in-betweenie

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (belatedly). I started back at work on the third day of the year, and the office was like a ghost town: behold the tumble weeds.

Achievements on the first week of work include: creating inbox zero in both my personal and work accounts; emptying out my downloads folder; and creating a "welcome back to work" poster in which I hand crafted decorative pennant flags in PhotoShop. Achievement ++!

Given that I've definitely already started my year, it may seem a bit strange that I'm still mulling over the beginning of the year Feelings of Potential and Enthusiasm for What Is To Come. But I do! It's from catching up on all those other blogs.

Firstly, I am making lists of things I want to do or do more regularly. My resolutions for this year have their own star chart: I'm working month by month which means I can add, subtract and edit my goals as I go along. This is totally cadged from CrazyAuntPurl. January looks like:

• Yoga twice a week
• Floss every night
• Sixty minute declutter weekly
• Blog once a week

As well as listing decluttering as a weekly goal, I'm also undertaking a nice New Year's purge. So far I've had a go at my books and underwear drawer, but I still have plenty of other cluttered spaces to keep me interested - my wardrobe and dresser, and also I need to do something about all the crap on my shelf in the bathroom, the majority of which I haven't used in forevs and that probably break all rules pertaining to the shelf life of cosmetics.

One of my plans this year is to keep a tally of the clothes that I've made, any clothes I've bought new, and any clothes I've bought second hand. This will be my dressing-ratio, and I'm hoping that it will trend towards more sewing. Thus far, if we keep the tally strict from 1 January onwards I am 1:3:0, which breaks down to:

• Made: cowboy-print culottes
• Bought new: three cotton singlets
• Op-shopped: nada

(If we start the tally from after Christmas and thus, including the in-betweenie time, I can also add that I've made a skirt and a fabulous vintagey portrait top from Gertie's new book (as in Gertie's Blog for Better Sewing). This changes my ration to a more respectable 3:3:0. But behold my honesty).

Mostly, this year, I'd just like nothing spectacularly awful to happen. 2012 had a big dollop of crap right in the middle of it that adversely impacted my plans to make my thirtieth year the Best Year Ever (although I still have a few months to improve that).

However, I know this year is going to be better. I'm totally going to colour in that pesky Debt Unicorn in it's entirety. And then I'm going to start a Holiday Savings Unicorn and finally get to all the awesome places that I've idealised, romanticised and fantasised about. I have an awesome partner who I'm lucky enough to be blissed out with everyday. I have bookshelves and an e-reader full of books, maintain a fairly good balance between having too many and not enough Things, and eat stupidly well. As always, there are things I can change and tweak and move towards improving. 

But you know, baby steps.