New Blog for the new year...

I need to begin by saying that I am a horrible blogger. I have attempted many blogs and kept up with...none of them. Not since the good ol' days of high school melodrama recorded under my screen name "jadedrose" (oh, oh, the dramatics) on Livejournal have I faithfully kept up with much of any kind of journal, online or paper.

However, this year has already been one of changes, so why not start now?

Primarily, I hoping this will keep me to my various goals. If I must say so myself, I've done a pretty fantastic job of keeping up with my teacher goals this year. I'm a super-fast grader and am pretty much always prepared...well, pretty much. I'm almost completely satisfied with how this year is going at HHS. Ask me again after the drama play is over. As of this week though, in addition to being a teacher, I'm also a student again, which leads to a whole new set of goals. My first graduate women's lit class was Monday and I LOVE IT I LOVE IT I LOVE IT. It was so extremely refreshing to have a non-forced (i.e., AP Lit) discussion about literature. If I could get my classes to discuss like we did in Dr. D's class just one time this year, I would be ecstatic. On here I'm going to try to keep up a reaction/reflection-type dialogue about that class. And I'll probably just complain about how hard linguistics is already.

My most important goals right now are for myself personally, and I have already come a long way but need to go further. At the end of the summer, I did a complete re-evaluation of how I was taking care of myself and decided it just wasn't cutting it. I am 23 years old and have no excuse for being unhealthy. So, this year I've started eating better and exercising a LOT more (hey, it's easy to exercise more when you weren't doing it at all!). Now I'm up to a pretty regular schedule of 25 minutes to an hour at least 4-5 days a week. Since August, I've lost 25 pounds...there was bit of a set-back round the holidays, but that damage has been repaired this month. Now I'm participating in this eight-week community weight-loss challenge, and my goal is to lose 8-10 more pounds. Hopefully that pans out! I just got to the point where I was completely unhappy with how I looked - I'm still a long way from where I want to be, but thankfully it's getting much better! If I can lose half of the weight I put on in college, I think I'll be good.

I'm working on a couple other goals as well, including:

• Reading more independently (good stuff, not so much fluff)
• Writing more - not just lesson plans and examples for class!
• Finding new recipes and actually cooking
  
• Being more faithful in my scripture reading
• Keeping up with housework!

So, this may be a little ambitious, but if I just keeping working a little bit at a time I know I can make some progress in all of these areas. In other news, I have wonderful husband, a great job, a nice place to live, good friends, and an overall happy life! This is still a time of change for us, but hopefully the changes just keep getting better!