It has officially been one month since I’ve started this blog, and I’m still in it to win it! Since I set that long list of goals to accomplish, I thought it would be a good idea to go ahead and give a run down of what I’ve been doing to actually achieve these goals.
I hate to admit to everyone, including myself, that I’m not nearly as far along with these objectives as I’d hoped. Oh well. Baby steps are better than no steps, right? At least I made some progress, which is what I will focus on today.
Goals to Accomplish Roundup:1
Goal 1: Board Games
What I set out to accomplish was to play 1-2 board games per week. I’ll do a follow-up with my favorite board games to play with kids later on. Here’s what games my family managed to play multiple times this past month: Thanos Rising, King of Tokyo and Jamaica. The past few weeks I wasn’t able to get a game to the table, but my family has been putting together jigsaw puzzles and LEGO sets, so I’m going to count this as a win. Plus those first weeks we did play, we played 1-2 games every single night so that evens everything out.
Goal 2: Peloton
Although I haven’t yet hit my first set goal of 300 rides, I did get back on the bike after surgery this summer and am nearly at 200 rides. Yay! I will hit 300 by the end of the year, no problem and no excuses. At the beginning of this year I also made a goal to ride 2019 miles in 2019. Well, being off for 9 weeks was a bit more than I was expecting, and I’m as close to my target mid-year as I’d hoped. Right now I’m at 845 miles, with about 4 months left. If I make it to 1,500 miles I’ll consider it all a success. If I don’t hit it, well I only managed to ride like around 150 miles last year, so I’m already doing better than Past Kristy.
Goal 3: Establish a consistent morning routine
I started back to work a couple of weeks ago, which is great and I’m really happy to get myself and kids back into a normal routine. However, that means my hour long coffee drinking sessions are done. I have to be at work at 7:30, so time in the morning is at a premium. My summer routine has gone from a nice, relaxing pace to a strict schedule where I need to get everyone out the door with underwear on and lunches packed. I’ve had to scale back significantly on what I get done, but so far it’s working pretty well. I’m going to do a more in-depth look at my mornings after I’ve fully gotten back into the groove of things.
Goal 4: Finish the Spanish course in Duolingo
This goal is probably the one I’ve managed to work on most consistently. I’ve dedicated a mere five minutes each morning to working on this and I’ve managed to make it halfway through the first level of the course. My Spanish speaking skills are slowly but surely taking off and I’m excited to zoom through my sessions actually knowing what is written on the screen. This is a far cry from actually speaking the language fluently, but I have confidence I’ll get to a place where I can communicate if necessary.
Goal 5: Research and Donate to Charity
My last post was breaking down my goals into bite-sized chunks and although this is something I fully believe in, I haven’t managed to get as far as I’d like with this goal. Since I’m fortunate enough to have a job that allows me to be off for two months during the summer, that means that when I go back things are a bit crazy. I imagine that my August is going to be fairly hectic, which means my goals are not going to progress as quickly as I’d like. This is where I will channel the hare from that famous race and keep with my slow and steady pace. What I did manage to do (which I talked about in this post) was to identify what issues I care about, which was my first step. The next ones will get done soon enough.
Goal 6: Blog 25, 50 and 100 times
When I first started this blog, I thought that hitting two posts a week would be fairly easy and doable. That was definitely the case during the summer when I had more time, but after a week back at work where I was busy enough to accidentally work through my lunches, I’ve found that twice a week may not work right now. Turns out that my creativity has taken a backseat to things that need to get done at my actual job. That’s not what I had envisioned initially, but it’s okay. These bouts of creativity come in spurts and I’m going to just go with the flow. I’m going to commit to a minimum of one post a week, most likely on Tuesdays. I also want to commit myself to writing something blog/book related for at least 15 minutes a day. That’s going to take me a bit longer to reach my goals on both my book and blog front, but that’s life. What I don’t want is to add another layer of unnecessary stress that I have imposed on myself. I want to enjoy my life!
New Goal- Win #1
A small, side goal that has been on my list for a long time in an unofficial capacity was to do an Escape Room. I know I’m super late to the game as these have been popular for years, but I just never had a group to go with or the urge to suck it up and just do it. I’m happy to report that this whole blog project has done its job and I finally took the plunge. I was surfing around Facebook (which I keep telling myself to stop doing) when I came across the perfect escape room theme- Jurassic Escape! Yes, it is an escape room that has a Jurassic Park theme. I gathered a crew, set a date and booked it before anyone could back out. I’m SO glad I did it, that was truly one of the most satisfying hours I’ve had in a long time. Take it from me, if you are on the fence about doing one of these rooms and you like puzzles or games at all, just do it.
Even though my goals are just creeping along right now, I’m glad that I’m taking more chances and not letting my fear hold me back. The escape room was a perfect example of something I had wanted to do for a long time, but just kept putting off because I think I was expecting someone else to take charge and plan it for me. I’m not doing that anymore. Due to my sudden take charge attitude, I also managed to drag my family to the Red and Green VegFest Albuquerque 2019. It was another thing that popped up onto my social media feed (which is perhaps more useful than I give it credit for) and I decided that we were going to go. Did it blow our minds? Not so much, but veganism is a big part of our everyday family life and it was an event to support that movement, so we went. There were some amazing vendors with some delicious cupcakes, therefore making it completely worth the effort of going. Again, something I might have skipped due to laziness or just lack of motivation, but I’m telling you-I’m a changed woman and the world is my oyster.
This is the first of many goals to accomplish roundups I will be posting. In fact, I think it would be worth while to post one at the end/beginning of each month so that I can not only keep you updated, but hold myself to my goals and expectations. It’s so easy to let so much of our time slip through our fingers and I’m committed to changing that. If you are interested in seeing other goals I’ve set, check out the links below.