~ new year stuff ~
Being of the mind that every day is a new day to live better than the previous, I do not normally go in for new year's resolutions. This year, however, will have a few notable milestones and turning points that justify a chronicling of my hopes and goals. In particular, at the end of spring/early summer, I will be both graduating with my masters degree and turning 30 years of age. Both of these events mean a lot to me personally and professionally.
Cycling
My primary personal goal involves putting in a lot of miles on the bike. With school soon no longer being an impediment to being able to ride my bike everyday, not only do I want to ride my bike everyday, but I want to ride it over longer and longer distances everyday. I feel a strong desire to embark on long bike adventures, including the multi-day/week variety. Additionally, I will continue to improve my technical skills, downhill speed, and I hope to complete at least one race.
Sometime around my birthday, Josh and I are going to go on a two week bike excursion. And I've recently been inspired to pair it with a brewery tour. The tentative idea being to drive down through Utah, stopping possibly at Park City and maybe hitting Arches, and then doing a tour of Western Colorado, camping for cheap on BLM lands, spending a day or two at each location, mountain biking the days away, and somewhere in between enjoying some quality beer. This plan is by no means certain, another strong inclination I have is to head north into Alberta. Furthermore, the plan seems to rest on my feeling inspired and excited, and I continue to search for exciting resources on the internet. My two primary sources for Colorado/Utah excitement include the Beer Drinker's Guide to Colorado and Mountain Biking Mayhem which has a lot of neat info about the trails in CO and UT (including fun videos!).
Food
Working full time and going to graduate school is a great opportunity to forget how to cook and to develop a love of processed foods. By the end of last semester, I was eating microwavable burritos every single day. The combination of my stomach virus and eating nothing but greasy food in Arkansas served as a reminder for me that there are better ways to eat.
Since my return from Arkansas, I have been cooking and loving it. Last night, for example, Josh and I made beef gorditas (a recipe from my my new cookbook) and they were delicious and satisfying. Over the weekend, I made an exciting chickpea stew. Tonight, I will make a curried sweet potato and chicken dish. No more microwavable burritos.
Furthermore, I am going to have a real garden this year. I've got a compost pile (sorta) going and a mulch system in place, and lots of enthusiasm. I also hope to buy more from the farmer's market.
Knitting
Over the past few years, I have developed a more meticulous attention to detail. I still tend to knit by the seat of my pants, but it is a little more structured and planned. A huge knitting goal for me is to implement a more rigorous approach to planning out my projects, which would facilitate my then being able to translate them into patterns. Last year, I succeeded in accomplishing my goal of writing up a real pattern - - I don't know if I'll ever make it public - - and it was a significant learning experience for me, instilling in me the understanding that a rigorous planning process would make pattern-writing A LOT easier. Lesson learned.
A second knitting goal is to expand my skills and learn new ways of knitting. I am pleased to have recently incorporated doubleknitting and seamless set-in sleeves into my knitting repertoire; my hope is to continue to expand it.
A third knitting goal is to knit exclusively from my yarn stash.
Here's a mosaic of my 2009 finished knitting projects.
I have a sense that my mosaic for 2010 will contain considerably less stockinette, more stranded knitting, more obscenely complex cables, fewer sweaters and more mittens.