New goals, and the Christmas of Handmade Gifts

My parents read the last blog entry, and after a few phone calls the family members are all on board for making Christmas 2015 be the holiday of the handmade gifts. The excellent thing about this is that I know exactly what I want to make for most of them, because I had it all planned out (but ran out of time) by October last year.

So!

Current 2015 goal:
- Hand-make all Christmas gifts for my side of the family. Potentially do the same for other friends and family. This will be excellent practice for the future etsy store, and if it is fun I'll end up making extras to attempt to sell once it is up and running. (A healthy amount of online crafting sales is my eventual business goal/fantasy especially once kids are in school and I have lots of free time.)

Potential 2015 goals I am pondering:
- Figure out how to grow healthy seedlings that survive, and get them planted outside on time. Sounds like a small goal, but this was my biggest garden issue last year that led to almost nothing producing a respectable amount of edibles. And I have a LOT of seed.
- Slowly weight lift daily for at least 5 minutes, arms/back one day and legs/stomach the next. Sounds simple, but whenever I have steady weight loss, I am on this regimen. I could use some muscle gain.
- Walk 1000 miles, as tracked by my Fitbit. That equals 2.75 miles a day... I tend to do a mile a day if I am totally sedentary, so this should be a doable goal, especially as I work up to longer hikes. This requires that I get outside almost daily, which I need to be doing more anyway, especially with a high-energy dog. The baby can handle a jogging stroller in 2-3 months.
- At least 10 minutes of Pilates or swimming per day. I have ten 10-minute Pilates video segments in my DVD arsenal and a saltwater pool in the backyard, and tend to feel the best when I have been doing these two exercises regularly. How hard could it be to find 10 minutes?
- Blog for at least 10 minutes per day, whether I feel like it or not. This would be encouraged by the new iPad, which is currently helping me type while I nurse.  Talking with an artist and researching writers online, it seems that they force themselves to create daily even when they're not feeling the creative spark... it works for them.  Maybe it'll work for me too.
- Avoid wearing jeans until Valentine's Day, to be able to say I avoided real pants for a year. Hehe.

If I do all the potential goals, that is an investment of a minimum of an hour per day in mostly small chunks. Torin's getting better at entertaining himself now that he's found his hands, so... heck, I'll do them all.

For a daily reminder I will make up a list of daily and long-term goals to use as my computer background.  My exception will be that the daily items can be skipped on days when sick or not at home.  Lastly, I will update here once a month with my actual tallies of miles walked, produce plucked, gifts made, etc.

Think it can be done with a baby in the house?

In Retrospect

Alrighty... it's my birthday, and it's the first of the year, so it's time for that good ol' goal setting thing.  Normally my "resolution" is to make no resolutions, but for some reason last year and this year I feel the need to do something more substantial.  


2014

The past year had a bunch of extreme successes, and a bunch of failures, but it was also one of the happiest years I can remember.


Basically, the three most important goals of the year were accomplished: 

• Leave my job (the end of a 3-year attempt to leave)
• Work every day on stress reduction and relaxation
• Get/stay pregnant after 3 years of fertility issues and pregnancy losses. We finally have that healthy baby we've been wishing for!

In the face of that, who cares about the rest?


So, what now?

Here are the goals from last year... very detailed, and apparently very optimistic.  See below* for details on what was accomplished!

It has become obvious that I need to make goals that are either few and important, or many and easy.  Do I gather all the mini-goals from last year that were abandoned?  Or just the most important ones?  Do I make super easy short goals like "perfect my thai soup recipe" or longer easy goals such as "do 10 minutes of Pilates per day"?  Do I reach for the stars, or reach for the nearest cup of tea?

Either way, I need to head in the direction of improvement.  My fitness is rather sub-par after a difficult pregnancy, the blog is lagging, my Etsy store seems to be just a far-off fantasy compared with how much free time I have, and the garden is a huge waste if I can't get it to produce anything again this year.

I need to ponder these things more deeply, so it'll have to be another post on a later day.  In the meantime...

Do you have any goals for the year?  Do you have any inspiring tales of goals accomplished in 2014? 



