New Year, New Hope, Take 3

This is starting to feel a little bit like a Star Wars trilogy, isn't it? I feel like I have said some of this a time or two before...

Well! Another year has come and gone. I haven't updated since my post after the last New Year check-in.

2017 has not been kind to me, and honestly, I have been too distracted by health and other issues to find time to blog too much. Of course, I am also starting to realize that this could be part of my problem. I need to force myself to do things, and in doing so, I will be positively affected in other ways.

So, let's hope things change this year! No...things WILL change this year!

A recent video from one of my favourite motivational speakers, Brian Tracy, said the first thing you should do in the new year is to review the previous year's goals. Let's look at my goals from 2017 and see how I did.

• Pour myself into my new job. - As much as I was able to due to health I did this. So I will mark this one as a success.
• Refocus on my education now that I have a job where I can actually use it. - Again, taking into consideration my health issues I feel I did ok with this. I completed one course and started a second, which I will finish early this year.
• Refocus on my health and weight now that I don't have this chronic illness wearing me down. - I tried. My body still hates me. New issues came up, possibly due to the treatments for my previous issues, and it's just been a long haul. Just had another surgery and hoping this is the year for this to finally go right.
• Refocus on cleaning and decluttering the home now that my illness is not dictating how to prioritize my life. - I am going to mark this as a win because even though I was sick, I took my sick leave time and actually did go through a lot of stuff and throw it out, give it away to family, or donate it to charity. I will keep moving forward with this in 2018.
• By less new yarn and use more stash yarn. - Yeah, this didn't happen. I used yarn purchases to cheer me up, most likely way more than I should have. This is a major focus for me this year as well.
• Complete more WIPs instead of starting new projects. - I did finish more projects this year than is typical for me, but only one of them was a WIP, the rest I actually started in 2016. So I will classify this as moving in a positive direction, but not quite what I was aiming for.
• More detailed crafting goals will be on the craft blog. My 2018 crafting goal post can be found here.
• Update the blogs more! - Even though it doesn't seem like it here, I did do more posts on my reading/review blog, Rants N Scribbles. I still need to get much better at this blogging thing.

So that's that. Moving forward I am going to make more detailed plans to achieve goals. This is going to include weekly, monthly, yearly, and lifetime goals. I have started a separate page to help track them. If you are actually interested, you can find that page here. I am hoping this keeps me more motivated to check in, and then blog as I go.

I am going to leave this at that for now. Perhaps if I break up my posts a little more instead of posting walls of text I will be more likely to blog more often.

My next post will focus on the detailed goals for 2018 and a brief look at the plans I have.

I hope everyone had a very happy New Year!