New Year's Goals

I'm not normally a fan of New Years Resolutions for several reasons. I generally have goals and plans in motion for myself year round. However, this year I'd seen several blog posts about setting goals instead of making resolutions. However, I already have quite a few things on my list that I'd really like to accomplish this year, so I figured I'd write them up into a nice list and share with all the world. That might help out with that accountability thing.

I've already shared our 2008 Financial goals, but I'll add that we have all our revolving/standing credit card debt paid off. We will need to make payments to cover all our holiday spending and the last payments on our trip. Everything looks like it will be under control soon and we'll be credit card debt free. On New Year's Day, H and I sat down to put together a new budget for this year and we'll work on keeping that on track. He finally set up his 401(k) for work and we've got a pretty good start on our emergency fund. I want to organize all of our financial paperwork this weekend to send to the CPA for taxes as soon as we get our statements in the mail. Also this year, I need to get H to work on his will, power of attorney and medical directive.

Health wise- I've got the marathon coming up in January. I'm normally a once-a-year gal, but I'm toying with the idea of running the grand-daddy of them all marathons- the NY marathon in November. I do want to make a very serious effort to get back into the gym doing weights at least twice and hopefully 3 times a month. I'm generally a regular dentist-vistor, but I've been putting it off an extra few months until I could get on H's insurance. So I need to visit the dentist and I want to see an eye-doctor (I feel like my vison is getting a bit worse since I had LASIK done a few years ago).

Faith front- continue attending church weekly, find a place to serve in my church, be more faithful about attending our small group, mission trip to Mexico, increase giving to missions and continue pledged giving towards new church, continue volunteering outside church and read the faith books in my "to be read" pile.

Married Life- have a great travel year with all of our trips, spend more quality time together, be quicker to say I'm sorry and get over little arguments, accomplish more things on our 101 list, including reading some books together.

Work world- Of course, I'm hoping for my engineering license application to be approved, so I can take the crazy 100 hour review course in March and the big exam in April. Our technical paper will be published and we will travel to Detroit to present it also in April. Since this is a public blog, I'm not totally comfortable sharing the rest of my work goals- as they are rather specific, but I'll just sum it up by saying: be a better employee.

Personally- spend more time reading, volunteer and be active in this year's elections, spend more time with the family- especially my grandparents, continue to blog and improve my blog, undertake the massive project of getting so many film photos into the digital world and documenting more of my history.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: It's a 3-day work week.