive and innocent years---which were filled with crushes and silliness. To this day I kind of wish I’d kept at least the first pages out of those 60+ years of diary and journal keeping. I miss that end of the year tradition of getting them out and reflecting over how how pretentious, silly, dramatic or lonely I was from year to year. ©

 Happy New Year, Everyone! 

I'll be the one spending next year trying 

to

“Seek the sweet moments in every day.”

New Year's Resolutions Report - Week Four

 

As you may or may not remember I’m taking a 12 week course called Stronger Memory and one of the three requirements is reading out loud 20 minutes a day. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it. It’s not! My voice box hasn’t gotten this much of a workout since…well, since never. I wasn't a mother who got to read to kids or grandkids and I’ve never taught classes or had a job where I had to give corporate reports. The closest I got to speaking out loud for any length of time was back in college when I took a couple of classes in public speaking, and I was a second stringer on a debate team but even back then our preposition and rebuttal speeches were limited to ten minutes.

A quick google search of how our voice changes over the years brings you information like: “As you age, all of your muscles naturally lose mass. This includes the muscles of your vocal cords and voice box that make your voice work. The older you get, the more your voice may become hoarse or ‘tired’ feeling as a day wears on." Even before I signed up for this course and discovered how hoarse my voice really is I’d been concerned that my voice was cutting in and out when I talk. I spent so much time alone during the pandemic of 2020/21 that if I hadn’t had a dog to boss around my voice would be even thinner and more cracker-ly than it is. (Oh, look, I just made up a new word.) As one website describes the aging process of our voices, “Weakened and dry vocal chords become stringy, which prevent normal vibration, causing higher pitched voices that sound thin.” That’s me. My voice sound ten years older than I am by the calendar.

The above paragraphs are the long way of saying that after ten minutes of reading out loud, it gets hard to do! I have to push myself to get through the next ten minutes. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m supposed to be reading out loud. (And I'm not alone in these complaints about our homework.) I am, however, enjoying the content of the book I’m reading: Painting Techniques of the Impressionists. One of the things I’ve learned that gives me hope for my own work is how long it took various Old Masters (by contrast to the Impressionists) to complete some of their famous works of art. Notes, sketches and color samples in a notebook of Turner’s for example resulted in a finished painting ten years later. Impressionists were not like that. According to my book they were “…painters of fleeting effects, as no other painters had done…” Impressionists would paint outdoors then come back with paintings they’d show and sell in galleries while the Old Masters would have taken those same paintings back to a studio, refined them and worked on them for long periods of time---years even---before they’d declare them finished. No wonder the Impressionists were scorned by some in the art world. (The invention of the camera factors in here, too, but that's a whole another topic.)

Anyway, back on topic: New Year’s Resolutions kept and discarded. I have started a painting but I had a least ten false starts before I settled on a subject to paint. Check that resolution off the list since the resolution was about starting a painting…nothing was said about finishing one. Okay, so that’s a technicality and some might say I’m cheating but it’s my Resolution List so I get to make up the rules here.

Although by the end of the year I do hope to finish a couple of canvases I’d been working on when my husband had his stroke in 2000. I recently found the photo and notes I’d mourned as lost about what color formulas I’d been using on a painting I truly want to finish. It’s of my great-niece when she was a little girl and now she’s a woman with two children of her own. If Turner could take ten years finish a painting and some of the Old Masters work on the same paintings for half a decade, then Amateur Hour Jean can take twenty-two years and not have to feel like such a failure about it. And Manet had once scraped a face off his canvas 25 times before being satisfied that he got it right, so I guess there's no shame in me redoing a face for a second time. Still, my mom in the last few years of her life made a conscious choice to finish up all her unfinished projects and sometimes it feels like her ghost is haunting me, telling me to hurry up and tie the loose ends of my life up because time is running out. Mom, quit nagging me, I'm trying!

The above paragraphs cover two of my New Year’s Resolutions, a third one about improving my personality has already been moved to the discard pile as being too vague. I’ve changed that from “improve my personality” to “reveal more of my personality” and I did so recently at a lunch table when the topic of Chick-fil-A came up. Someone asked if their chicken is really that good that people would wait so long  in line to get it and I mentioned that I wouldn’t know because the place is on my Boycott List. When I was asked why I boycott it I kept it simple, just saying that they support a lot of conservative causes that I fight against. That statement opened it up to where three others revealed that they boycott the place too.

