mistressofmuses

This week, to be festive, some bits cut out of one of my favorite wrapping papers that we currently have.

This was a lovely week. Christmas itself was nice and mellow, which is how I like it. The days leading up to the holiday were busy, especially with baking and such, but I did manage to get almost everything I'd hoped to done. (We'll see how I feel in the run up to New Years.) It was nice to spend time with my mom and Taylor, time with Alex, making food, getting some chore things done... The time after Christmas up until the end of the year is always a weird sort of limbo, and the latter part of this week definitely had that vibe already.

Goals for the week:

• I read more, but did not finish The Fragile Threads of Power
• Since I didn't finish that, I did not start Manhunt
• Christmas happened!
• I did visit mom and Taylor on Christmas Eve into Christmas Day
• I baked my yule log cookies
• I baked my kolaches
• I made my truffles
• I watered my plants
• We went and did a very large load of laundry (overdue blanket load!)
• I put my laundry away
• I did finally get caught up on DW
• I didn't check it off, but I did work on my reviews for the month
• I didn't work on my reading page
• I did go get crickets and fruit flies
• I got stocking stuff for Alex

Tracked habits:

• Work - 3.5/7 - we were closed on Christmas, and had a half-day on Christmas Eve
• Household Maintenance - 6/7
• Physical Activity - 4/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
• Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/7
• Meta Work - 6/7
• Personal Writing - 4/7
• Other Creative Things - 4/7
• Reading - 7/7 - I read quite a bit of The Fragile Threads of Power and some of my ebook; Alex and I read some of The Sun Dog; Taylor and I finished Silver and Lead
• Attention to Media - 6/7 - Sunday we watched the Ravens game (did not go well), and some reviews; Monday watched a review; Tuesday I listened to music and watched a review; Thursday we had some background youtube and later watched Christams Twister [sic]; Friday had background storm chasing and later reviews; Saturday we watched another Ravens game (which went much better) and then more reviews.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 6/7

Total words written: 0

I don't really do "New Year's Resolutions" so much as just set goals for what I want to do. (I've mentioned before that I realize it's a semantic difference, but still also a real one, I think.) I think I'm softening it even further this time by not even calling them goals; I'm calling them "intentions," lol. This what I intend for 2025.

(And yes, I also do know that the changing of the year is an arbitrary divide, and there's no actual magical change from December 31 of one year to January 01 of the next that necessitates that being the time for change or new habits/goals/etc. However, psychological and cultural influences are real! I will take advantage of them!)

I am not wildly hopeful about 2025, largely because I can foresee this being the start of a miserable, dangerous, disastrous four years (at minimum.) Pushing myself toward productivity, or even just focusing on little minutiae feels kind of pointless to an extent. I saw a post on tumblr (by tumblr user gideonisms) to the effect of resolutions not being about whether you actually keep to them or not; it's about them being a promise to yourself that you're still going to try something new.
In my case, I'm not really attempting anything terribly new, but setting my intentions is a promise to myself that I'm still going to try to make my own life (and sometimes the lives of those around me, hopefully) better. No matter what the landscape of 2025 brings, and no matter how hopeless it feels... I am going to live my life, and I will do my best, for as long as I can, to survive and to do better.

Habit tracking has continued to be useful to me. I enjoy my particular blend of a bullet journal/habit tracker and brief "what I did today" entries. It's been nice to be able to refer back and figure out what date something happened on (because I am chronically terrible at judging or remembering the passage of time.) The only longer-term thing I tracked last year was my reading, which I was happy to have succeeded at last year! I did not, for a second year in a row, use the monthly calendar pages that I'd painstakingly drawn out, so I ditched those for this year. Still planning on keeping track of my reading, and the same twelve habits I've been tracking.

( My intentions for the year: )

20 intentions, which is a few more than usual. The ones I'm probably least certain of are the ones in the "social" category. I don't have an overabundance of unused free time, so I don't know how feasible it is for me to devote more of it to socializing in various spaces... but I also think it's going to only get more important to have some form of social connection. So we'll see if I can figure it out!

As I say every year, I know that the new year is a perfectly arbitrary measure. Time is fake! It's all a social construct! Even so, it's still a useful period of "cultural reset," and it's a convenient time to look at having a sort of clean slate, to reassess things, to decide on a course to focus on.

I tend to do some goal-setting, which feels different (though maybe only semantically) from setting "resolutions." Though as a couple people have pointed out - several on tumblr, galadhir here, as well as others - too often "resolutions" wind up being about working more, or denying ourselves things we enjoy, or pushing harder into the productivity and grind mentality... I'd rather aim to do things that are fun, or that I enjoy. At the very least, I want them to be things that improve my life. Even if they aren't "fun" per se, I want them to be the sorts of things that make my life better, make my environment more enjoyable, are a gift to future-me, etc.

For this year... it looks very much the same as last year, honestly. Last year's goals were sort of a mix in terms of success. I did well at some stuff, some stuff I did not touch, some stuff I tried a bit and then crapped out on. So this year, the aim is mostly "keep doing the good stuff, and try again at the stuff that I didn't manage last year."

I'm still planning to track the same habits on a weekly basis. While I had a couple stretches last year that were a struggle with the tracking, it's still much more valuable to me than it ever is annoying. It helps to keep me on track, to see where my time is going, to set short-term goals. It also helps me to look back and remember things I've done. I have a terrible conception of the passage of time, so it's good to look back and see what I've done! (I also have some emotional blindness when I'm having a rough patch. It's nice to look back and be able to tell that I haven't always felt like crap!)

Much like last year, I've sorted my goals into categories based on the habits I track.

( For 2024... )

Here's to a year that I hope is good, peaceful, and kind to all of us.

Back at the start of 2023 I did set some goals for the year. Pretty tentative, as they generally always are. I know that years are an arbitrary measure of time and all, but it's still convenient!

The quick version of my goals for 2023 were:

• continue habit tracking
• expand my tracking to include monthly calendar pages, plus long term goals like books read
• at work: find a better structure for my days, take my lunch breaks, and limit how often I went over 40 hours/week, and focus more on management's success metrics
• for my household: aim to do weekly small cleaning projects, make coffee at home more often, repot my plants, display my collection of pins
• physical: find a good stretching routine
• writing: write 75k for inkingitout and getyourwordsout, find a new project to feel enthusiastic about, finish my Set Sail zine piece, complete and share at least one new fic
• meta: try scrivener, finish posting All Strange Wonders and Outbreak
• personal: keep up on DW
• creative: draw more of my tracking layouts, participate in National Model Painting Month, find ways to better portray a sense of personal style 
• reading: read 20 books
• video games: play more
• social: interact with more communities here

( And how did I do? )

Not a whole lot to say otherwise about the year as a whole... no big changes for the most part. The one big thing was getting Bella, back at the very beginning of March! I'm still extremely happy how much better she's doing now than she was at the start. We got to do some very limited travel - just quick car trips, with at most an overnight or two. We put our park pass to pretty good use for at least part of the summer, though I'd of course have liked to do more. The year as a whole seemed to go very quickly... though I guess everyone says that, ha.