Third Checkpoint

Goals time again.  I’m sure all of you are thrilled for the update.

• Fit Into My Clothes Again – I haven’t been exercising like I should.  I’m having a hard time making time for it in my day.  I know it’s a problem and I’m trying to figure out a new schedule that will work better for me.  We’ll see how it goes.  I finished nursing Wingnut at the end of May so some of my clothes that were fitting, uh, snuggly up on top are getting back to normal.  I’m not sure if I should be sad or not.  Also, since I no longer have nursing hormones coursing through my body I’m hoping my body will respond more quickly to exercise when I get back to it.  Again, we’ll see.  Feeling a little discouraged about this one right now.
• Organize my recipes and get rid of my magazine collection – I only have 4 more magazines to go through which won’t take long.  I’ve also been getting the recipes I have saved on my computer in order.  Next up, get everything into binders.  Yay for progress!
• Pare down and organize my photos – Squee!  Done!  I finished this just a couple of nights ago.  ODD was gone for a few days for a Youth Conference.  While he was gone I reverted back to my night owl ways and in true HSF fashion I dove into organizing my photos in an all or nothing way, staying up until 2 one night and 4 the next to just get it done already!  To give you an idea of what this really involved, in addition to tossing duplicated and superfluous photos I also looked at every single photo, relabeling them, and organizing them by date.  The last 4-ish years were almost all already organized by date but also I still had to go through over nearly 16,000 photos and sort them to determine what I wanted to keep and toss.  The years preceding that didn’t have as many photos (these are pre-kids years) but they were all disorganized and put in random folders all over the computer.  To add to the work we also recently scanned all the prints we have and I had to organize those as well.  All in all we’re talking about almost 20,000 photos.  It was a huge undertaking but I’m happy to have it done now and it makes finding photos much easier because they’re all in the same place.
• Publish my blog again – Although I found a quick, easy way to do this I decided to wait a little bit until ODD got a raise at the beginning of July.  Now, instead of making roughly $8/hour he’s making $9/hour!  Woo!  Anyway, at the same time blog2print was also having a deal for 15% off which was nice.  I printed my blog sans comments and the past two years were still roughly 250 pgs.  The photos are smaller than the ones I had printed through QOOP but I don’t mind and I’m so happy to have them in hard copy.  I ordered them in hardback and they were around $100 each.  The only thing I was kind of sad about what they didn’t have an option where I could design the full cover myself.  Not really a big deal, though.  I’m thinking I need to get my first two years redone now so they all match.  I love looking at them all together.  How cool to have four years of our lives in print!

• Sew at least one project each month – I can’t remember if I posted about May’s project but I made a little make-up bag for my mom for Mother’s Day.  Now both Teeny and Kermit want one too so I need to get some time to sew them up.  They don’t take long, I just need to do it.  For June I made a new skirt for myself.  I still need to add some big, red rick rack to it but you get the idea.  I also went to a quilting shop hop last month and bought a great new pattern so I can make a jacket for Peanut this fall.  I’m very excited about it but I’ll post more about it when the time comes.

Over all I’m making pretty good progress on my goals.  I’m so happy to finally be completely finished with two of them!  Now I just need to get myself in gear with exercising which will probably always be a constant struggle while I have little kids who like to “help” if I exercise while they’re awake.  All in all, though, not too shabby.