Then one of the Skinny Minnie Twins admitted to buying a My Pillow pillow before they knew the company owner was so off the rails Trumpian and how much it hurt to throw that very comfortable $100 pillow out because she couldn't put her head on it without negative feelings filling her head. Another woman admitted that she will only go to Hobby Lobby when she’s exhausted all other sources to find what she’s looking for. Because I had the guts to drop the ‘Boycott List’ into a conversation I’ve found my political tribe on the continuum care campus. And here I didn’t think there were any other Liberals around.  However, The Cheerleader causally mentioned that we all have to live together for the rest of our lives and there are so many other things in the world to talk about that we should keep politics and religion off the table. Okay,  then. ©

Photo at top: J.M.W. Turner's 'Dutch Boats in a Gale.'

The unfinished portrait that I'm pledging to finish by the end of the year. (Need some practice time on other stuff before I tackle her face again.)

 

The shelves I mentioned in an recent blog that I had added to have a place to store wet canvases and various things I need for inspiration or to have handy in my painting nook. The thing to the right of the easel is a fold up, antique table that I can put my palette on when working.

It’s a Brand New Year and You Know What the Means…

…Or maybe you don’t know what it means to me to be starting 2022 just as I don’t know what it means to you. Are you the type who makes New Year’s Resolutions? Most of my life I’ve been that person who makes the list and at the end of the year reviews my successes or failures at accomplishing what I committed to writing. When 2021 started I was especially happy to usher it in and I wrote a post that began with: “Goodbye 2020! In my entire life I’ve never looked more forward to a New Year’s Eve than I have this year including the years when I had fancy, dress-up events to attend. I’ll bet most of us can say that in this year of the World-Wide Pandemic, Mother Nature Gone Wild and our Bat-shit Crazy Politics. 2020 needs to be thrown on the heap of history with the hope of better things to come.”

Not much has changed in the arenas of the pandemic, Mother Nature and bat-shit crazy politics but this past year (2021) I've taken the easy way out by ignoring the greater world around me, metaphorical pulling a blanket over my head thinking what I don’t see can’t hurt or affect me. I’ve been in an almost total news blackout since October and that has never been my MO. That’s not to say that I haven’t tuned out of things in the past. I have. But never for this long before something would suck me back into keeping up with the news. 

And that's starting to worry me. Lately I’ve been asking myself if being too busy it the real reason I’m pulling inward or if it’s something that happens with age and failing brain power that explains why I don't want to keep processing what's going on outside the bubble I've created for myself. When they give an old person cognitive tests they always make a big deal out of whether or not someone knows current events and who the president is blab, blab, blab. Little green men from Mars could have taken over the world last month and I wouldn’t know about if one of my favorite bloggers didn't write about.

My dad was in a drug trial for an Alzheimer's drug and part of that trial involved me taking him in to get a comprehensive cognitive test every two months for a year. His answers to 'who is the president' were never right but often funny. Once I tried to prep him for the test and he ended up ratting me out. When asked who the president was that day he couldn’t tell the doctor and the doctor said, “It’s Bill Clinton” to which my dad said, “My daughter tried to tell me that in the parking lot but I didn’t believe her.” Once he said, “I don’t know his name but he seems like a hell of a nice guy.” One time he was a good looking guy, another time he said, “I don’t know but the vice president is Al Gore.” I’m quite sure when my time comes to take the comprehensive cognitive test that could deem me unfit to handle my own money and medical decisions I’ll proudly answer the president question with a firm, “Bill Clinton. Everyone knows that.”

At least I know I’ll get that question right the first time I take the cognitive test because I’m doing one in a few days as part of a twelve week class I signed up for here at the continuing care complex. It’s called Stronger Memory. We get a cognitive test at the beginning and the end of the course. Others at our sister campus who’ve been using the Stronger Memory workbooks claim it helps them and it’s a fun course to take. It involves committing to do twenty minutes a day to reading out loud, writing twenty minutes a day and doing a sheet of timed math problems a day. We’ll meet once a week and read some of our topic-driven essays out loud to the class. I've heard from several sources that the innovated memory care program on this and our sister campus is rated one of the highest in the state. I'd be a fool not to use the tools they offer to try to hold on to my brain power.

We’re supposed to write our essay answers out long-hand, directly into our workbooks but I’ll be cheating on that. I'll write them on another paper then copy them in the workbook. With my dyslexia I simply can’t write a decent paragraph without editing and correcting spelling and changing word order plus I’ve been practicing penmanship for the past 4-5 months so I’m not concerned with my brain renewing those connections. Mainly I signed up because it will be a good way to get to know others better---like taking a writer's workshop---and wouldn’t you know it, three of the five Jean’s on campus will be my classmates. It happens so often that its become a running joke. If your name is ‘Jean’ you automatically get enrolled in the sign-up-for-classes club.  

