Hello February

So far, February has been much friendlier than January was.  Not to say good things didn't happen in January, they did, but the weather in January was by and large just blah.  Gray skies, blah.  Bare ground with dead yellow grass, blah.  Rain, rain, rain blah.  February, on the other hand, is two for two with sunshine and blue skies at this point. (Even snow in spurts, yay for snow to make the ground pretty again!)  Hello, February, it's good to see you.  Please keep up your lovely demeanor.  I don't care if you are cold, just give me sunshine!

February is always here and gone in the blink of an eye, it seems, being such a short month.  Exactly four weeks.  Maybe it's the shortness, or maybe it's the long awaited burst of sunshine that February has brought to me, but I'm in a goal setting mood.

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 is, I think, thoroughly attainable now that we (trainer, vet, farrier and I) seem to have found the 'magic' combination of shoes and pads that make the Quarter Horse comfortable (his navicular) when in work.  When riding made him foot sore, I didn't feel right riding more than once or twice a week.

Goals 2, 3, and 4 are all related to each other, and, in a way, to Goal #1.  I've gotten to a weight and size that I'm just not comfortable with.  All that weight I lost 5 years ago, it's all back and then some.  If I lose weight and inches (ie. tone up my muscles) I will be able to ride much better.  I'm on a mission to improve my dressage skills, and am at the point where core strength and timing of aids are key.  If I'm inflexible, if I don't move as quickly and coordinated as I'd like (as I could do when I was 20+ pounds lighter), it really affects the quality of my riding and my ability to move up the levels.  Remembering that in the beginning of my previous weight loss it took a month to actually see much weight loss--due to turning fat into (heavier) muscle--I'm not going for some pie in the sky number of pounds to lose this month, just 1/2 pound per week.  That should be totally doable, and any additional decrease in weight will be a bonus to shoot for in March.

Goal #5 is partly because I'm a bit tired of eating the same old things.  And partly because I have meat in the freezer that needs to be eaten before I can justify going out and buying other cuts that we don't have in stock.  So, even if it's chicken, venison, or some type of pork sausage from my freezer, I'm going to find a new way to serve it this month.  Yesterday was venison stroganoff that was really delicious; even DH raved about it (and he could eat the same dish for a week and be okay with that, so to have him give good reviews to something new is big).

Goal #6 goes along with my attempts to a) do more things I find enjoyable on a regular basis, and b) decrease the amount of clutter in this house!  The local Goodwill sells puzzles for 99 cents, so somehow in the last three years (judging by the dates on the price stickers) I have managed to amass about twenty 1000 piece puzzles.  They are taking up a lot of storage space that could be used for other things.  So, I need to do puzzles more often, and then donate them back to Goodwill (I rarely put together the same puzzle twice; it's a quirk of my brain that I tend to remember which piece goes where and then putting the puzzle together isn't as fun after the first time).

Goal #7 kind of also goes along with decluttering.  Books are similar to puzzles. Unless it's a really awesome one, I never read it twice.  Horse books, generally being of the non-fiction variety, are a little different, but I still need to weed out which ones I want to keep as reference material and which ones I can part with.

Lastly, Goal #8 is more clutter busting.  The 30 minutes daily would be in addition to the normal maintenance types of housework all ready done.  You know: making the bed, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor. . . that's all daily stuff.  My plan for the 30 minutes is to tackle some of the long overdue cleaning, organizing, and decluttering around here.  I'm finding closets and cabinets that had stuff shoved in them in Sept.2014 while 'making room' for DS1 and family to move in with us but those closets and cabinets haven't been emptied/cleaned/organized since then. That's way too long!  If something has been stuffed away for nearly 2.5 years, I probably don't need that item and should get rid of it. By keeping it to 30 minutes a day, it should be an easy goal to achieve.  30 minutes is one TV show; I can give up watching Wheel of Fortune this month and make my house more livable instead.

How about you?  Do you have any plans for February?