This Bright New Year

Cranes via WeHeartIt

It's likely that I didn't start my New Year particularly well. I didn't get much sleep, gossiped, didn't brush my teeth until noon, got in an argument with my husband, taught a 7-year-old a card game with an inappropriate name, and ate too much pie. And hell, those are just the bad beginnings I remember six days later.

Perhaps 2012 had inauspicious beginnings for me, but I'm determined to make a few changes this year. My New Year's resolutions are hopefully a little easier to stick to than losing 25 pounds or being sweet to my husband everyday (which probably should be my resolutions, but hey I don't want to set myself up for failure. I'm a girl who likes to eat and be sarcastic to her husband. Know thyself.)

My first goal is to be more positive, mostly about my job, but certainly I could stand to incorporate it into other facets of my life. It's been easy to focus on the frustrations, and I know those same frustrations probably won't go away anytime soon. My hope, however, is that if I willfully refuse to acknowledge them in the future, they will have less impact on my mood. It seems to be working so far, but that could also be the endorphins from a great vacation still leftover in my system.

My other goal is to, according to a note on my phone, "work on my abs." I'm not sure what caused me to believe that a mental note was not a concrete enough historical record and that I needed to actually start a note dedicated just to my reminder to do crunches. Indeed, as I sit typing this hunched on the couch trying not to disturb the muscles screaming all over my body, I realize "schedule massage" should have been the next note on that list ahead of "Take tennis lessons."

Well, I probably don't have to think about that much until about June when winter in Chicago finally (usually) ends. Though with the unseasonably warm weather here it's tempting to start now. I just know that if I do I will jinx us all causing a deluge of winter storms to zero in on my tennis-playing  joie de vivre. So I will wait. You're welcome, my fellow Chicagoans. When our winter weather remains mild I will require full credit.

My final goal is to improve my posture. I think this will likely happen somewhat organically as I improve my overall muscle definition. My days of indoor rock climbing gave me muscles that seem to cause me to naturally hunch a bit. You'd think that with my current lack of muscles the problem would be solved. However, a few recent pictures have led me to believe that my time at my desk has made me lazy posture-wise. I have no real plan at this time other than a heightened awareness of sitting and standing up straight. Hopefully that will be enough though I have considered incorporating some sort of harness. Decided that might be overkill though.