As for New Year’s Resolutions, I’m keeping one that has been repeated frequently since my teens to “improve my personality.” After all these years of writing that resolution it finally dawns on me that I should break that down and define what it is I think I should work on. It’s too vague. Another resolution I’m putting on my list of five is to stop talking about painting again and make a serious effort to actually do it. Everything is in place but me. To help with that I’m going to use my twenty minutes of reading out loud time to read in my art books. I think I'm afraid I'll find out that I lost whatever talent/skills I once had and I don't have enough years left to get it back.

My third resolution is to downsize again starting in the summer when I can work in my storage unit in the parking garage. If you followed my downsizing saga these past few years you’ll laugh at the fact that I just downloaded a free book called, Decluttering at the Speed of Life. I guess I'm looking for someone who can turn me into an unsentimental, minimalist who would be happy to sit on a curb with a bowl of rice and a buzz cut.

My forth and fifth resolutions have to do with coming up with a schedule that finds the sweet spot between personal time for hobbies, social time and improving body and soul. Drifting along sampling different things around here has been fun but it’s time consuming and I need to set my sails, head some place.

I know you're wondering what happened here for New Year's Eve. We had two parties. One was fully implemented by the management, a fancy buffet with jazz musicians for entertainment. I got to wear an out-dated-but-much-loved wine colored velvet jacket and everything ended at 9:00 on the 30th. For the actual the New Years Eve we residents organized another party where 20 of us each brought a tray of snacks and we played Uno. It was fun but the party started at 7:00 and ended at 10:30. 

Happy New Year, Everyone!  ©

Goodbye 2020!

In my entire life I’ve never looked more forward to a New Year’s Eve than I have this year including the years when I had fancy, dress up events to attend. I’ll bet most of us can say that in this year of the World-Wide Pandemic, Mother Nature Gone Wild and our Bat-shit Crazy Politics. 2020 needs to be thrown on the heap of history with the hope of better things to come. 

This time last year I started the year out with an actual Good Things Jar, fully intending to add a note each day of something good that happened that day. That lasted until March when my state got our first covid-19 lock down. By mid-summer I emptied out the jar to repurpose it. I hate admitting that, but facts are facts. Usually I keep my commitments to myself. (Well to others, too, but the point is that the Good Things Jar was another good thing in a long list of good things that went badly in 2020.) Since I was a teenager I’ve faithfully written New Year’s Resolutions. After widowhood my resolutions morphed into the then new fad of having a one word Mantra to live by over the next year. I loved the mantra idea and should have stuck to it. Better yet when the Good Things Jar bombed I should have revived one of my past Mantras. My mantra of ‘courage’ that I used the first year after my husband died would have worked for 2020 because it took courage for me to roll out of bed each morning and stay focused on my move to the continuum care campus while the building project got shutdown due to the virus. Or my past mantra that was inspired by Wood Allen of ‘Just show up’ could been bent to fit the trials and crud that came with 2020.

One way I will celebrate tomorrow night is to watch a movie that has become a tradition on the last day of December since it was first released in 2011. It’s a comedy romance titled New Year’s Eve and it centers around the ball dropping at Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It gets stuck and the woman in charge of the drop steps forward and makes a touching speech that in the shadow of 2020 sounds almost quaint. “…As you all can see, the ball has stopped half way to its perch. it's suspended there to remind us before we pop the champagne and celebrate the new year, to stop and reflect on the year that has gone by, to remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken, the times we opened ourselves up to great adventures... or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt, because that's what new year's all about, getting another chance, a chance to forgive. To do better, to do more, to give more, to love more, and to stop worrying about what if... and start embracing what will be. So when that ball drops at midnight, and it will drop, let's remember to be nice to each other, kind to each other, and not just tonight but all year long.” 

I still love that speech but I’ll be the first to admit the ‘what ifs’ of 2020 haunted me, I embraced them in a hug so tight that it felt like I was super-glued to all that went wrong in the political world, with the world-wide pandemic and with acts of God and how all three of those things converged in what felt like I was a small sailboat being dragged down into the Bermuda Triangle. So on New Year's Eve I’m metaphorically going to ER to get that super-glued hug unstuck like the time I super-glued my eye shut and had to go in for emergency eye care. Oh my God, did that hurt! And to this day I still wear safety glasses whenever I use glue. Super gluing your eye shut doesn’t do any permanent damage. If only we could say the same thing about all that went wrong in 2020. But we can’t. Lives and homes were lost to fires, floods and hurricanes. Millions of people have died because of the world-wide pandemic. Jobs and businesses were also lost to the virus. And we can only hope that our very democracy has not been damaged beyond repair from having the most corrupt and self-serving president in our history these past four years. My hope is probably echoed across the world, that we’re leaving all that behind in 2020 and we get a cleaner slate starting out 2021. Note I didn’t say ‘clean slate’ because we still have still have to mop up a few major messes from last year.

