New resolve

A few housekeeping notes:

• My Secret Blogger Santa is awesome! Yesterday, I received a puffy mailing envelope containing cute blank cards with various antique-y prints and chic stickers. I neglected to mention that, for my second gift, I received a very sweet e-mail with the five things my SBS loves best about reading this here site, plus a link to FreeRice, where I flexed my vocabularly muscles and wasted a good part of a workday. Thanks, Nicole! You rock!
• Last night, during our New Year’s Eve bonanza, we made it through 11 out of 22 episodes of the second season of The Office and barely propped our eyelids open to see the ball drop. Our marathon viewing of The Office continues today, somewhat scattered around football viewing, because I am determined to see the blooper reel.
• I generally shy away from retrospective posts for the year. Trying to digest a full year’s worth of activity is a little too much for me, I guess. Shrug. Off the top of my head, highlights of 2007 include taking a colonial spring break, celebrating a second anniversary, getting a dog, invading DC, quitting a job, starting a new one, and being an SBS elf. I gesture to the Archives for all other points of interest.

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I’m torn on the subject of resolutions.

On one hand, I like an excuse to make goals. January 1 is an arbitrary sort of new year for me; I still operate on an academic calendar with JG, so September is more intuitive. In the middle of winter, it’s nice to feel as though I’m turning over a new leaf and self-improving. On the other hand, I hardly ever succeed at my resolutions because the thrill of making goals and possibly checking them off makes me go overboard: I’ll do yoga on every workday! I’ll re-learn how to play the guitar! I’ll stop biting my nails again! AND I’ll write physical letters once a week! By January 20, I’m a dismal failure, so I swear off ever having resolutions until December 31 swings back around.

Last year, I resolved to read four books every month (in an effort to make a point to make time for leisure reading) and try two new recipes every month (to try and cook more). Because I didn’t bother to track my cooking expeditions, I have no idea if I even came close to that one, but I’m pretty sure that I didn’t have a fighting chance of meeting that goal. Out of 48 possible books, I read 35 books in 2007, so I wasn’t successful at that resolution, either, despite my best efforts. I feel okay about my progress because I managed to read four books in five of the months, and in general, I made it a point to read a lot more than I would have normally. I developed a habit of constantly scouting out books for the next month and asking people what they were reading so that I could garner new recommendations. Although I didn’t meet the actual goal of 48 books in 12 months, I feel successful in the overall intention.

What’s next — five books every month for 2008? No, no. Since I’m fully immersed in searching for new reads and asking strangers what they’re reading, I am letting go of a reading goal this year, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t keep track of my literary ambitions. Thanks to Goodreads, I can keep tabs on my virtual bookshelves, plus whatever my cohorts are reading. (Click over from your feed readers to check out the fancy Flash widget that shows my recent reads!) Thank you, Internet, for fulfilling my urge to obsessively track yet another aspect of my life.

That said, the resolutions for this year are:

1. To cook 2 new recipes every month
Yes, I’m trying it again. As with last year, I want to try and improve my cooking skills by making one new dinner/entrée and one dessert/baking recipe per month. This time, I am laying out the to-try recipes way in advance, instead of hoping that I run into the right recipe in time. To keep me on track, I will post each recipe here, and hopefully, the accompanying story won’t be horrific. I will do my best to glean from the cookbooks and clippings I already have, but I may supplement with any must-make numbers I encounter.

2. To give up drinking soda
Ah, here’s where it hurts. I come off as a saint when I demurely refuse coffee and chocolate (with the shocking truth that I simply don’t like them), but I am a fiend when it comes to candy and sugary drinks, and my weak enamel cries out in pain. Trying to give up sugar would be completely unrealistic, so I’m trying to eliminate a mere subsection by substituting water (not lemonade or iced tea) when I would normally reach for a soda. The hardest part of this goal will be resisting my deep love of the root beer float, my favorite dessert. Before we rang in the new year last night, I drank two bottles of Hank’s root beer to commemorate this new stage of self-restraint. The year won’t be completely abstinent; to celebrate each month of soda-free existence, I’ll reward myself with a root beer float on the last day. And I will look forward to it all month long.

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