New Year's Resolutions for me (and T---tma)

I am actually proud of myself for sticking with this blog for the last few months. I haven't told anyone about it...well that's not true. I tell people about it, I just don't tell them WHERE it is :) So in itself this blog has been an accomplishment for me. It's a way to show myself that I can in fact stick with something if I set my mind to it.

So with that in mind I decided I want to make a few New Year's Resolutions that pertain to both my personal life and this blog.

1. I want to be in more travel pictures. This past year I have very VERY few pictures of me because I run from cameras like they spew flames with every snap because I don't like the way I look. And whose fault is that really? In August to prepare myself for our yearly Labor Day couples vacation, I lost 12 pounds with the Biggest Lost 30 day Jumpstart. I LOVED the food, but it's a lot of work. And really what in life isn't? So to achieve this goal, I resolve to use the new Biggest Loser cookbooks to cook healthy meals and lose 50 pounds by the August Berlin/Prague trip. To keep myself on track, I will post here the best food I loved and/or the most troubling dishes. I will NOT be posting a monthly weight update. However EVERY trip I take will have pictures of me and hopefully the differences each month will be noticeable.

In 1997 when I went to Europe the first time with my friend Carrie, she told me that EVERY picture had to have one of us in it. I juxtapose this with the last pictures I take and would love a happy medium. I have some great pictures of scenery marred only by a travel bedraggled woman with bed head (from sleeping on trains) that I really wish we would have taken without us in them. There has to be a happy medium.

2. I want to track what I read. In 2008 I resolved to track EVERY book I read. It was over 200 books. I read. A lot. And that was fun but not what I want to do again. I read about a bookstore in New York that groups books according to location. Supposedly you can email them a location and they will send you a list of books that you can buy from them that uses that location as a setting. Well I emailed and as of now I haven't heard back, but I can only imagine their puffed out inbox after being featured in a premier travel magazine. This led me to thinking that I want to do that here. I want to track everything I read based on location. I will list the labels on the blog so that anyone can link to a series of books based on the label for any location that I have read.
CAVEAT: I will not be listing all of the historical romances that I read like crazy because seven hundred London books set in the 1820s really isn't THAT informative for anyone who wants to read.

3. I want to spend less on crap. This pertains to T---tma because I have a tendency to buy any seemingly homemade crapola from any old native when I travel. Yesterday at breakfast I pulled out a bread basket made from Provencal material.





and told my husband that I wasn't going to buy any more souvenirs that I knew I wouldn't use. I wanted more like the breadbasket (or hell even a a coffee mug) and less of the jade (very very costly) elephant I got in Paris. WTH was I thinking? I mean who else doesn't immediately think of Paris when they see a Jade elephant???

Strangely enough that very day on the way to my inlaws I was reading a magazine article about the UNsouvenir. The author's main purpose was to buy items that the LOCALS use. I'm not going this far really. I just want to buy items that *I* will use. Like the candy dish from Mount Vernon I use to hold my jewelry



4. Learn something new I commit to this every year. But as I'm travelling to Czech Republic and Germany I'd like to learn enough conversational German to get by and quite a bit more Czech. We even get a Czech paper through our life insurance so I will have practice!

I think that's enough for this year. I've decided to go for the full marathon this year if I get chosen for Nike Women's Marathon again so I will have to start walking like mad very very very soon (like today). I turn 36 this year and with respect to my family's life expectancy half of my life is over. I want to really enjoy the second half!