Day in the Life of an Idiot

 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.  :-(

I will admit that I kind of like the idea of making New Year's resolutions. I do it every year. I think the key to enjoying the idea is not to stress too much if you break them. This year I am resolved to find some fun new excercises.

Thing is, my gym membership expired. I normally would just have Shawn renew it as part of my holiday present package, but my gym got sold to another larger corporation and I would have to start going somewhere new and/or hassling around to get a new membership card, etc. That made it ridiculously easy to JUST QUIT. Obviously, I would like to continue to be fit in some way beyond kuk sool wan. So, what I decided to do this year is to take the money I normally would have spent on a gym membership and apply it toward fun community education classes that are excercise related (as, clearly, cooking classes are fun, but sort of the opposite of what I'm trying to acheive.)

I have already signed up for two! Starting in February, I will be taking a hula hooping class! Then, in April, I will take "Bokken: The Japanese Sword," which sounds super-awesome. The biggest trauma so far, is deciding which of the cool sounding classes to take. I had an awful time trying to decide between all the things on offer this semester. I can only hope some will be repeated the next time the catalogue comes out. The only other bummer is that most of these classes are conveniently scheduled for people with REAL JOBS, which means they're in the evening rather than during the day. I wish that more people were loser-layabouts like me so that these sorts of things would be offered in the middle of the day.

Still, should be fun. Plus, kuk sool wan is offering "topics" classes on Fridays so, I've signed up for a couple of those as well. I will meditating on Friday. When we went to class last night, I did warn Nicki Jo Kyo Nym that I meditate on a regular basis already and I have an AMAZING knack for falling asleep. Actually, I must go into some kind of sleep/meditative state because I can hear the words, "relax, close your eyes...." and then I wake up just as she's saying, "open your eyes slowly..." It's kind of amazing, because sometimes, I will wake myself up in the middle with a loud snore and be very aware that I was DREAMING, rather than meditating.

But they're also doing things like a topics class on jumping and falling another other things that are much more likely to be strenuous. :-)

I'm also resolved to be a better, more published author. But that's kind of the gimme resolution, you know?