Back to what I plan to use for a mantra or New Year’s Resolution for 2021. I’m going with ‘Hope, Health and Moving Forward.’ And that means I’m nurturing the hope that all our lives will improve as we get the virus under control. The ‘health’ in the mantra means I need to step up and be proactive to get my small health issues under control before they mushroom into something bigger---my arm, foot, weight and, of course, avoiding the virus. And the ‘moving forward’ part of my 2021 mantra means every day I need to keep doing what needs doing to facilitate my move to the continuum care campus in August. ©

 HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

The Good Things Jar - 2020

I’ve spend many New Year’s Eves reviewing my past year’s accomplishments and disappointments and making new resolutions for the coming year. Many of my old diaries contain grandiose prologues with lists of resolutions done in a way only a youthful person with a locking book and a pen could write. I was ritualistic about the process in the last century, but in this century some would say I gotten more creative about the passing of one year and the beginning of another. Others might say I’ve just gotten lazier as I age. 

For example, for a few years early in my widowhood I joined the One Word Mantra Movement instead of writing resolutions and that worked great for me. The idea is to pick a word that expresses your intention for the coming year, an inspiration to apply to your life. In 2013 as a widow approaching my first sadiversary I embraced the word ‘bravery’ as my mantra and the Cowardly Lion as my mantra’s symbol. I even found a Cowardly Lion charm to wear on a chain. (I love eBay. You can find anything there.) I wore that charm to all the places I went to solo, when I was feeling insecure and wishing I didn’t have to choose between going out alone and staying home alone. It worked because now I can go anywhere and it no longer fazes me. Well, except maybe to a biker bar in the hood, I'd still be scared if I tried that. Not that I want to, I'm just sayin' so for the sake of full disclosure.

For 2014 I used a longer mantra---“Choose Your Change”---to help me remember that I was in charge of pulling my own strings and I could transform my life into whatever I want. Then in 2015 I went with “Just Show Up” as my mantra. It was a one-size-fits-all situations manta/resolution that bounced off something Woody Allen is known for saying, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” He was talking about being successful at writing and how so many people say they want to write, but they don’t sit down and do it thus they don’t accomplish anything. He believes that if you actually show up every day to put words on paper, you’re 80% of the way towards being successful. That mind-set can be applied to any goal and in 2014 I wanted to ‘just show up’ for every that felt like progress in finding and building new friendships. I signed up for any and everything I could down at the senior hall, didn’t turned down a single invitation that came along, got involved in a few volunteer projects and I stepped up my creative writing sessions and to this day I still continue showing up every day to feed words to my computer.

Last year my inspiration for my 2019 New Year’s Resolution were some words I saw stitched on fabric: “Use all the talents God gave you for the forest would be very quiet if only the best bird sang.” Being a person who drags around a lot of guilt for wasting time and my minor league talents, those words struck a chord. So last year I cataloged my talents and vowed to appreciate and use them more. And I did. Two things that I consider I have a talent for doing are organizing and long-range planning. So I put money down on a 1,000 square foot unit at a continuum care campus that is being built and won’t be ready until early 2021 and I’m symmetrically downsizing my quart-sized life into the pint-sized life I’ll be moving into.

Now with January 1^st, 2020 close at hand I’m starting a new-to-me tradition. I'm starting a The Good Things Jar which is like keeping a gratitude journal and a gratitude journal did wonders for me in the dark year following Don’s stroke when some days the only thing I had to be grateful for was the fact that the day was almost over. With The Good Things Jar you’re supposed to write a note about something good that happened in your week then put the note in the jar---notes that you’ll take out and read on the following New Year’s Eve. I’m a creature of habit. I take my trash out on Sundays. I water my indoor plants at the same time, plan my next week, do my laundry and read the Sunday paper. I’m planning to incorporate writing my ‘good things’ notes into my Sunday chores list. Sometimes I get so lost in big projects that I forget to come up for air like this past year of downsizing collectibles on e-Bay and I’m thinking the ‘jar’ will help me notice the positive things happening around me, around the world and in my heart as I let go of past to move into the future.

What are you doing on New Year’s Eve? Will you look back at last year and tally up your successes and regrets, maybe make a few Resolutions for the year to come? It’s also (almost) the beginning of a new decade and let’s face it, it will probably be my last decade on earth and I plan on making the most of it. Now not only am I resolving that in 2020 I will faithfully use my Good Things Jar but I’m also making a resolution for the whole decade to come a year from now. I’m going to: 1) choose my change, 2) just show up and 3) use my talents all rolled up into one whopper of a Resolution for the rest of my life. ©