Resolutions That I Have Not Completely Failed At Yet

In school, my sisters and I had an easy and fun way of doing new year's resolutions. My mother would come up with a basic craft project during which we would write down a minimum of three resolutions--writing them on petals pasted to a flower, or branches on a palm tree, that sort of thing. The next year when we started our new ones, she would pull out the old craft so we could see how we did.

I always ended up with 5-15 resolutions, and probably had an 80% sucess rate, which I think is pretty amazing. I am a resolutions goddess.

This might have had less to do with my willpower and more because the majority looked like this:

• I will beat Pokemon Sapphire
• I will buy the next Harry Potter book
• I will beat Pokemon Emerald
• I will begin seige of the evil colouring demon, Paint Shop Pro 9 [Yes that is word-for-word what I wrote.]

The ones that didn't get completed looked like this:

• I will learn how to sew
• I will write at least one snail-mail letter a month
• I will save up enough money to fly my best friend from Germany to Hawaii to visit

If I listed all of them from my middle/high school years (which is where these came from), you would discover several truths about me:

• I played a lot of video games
• I really liked drawing
• I really hated drawing digitally (and liked the whole British insert-u-everywhere thing)
• I thought that an 8th grader would totally make enough money babysitting to fly her quickly-fading best friend across the world.

Now that I am older and by default wiser, I choose realistic things that I can accomplish. I resolve this year to:

• Eat vegetables
• Read something older than I am
• Write at least one snail-mail letter a month [Older and wiser. That means it has a chance of happening this time, right?]
• Not die
• Beat Pokemon Pearl because I started it in 2007 and that's just sort of sad

Originally, I had another one on there: be more organized. Not just to actually put my clothes in the laundry basket for once, but to schedule things so I would do my homework before three in the morning, and then schedule in times for the fun stuff I like but never do, like drawing and writing.

It failed miserably, which you may have noticed because it's taken me three solid weeks to write this post. So we're going to pretend it didn't happen.

[Insert Obligatory New Years Title]

Hello, and welcome back to your irregularly-scheduled programming, the Unnatural Commonplace show! Here's your host, Kayt O and her Amazing Technicolor Socks!

It's a new year, and I thought that at 12:01 AM on January 1st, this meant I was done with all the traditions for a while. Done with opening St. Nicolaus Day presents (Dec 6th). Done with the Christmas Eve presents and dinner. Done with Christmas, and with our traditional Boxing Day tea party and presents. And with New Year's Eve, where we did not get presents but we did get those little explodey firecrackers you throw on the sidewalk and then step on all the unexploded ones the new morning and scare the bejeebers out of your dog, which is almost as good.

But noooo, apparently there was one more tradition left over and it was horrible. My family, who appear to be very sane people if you don't look too closely, thinks that to start a year off right, you should go hiking.

Have you heard that what you do on the first day of a new year is apparently how you will spend the rest of the year? That is a great argument for sleeping the day away and watching a Phineas and Ferb marathon. You'll spend the rest of the year well-rested and in a good mood!

Instead, my family wants you to spend the rest of the year slipping on dead and decomposing organic matter and getting rained on while trying to figure out if these marked trees indicate you're on a real path or if you are lost and surrounded by the remains of a beaver picnic. Also, I am pretty sure that's a really deep metaphor for life. One in which you did not get enough sleep or watch Disney cartoons, obviously.

So, here's to a new year, full of fun, blog posts that I actually remember to write, and sleep.

And at least five colors of tiger-striped socks.