Friday survey: Plan my life!

Spring is one of those times of year when I am motivated to get my life together.  After hibernating all winter, I am all jazzed up to get going, to organize my life, to revisit hobbies, to become a brilliant and fascinating woman so comfortable in her own skin that everyone in America wants to be her.

Wait, what?

Anyway, I find myself at a bit of a crossroad.  I’ve got quite a lot of half-hearted plans and quite a lot of NO TIME right now.  I figure that, at best, I can scrape 1/2 hour out of each workday and maybe a couple of hours on the weekend to accomplish some of my goals.  I need some help prioritizing.  And that’s where you come in.

Below are some of the things I’ve thought about pursuing.  I can’t do all of them.  Hell, I probably can’t do one of them.  But I’m going to try.  Pick one thing from each category that you think is worthy of my limited time.  I’ll do my darned best to keep up with it and will report back on my success.

Ready? Go.

Life maintenance*:

1) Exercise: hiking, walking (which is totally different from hiking, don’t you know?), yoga, taking some kind of class, etc.

2) Physical appearance: improved skin care, regular haircuts, doing my nails, buying clothes that fit and then washing them, generally making myself look less like a ragamuffin.  Stop raising your eyebrows at me like that.  This stuff takes time, darn it.

3) Homemaking: actually planning meals as opposed to panicking every night at 6 PM, keeping the house in a relatively sanitary condition, baking yummy things, attempting to keep alive some plants (um, also known as gardening)

Creative:

1) Knitting: I’ve got a bunch of yarn and whatnot because I used to do this all the time and I loved it and was good at it but…yeah.  Let it slide. 

2) Photography: also something I got pretty good at and then quit.  We have a sucky digital camera, but a nice film one PLUS some old cameras that could be cool to play around with all old-school-like.  Plus, wouldn’t it be nice to have good pictures of my daughter?

3) Screenprinting: a while ago I got jazzed about designing and printing fun stuff and bought some screens and ink and…yeah.  See above for what happened to my other hobbies.

Writing:

1) Work on the novel that I whipped out during Nanowrimo a few years ago that I still love and think about all the time.  I truly think it has potential, or I’d just let it go. 

2) Work on some personal essays and other short works that have the remote chance of actually being published.

3) Concentrate on turning this blog into something less half-assed and haphazard.  ‘Cause I can do better than I do here, I’m sorry to say.

Entertainment:

1) Go out more with friends: more than like, once every six months.  Perhaps even try to arrange a standing happy hour get-together once a week, which I used to have with a group of friends and miss tremendously.  I no longer live in the same place as those friends, but I have new friends!  There’s even a bar in town where it’s okay to take babies.  I know, I know, but I swear it’s true.  It’s really a brewpub/restaurant kind of place and there’s no smoking or loud music or frat boys.

2) Go to the movies: I love movies.  A lot.  Few things make me feel as inspired and refreshed and thoughtful as a good movie seen on the big screen.  I have no qualms about leaving Alias Father with the baby once a week to go to the movies alone.  That’s how much I love movies. 

3) Read more: Currently it takes me around 3 months to read a book because I manage only about 15 minutes at a time before bed.  This is out of character and is making me feel like an uneducated slacker.  My “To Read” list is like 300 books long.

Okay, folks.  Weigh in.  I need opinions.  I EVEN NEED OPINIONS FROM ALL YOU LURKERS THAT I KNOW ARE OUT THERE BECAUSE I CHECK MY STATS, PEOPLE.  STOP LURKING AND VOTE!  AND I MEAN THAT IN THE NICEST YELLING WAY POSSIBLE!

(Perhaps I should skip all of these in favor of an etiquette class where they teach you not to raise your voice at the nice people who read your blog.  Ahem.)

*It tells you something about me that I even have this category, doesn’t it?  And that it’s my first one?