New to Us for New Year's

This "New Year's Post" is a few days delayed, mostly because it's been rattling around in my head since Tuesday, but only really started to take shape in the last 24 hours or so. And partly because the 3 day work week kicked my completely relaxed rear back into reality in a not so nice way. Vacations are wonderful, but returning back to work after the vacation is not.

Today we bought a new-to-us car to replace the one that was declared totaled earlier in the week. While it's a 2003, it's in great condition and feels new to us. I'm relieved to have the accident now be "over" so I feel like we can move on with our lives.

That new-to-us philosophy is how I'm approaching the always popular New Year's resolutions. I've never been able to keep these. So this year, I'm not making one. Not exactly. Instead of doing something new, I'm choosing instead to improve upon the things that we're already doing.

• I want to do more cooking at home and not use the "I'm tired, can we go out?" excuse as often.
• I want to then serve that cooking at the dining room table more often, instead of eating in the living room so much.
• I want to be more frugal about my spending (see #1), and impulse buy less often.
• I want to keep on top of general household chores better, so that the overwhelmed and buried feeling occurs less often.

Over at Reflections, Kim posted on how she is using her recently acquired Taekwondo skills to formulate "specific, motivating, attainable, relevant and trackable" goals. I would love to say that I can do that too, but in reading her goals, she is much more disciplined than I am. More power to her! For me, I've tried that and failed. I'm hoping that by improving upon what I am already doing, I'll see more success.

I'll let you. know.