Lacking a Nail

I didn’t look at these as resolutions, while I feel it’s fairly obvious that when people speak of resolutions they are speaking of personal goals they have for the upcoming year. In my experience they are more like pennies cast into a wishing well. Things we would like to accomplish or think we ought to accomplish but, outside of breathing momentary life into them on New Years’ Eve they are left to live or die in the elements.

Goal just carries more weight in my mind. A goal is something I will keep going back to try again if I stop doing it. Without further ado – my 2025 goals. (While they are numbered, I promise they’re in no particular order.)

1. Lose weight. I’ve gained a good 40 pounds over the last five years. I’ve even started the oft mentioned yo-yo-ing of weight. I would like to casually, over time with the goal of permanence, lose 50 pounds. Why 50? It’s a round number and I was already needing to lose a little weight five years ago.
2. Improve personal hygiene. I suck at brushing teeth daily, regularly taking showers. You know basic stuff a person of my age should already be in the habit of doing.
3. Improve my budget accuracy. I want to remember the annual/periodic bills better. I would like to not spend all of our spending money as soon as it hits our account. I would like to improve staying within the allotted money for each category by both better estimating how much I want to/need to spend and by increasing awareness of how much I am spending. Both can lead to blowing a budget.
4. Clean up my email. I’m a resource collector so I have a lot of email courses and account confirmations. My email says I have 95% of my storage used (I have brought it down from 98% already) and I had, probably still some in there, emails from 2010 telling me about store specials that week.
5. Clean / Back up my computer. As stated above I’m a resource collector. I have a ton of downloads from Ultimate Bundles. I also have a lot of pictures that I have downloaded from my google account. I do have the bundles on a back up disc, that I am now getting notifications doesn’t work any more. So I want to organize what I have and start going through them. What’s the point of buying all these Ultimate Bundles on housekeeping, budgeting, blogging, etc. If I don’t even look at what I have after it’s downloaded?
6. Read 12 adult books. I’m not talking about smut, although maybe I’ll include that next year. The last 5 years I’ve had trouble focusing when trying to read a book. January’s book, which I’ve managed to only read a portion of the introduction of, is Lazy Genius Way. Yeah, already way behind on this goal. But as I said the trouble isn’t solely finding the time, it’s literally not being able to focus on reading when I do have the time.
7. Organize/Clean the house. This has been a task I have been working on and improving over the last decade or so. I have vastly improved. I have a lot more to go.
8. Journal, Blog, Vlog. work on it all. This is the journal/Blog aspect. My Vlog will be me doing random crafts with the sound muted because I have no idea where and how to get sound that won’t be a copyright infringement. There’s a market for someone doing diamond painting, color by number, and sticker by number in poor lighting and at bad angles in complete silence, right?
9. Control my social media presence. I need to learn to keep my mouth shut and should probably look into deleting some posts/comments.
10. Related to #3. Not spend all of the spending money in the first two weeks of the month on random stuff / impulse buys. I am excluding when we’re buying something that we have been planning on purchasing and a good deal or the availability is at the beginning of the month. Example – We already discussed purchasing a new razon and got a 40% off coupon for the full purchase from a drugstore that, like all drugstore coupons, we had a week to use. It was something we were already looking at, we agreed to and intended to buy, a decent coupon appeared with a limited window.
11. Have a regular “spa” day. Which I am yet to have this year. Basically a foot soak and maybe face mask type of thing. If I’m feeling really fancy I might even paint my nails.
12. Complete a latchhook project for my MILs birthday. These are goals not resolutions remember. I didn’t get it done for Christmas I want it done for her birthday.
13. I joined an online finance group a few years back. I want to actually work through some of their masterclasses and resources and such. I decided to randomly aim for 1 a month. I actually did complete this goal this month already.