Goodbye, February

Well, this month has flown by. I know that February typically does, being shorter than the other months after all, but yet this one seems to just have whizzed through my life.

Time to revisit my February goals and see how I did.

My Goals for Feb:

1. ride 16 times (so, 4x p/week)
2. workout (other than riding) at least 2x per week
3. lose 2 pounds
4. lose 1" of waist
5. try one new recipe a week  
6. do one puzzle
7. read one horse book (non-fiction) and one novel
8. spend 30 minutes a day cleaning/decluttering

Goal #1: not met.  The Quarter Horse developed a worrisome cough shortly after the beginning of the month. At rest, he was okay, but when I rode at anything other than a walk he would have episodes of coughing so hard I would nearly lose my seat.  So I gave him lots of rest between rides (riding like once a week) for most of the month.  Counting the weekly lessons I took on T and the few rides on the Quarter Horse, I rode all of 8 times this month.  Which is only 50% of my goal.  On the upside, his cough seems to have resolved itself and the last couple of rides were great.

Goal #2: Started out well, fizzled in second week with busy afternoons.  That was followed by my annual physical, and a couple other appointments for blood work and follow ups, which greatly ate into what 'free' time I'd planned to use for working out. Workouts totaled six for the month.  So, 75% of goal.

Goal #3: Nope.  Scale still says the same number as it did 27 days ago.

Goal #4: Lost 1/2".  Better than no loss at all, but could also be the difference between being bloated or not.  However, I did lose a total of almost two inches off other parts of my body, parts (like upper arms!)which are not subject to bloat. 

Goal #5: Nailed it!  Garlic chicken calzones, a new venison stroganoff recipe, duck tinga (Mexican duck), and banana snack cake.

Goal #6: achieved!

Goal #7: Done and done! Although it took me a lot longer to read each book than I had thought; I used to fly through books and now it seems like it took about three weeks for the non-fiction and a week and a half for the novel.

Goal #8:  Ha ha ha.  Not.  On a daily basis, this was a huge fail.  On the other hand, there were several days that I spent 3-4 hours at it. Overall, it didn't total 1/2 hr per day.  I decided (since we haven't owned a vacuum in eons, not having any carpeting in the house at this little place here) to bring the shop vac in from the garage and suck up all the collected dust/hair/fuzz/whatnot from where the floors meet the walls and the broom or dust mop don't reach into(because DH never installed baseboards when we built the house).  This entailed going room by room, pulling everything away from the walls in order to use the wedge shaped nozzle to vacuum in the small crevice that made up the borders of the room.  Moving stuff out and back (and sometimes sucking up enormous dust bunnies under furniture--like I said in yesterday's post, things got really cluttered and out of control while DS1 & family lived with us, and it is taking me forever and a lot of mental/emotional energy as well as physical energy, to get things decluttered, cleaned and organized) took hours.  Honestly, I've only gotten four rooms, two hall ways and one set of stairs done with the shop vac so far. 


Overall, not a bad month.  I did accomplish quite a bit more than I would have without setting goals. A small part of the house is totally cleaned and decluttered. That's good for my state of mind. (Disorganization is so depressing!)I think March needs some goals too. I'll have to take a look at what's on my calendar and come up with next month's (hopefully realistic)list.