*
Here's what did get accomplished:

• "Retire" from my job.  Heck yes I did!
• Cook purely from scratch... well, I mostly did this.
• Meditate daily and keep stressors down.  HUGE success here.
• Doubled the garden space.  Weigh all produce for accuracy.
• Deep-clean and declutter house.  Technically I did this, but then it re-cluttered halfway.  It's an ongoing battle with my hoardy instincts.
• Paint and furnish the extra bedrooms... did 2 out of 3, not bad.  Put in new carpet and beds!
• Minimized the overall budget.  Not as much as I could have, and still plan to do more next year, but it was enough.  Kinda shocked that we didn't really feel the loss of my income.
• Making friends... the neighbors' kids come to play with Stormy on occasion now, and I have 1 dog park friend.
• Increased disaster preparedness to cover 3 months of bugging-in survival.
• Slowly train Stormy to carry water on hikes.
• Get pregnant, stay pregnant.  Damn right, I had that baby!
• Keep blogging.  Technically I did not give up, despite very few posts.
• Host a party... there were 2.

Major 2014 goals not accomplished:

• Double the garden produce.  Didn't even make a 10th of last year's.  Horrible weather patterns, horrible luck with seedlings, mysterious tomato failures, lots of mammal and codling moth pests.
• Become a badass hiker.  A high-risk pregnancy meant an end to my hiking... doctor's orders.
• Build enough stock for the Etsy store to actually start the store.  But I did learn to crochet!
• 2014 food storage plan... only did about a 4th of it or less.  Pregnancy food aversions, ugh.
• Hand-make gifts for the holidays... well, I did a few of them.

Stormageddon can't pee due to Stormageddon

Stormy's full name is Stormageddon, so it is cracking me up that the news and social media are using her name to describe California's storm right now.  A storm which is just all hype in my portion of the affected area.

In any case, Stormy can't pee in the rain... I think it's too distracting for her.  Today is no exception, and she hasn't pottied in 14 hours.  I decided to solve her bladder issue by resorting back to what we did when she was a puppy, and create a safe place for her to go out of the rain.

Oh look, a dry spot.

The plan has been a failure so far.  She has completely forgotten what puppy pads are for.

... wish us luck.

A Dairy Sacrifice

Today marks a week of being dairy-free.  

Is it possible to be addicted to cheese?  It feels like I am!  Nearly everything I regularly make has some sort of dairy product in it... and those foods that don't have dairy will often get a sprinkling of parmesan.  Mmmm, I make a delicious popcorn with olive oil, smoked paprika, and parmesan.  I'll try not to cry over my thick and satisfying homemade yogurt. 

Anyway, I'm not doing this for fun, or for moral reasons, or for my own dietary reasons.  My month-old son is allergic to something I'm eating, and the doctor is certain it's dairy proteins... there's nothing like blood in a diaper to scare first-time parents and give one the proper motivation for a major dietary change.  I may have to avoid milk products for a year.

It is now time for recipe experiments!

In an attempt to make the dairy-free life easier, I've been testing the waters with a few new recipes.  I only had one box of almond milk on hand, so the first thing I tried was making a homemade "milk" from oats.  It is oddly satisfying, but then, I like oatmeal flavor.

My favorite discovery so far is that breads seem to be easy to do.  I've used the oat milk in place of milk, and melted coconut oil in place of melted butter, and my pumpkin dinner rolls came out just as moist and tasty as usual.  And it turns out that my 2 favorite pizza dough recipes are dairy-free already.

My pizza experiment didn't go all that well, just making pizza but leaving out the cheese.  However, I did do one pizza with beans, veggies, and BBQ sauce, and it was palatable.  There's definitely room for improvement (next time, chicken instead of beans!), but I discovered that I very much prefer a cheese-free pizza if the sauce is not a red one... that way, I don't expect it to taste like pizza and I don't miss the gooey heavenly cheese as much. 

My parents came by last weekend, and cheered me up by bringing some dairy substitutes... 2 types of "cheese," a "butter," and an "egg nog."  Thank goodness there is fake cheese that melts properly!  Times have really changed since the last time I tried to go dairy-free a decade or so ago.


Do you have any favorite dairy-free recipes to share?