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My Unofficial Resolutions for 2017
Apr. 28th, 2017 09:53 am I suspect I had other resolutions earlier this year, but I've forgotten them. I'm certainly not doing them, unless one of them was to try to do a little bit of gardening every decent-weather day. Yeah, so that's the thing I'm trying to do this year. I'm really hoping it will stop my gardens from becoming their usual weed-infested, overgrown disaster areas. It would be one thing if, when I let my gardens grow wild, they would become a haven for woodland creatures. Somehow that doesn't happen. Somehow I just end up with a mess.
To that end, so far this year, I have spent probably a total of four hours on a couple of problem areas. One, hardly anyone will see, but we have this pathway that leads from our backyard to the front. It's usually completely ignored by me and becomes the place the weeds with the sticky burrs live. Then every time I take the garbage out and come back again, I have to pick those little sticky bastards off my sleeves. WELL. A couple of days ago, I dug that whole area out and transplanted some hostas and day lilies and now my fingers are crossed that the predicted snow does not kill them.
Today I spent an hour or so on the front hill. The front hill... when we first moved into this house we had lush, green grass growing down the hillside. It was a really big pain to mow, but it was GRASS (something, it turns out, I have no skill in growing or maintaining.) Now... now there's a lot of dirt and weeds. Underneath the weeds are some hosta, so pulled out a lot of the weeds today and uncovered several hosta. A few were big enough to split and a couple were in places where they were going to get smothered out--so I moved some stuff around. I'm hoping this will help things look intentional.
The second resolution is that I'm going to try to learn more conversational Japanese. I did NOT start this year out well in that regard as I have had to drop out of my community education class, however, I did find a REALLY GREAT set of language CDs at the library which I'm listening to while I do the dishes/make dinner/other housework. I love these CDs because they're actually teaching me some useful phrases ("I don't understand Japanese being the FIRST THING THEY TAUGHT ME) and they keep bringing up the things you learned in earlier lessons on heavy repeat. I actually, for once, feel like I'm retaining some of this information I'm learning. That's a HUGE step forward in the language department for me. Because I can't otherwise seem to retain information. I told Shawn that I'm going to have to buy this particular brand of language CD.
I should probably resolve to write fiction, too, but sometimes I feel like I should give up. :-(
To that end, so far this year, I have spent probably a total of four hours on a couple of problem areas. One, hardly anyone will see, but we have this pathway that leads from our backyard to the front. It's usually completely ignored by me and becomes the place the weeds with the sticky burrs live. Then every time I take the garbage out and come back again, I have to pick those little sticky bastards off my sleeves. WELL. A couple of days ago, I dug that whole area out and transplanted some hostas and day lilies and now my fingers are crossed that the predicted snow does not kill them.
Today I spent an hour or so on the front hill. The front hill... when we first moved into this house we had lush, green grass growing down the hillside. It was a really big pain to mow, but it was GRASS (something, it turns out, I have no skill in growing or maintaining.) Now... now there's a lot of dirt and weeds. Underneath the weeds are some hosta, so pulled out a lot of the weeds today and uncovered several hosta. A few were big enough to split and a couple were in places where they were going to get smothered out--so I moved some stuff around. I'm hoping this will help things look intentional.
The second resolution is that I'm going to try to learn more conversational Japanese. I did NOT start this year out well in that regard as I have had to drop out of my community education class, however, I did find a REALLY GREAT set of language CDs at the library which I'm listening to while I do the dishes/make dinner/other housework. I love these CDs because they're actually teaching me some useful phrases ("I don't understand Japanese being the FIRST THING THEY TAUGHT ME) and they keep bringing up the things you learned in earlier lessons on heavy repeat. I actually, for once, feel like I'm retaining some of this information I'm learning. That's a HUGE step forward in the language department for me. Because I can't otherwise seem to retain information. I told Shawn that I'm going to have to buy this particular brand of language CD.
I should probably resolve to write fiction, too, but sometimes I feel like I should give up. :-(