Oh hai 2013!

It can be said with confidence that 2013 is going to be a big year for Matt and I.
Heck, 2012 was pretty significant (going to Taiwan, Japan, lots of great stuff happening in my job, Matt being laid off from his job, increasing my volunteering in the community, etc.). So while there are some knowns for the next 12 months, there are a lot of unknowns that will likely make things interesting!

As such, I’m making some goals for 2013 with no pending guilt attached. If I manage to pull of all or any of these goals, I’ll consider it a win.

Blog more – at least twice a month

As I mentioned in my summary of 2012, I didn’t do too bad with blogging last year, although it was rather infrequent. But as the great Scott Stratten has often said, it’s better to blog or update when you have something to say instead of putting yourself on a forced schedule and produce content that doesn’t reach your audience and just leaves you with boring posts.

That being said, it’s also easy to get lazy with blogging and not bother updating. I want to give myself a measurable goal, so I’m hoping to update my blog at least twice a month. Not really an overly challenging goal, but you have to start somewhere, right?

Read my social media book list from 2012 (and hopefully more)

Since I didn’t manage to take care of these books last year, I’m hoping to read through all of these. Maybe audio books will be the answer during late night feedings with our little miss?

And for that matter, read MORE

In addition to professional/industry books, I just need to read more. So bring on the chicklit, drivel, and trashy books in 2013. Right now I’m focusing on pregnancy, hypnobirthing and parenting books, but there’s a need to have some lighter stuff on the reading list too.

Run the Tely 10 again

Mini Middleton arrives (in theory) around the end of February/early March and last year I didn’t even start training for the Tely 10 until May (and even then I didn’t train as much as I could have and I did much better than expected on the big day).  I’d really like to run the Tely again this year.

I’m not saying I have to beat last year’s time; I just want to be there at the start line ready to run it and do my best.

Unpack boxes from Toronto

We moved from Toronto and back to The Rock in September 2010. It was a somewhat fast move.  Well, it felt fast because within a month, we had two weddings including a wedding of our best friend and I was a bridesmaid and the other wedding was Matt‘s sister tying the knot. So in less than a month, we found out that we needed to box up our lives and move half-way across the country; all in what was probably the busiest month that year. We had 120+ boxes/pieces moved and there are still a numberof boxes that we haven’t even touched since moving.

Before we moved, we were able to get rid of a lot of junk, but the fact that we pulled an all-nighter before the movers arrived, there was a lot of discussions that involved “crap, just throw all of this stuff into a box and write what room it came from!” So we have some “royal sampler boxes” that have all sort of random things in them. Ha ha.

Sort/gut childhood boxes

It’s an understatement to say that I had a pretty darn good childhood. One might even say I was spoiled… OK yeah, I was. There was never a shortage of toys, dolls and anything else a little girl might enjoy having. My parents were also aware that having epic battles to get me to throw away certain things wasn’t worth it, especially if my OCD was just going to upset me with having to “let something go” and toss it. This includes lots of past school projects, old pencil tops, and random pieces of paper and other silly stuff.

This has resulted in a lot of stuff that has been at their house for many, many years. Once Matt and I moved into a home of our own, slowly but surly, boxes have made their way into our house that were once cluttering up my parents basement and my old bedroom.

There are some things I want to keep of course – some of my better Barbies, children’s books, all of My Little Ponies (I can’t part with them… it’s just not possible), etc.  There’s also a lot of junk I can easily either toss or sell in a yard sale.

My goal is to try and go through as many of those boxes as I can in the next year. Whatever I keep, I need to be able to justify it’s existence and right to take up space in our home.

Edit and sort photos

This may sound simple, but it’s a pretty lofty goal. We have A LOT of photos that I have taken, but never really done anything with. I’m slowly accepting the fact that I need to accept that deleting photos that aren’t perfect is OK. It’s also OK to delete photos when you have multiple copies of the same photo.

I really, really want to sort through a lot of our photos and actually print some of them off and put them in photo albums. I also want to upload these photos to my Flickr account as a means of backing them up and have them available to share with family and friends.

I’m also playing around with the idea of doing the “photo a day for a year” that a few friends have done. I’ve taken a photo a day the past two days and I’ll probably start uploading them to my Flickr account, but I haven’t made a full on commitment to this yet.

So there you have it. My goals for 2013. Maybe I should have made them more baby-focused? Maybe they’ll all get tossed out the window once the little one arrives and our lives are turned upside down? I have no idea.

Have you made any goals or resolutions for 2013? Feel free to share or to comment on the ones I’ve mentioned.