It's the new year, y'all.

[gelbes_gilatier]

You know, in case you haven't noticed yet...

Anyway, first of all: happy new year to all of you! I hope you all had exactly the New Year's Eve you wanted and had a lovely beginning of the year. I did, surprisingly because I tagged along my sister and her invitation to her co-worker's house for New Year's Eve which ended being a party of eight adults and five kids ranging from two months to five years, including my nine-month-old nephew (the other sister, his mom, tagged along, too with my brother-in-law) and kinda like the New Year's Eve parties we had when I was a kid (i.e. lots of food, lots of alcohol, lots of talking, fireworks and kids hopped up on sugar and excitement running amok), only that suddenly we were the adults doing the drinking and the talking and the fireworking (that's not a word, I know, okay). Anyway. It was fun!


Regarding the topic of resolutions... I don't have them because I know I don't stick to them, anyway. Instead, you might remember that I have a couple things that I'd like to achieve this year. I know that I didn't achieve everything I planned last year, so lots of stuff I wanted to achieve 2017 will get carried over to 2018, but honestly? I'm okay with that. Kinda. Sorta. Anyway. Here are the goals for 2018:

• Find a fucking job. Like, a real one. Honestly, after a little more than a year, I am really, really done with being unemployed. I. Am. So. Ready for a job.
• Run 10k. That is, transition from regularly running 5k to regularly running 10k (no races for me, because I have zero ambition to do competitive running. I'd just finish last every time, and I'm a person who can finish last only so many times before she gets frustrated and overambitious). I've been running 5k more or less regularly for about one and a half years now, and I've been mulling transitioning to 10k for at least nine months now so I guess the beginning of the year seems like a good time to get serious about a new running distance (especially because I'm more likely to run regularly in winter than in summer. Looking back, it's a bit of a miracle that I managed to graduate C25K after starting in June...). I'm currently downloading a transitioning podcast a friend recommended and I really hope that it's going to work as a well as the NHS's C25K program. My sisters gave me a gift card for Lululemon for Christmas, and I intend to make really good use of whatever I'm going to buy there.
• Build a community garden in the backlot. My block's backyard is huge (as in several hundred squaremeters huge), and after they finished building the elevators, they're set to rebuild the backyard. I suggested - as the block belongs to a co-op, so basically a small part of that also belongs to me - a couple things like a small community garden lot with vegetables and herbs, a barbecue area, a bee and butterflies friendly area, that kind of thing - and the co-op chairman wanted to talk to me about those suggestions sometime in January. I'm hopeful that I get at least a couple of them cleared up, and I'd really love if we could find a way to bring other renters in on it, too. I really do think that people are more appreciative of things they built with their own hands than stuff that they didn't have a vote in and possibly maybe even didn't want.
• Continue the cookbook challenge from 2017. I didn't get done much of it last year (I also bought a couple new cookbooks *sighs), so this remains open until I get it done. I'm hoping to cook more than just the measly four times of last year (actually, it were like six but I kind of err... forgot about posting about the last two. And okay, I cooked more than six times but most of it was Kochhaus stuff or off the cuff stuff, not from any of my cookbooks) because I still semi-live with my parents and yeah, usually one of them cooks. But yeah, this is still a good idea so I'll keep it up.
• Finish knitting the Green Monster. This blanket has been haunting me for three or four years now and it seems like it's stuck at 80cm, no matter how many rapports I add. But I am determined to get it done. This damn thing is kind of like my knitting nemesis and I want it to be ooooveeeerrrr.
• Finish crocheting Bernie the Ball Shark. It's my first amigurumi project and my first real crocheting project, too, and I'd rather not still be haunted by it in four years.
• Finish at least one of my stitching projects. I have a couple of them lying around (some almost twenty years old, I kid you not), and really, it's ridiculous that I haven't finished any of them yet. So, definitely another crafting priority to tackle this year.
• Read at least fifty books. This has been a yearly goal for maybe ten or twelve years running and I even had a couple years where I managed to track my reading for at least six months but I want to give it another go and see if I can really manage it. I have managed buying at least fifty books in a year easily and more than once, so it shouldn't be a problem reading them, too. I will, however, also count books I started reading in 2017 and haven't finished them yet and books I'm re-reading (because I have a couple romances I just love to read over and over and over again, and I still read them cover to back, so those totally count!), just to be transparent about this.

I'd also like to write more fic again, but that's more of a kind of continuing thing than an actual goal, so I'll keep it in mind but not add it to the actual list. Also, those goals seem attainable (with the exception of finding a job, considering that most of that isn't actually in my hands but that's a topic for another day) and well suited to be checkable (i.e. I can put a checkmark behind them), and I love checkable things. If I can manage at least three things on that list by the end of 2018, it'll have been a good year. Yes.

So, how about you? Any goal lists, resolutions, stuff like that? Tell me!