Resolutions

Although I don't set much store in New Year's resolutions, this year I've decided to make a few.  My primary objective is to have resolutions that I can realistically follow.  (For example, I know I won't exercise every day, so resolving to get daily aerobics in would be pointless, and the year I resolved to grow taller also didn't work out ).  I think I've come up with a mostly manageable list this time around.

1.  Keep my pantry organized.  It's fairly organized as is, because I can be obsessive about things, but I've decided to keep a list on the inside door of the things we should regularly have in our pantry, like pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, and flour.

2.  Exercise two times a week.  When I don't have to worry about ice, I like to go running, but winter shouldn't be an excuse for not exercising.  I'm lucky in having a very fast metabolism, so I don't worry too much about weight gain, but for the brief time in my adult life that I belonged to a gym, I definitely felt like I had more energy.

3.  Incorporate more vegetables into my dinners.  I tend to make elaborate pasta dishes most days of the week and often neglect having an actual vegetable side dish.  I am going to try to change this.

4.  Nap less.

5.  Learn Russian.

6.  Keep in better touch with friends.  I have a handful of friends with whom I text and exchange phone calls regularly, but I've gotten shamefully bad at writing actual e-mails to people.

7.  Read more.

8.  Give up soda.  This one I'm not totally decided on yet.  Mercifully, my parents never really let us drink sodas when we were little, so they were really only a special-occasion-kind-of-thing.  Unfortunately, as a working adult, I frequently feel like I need a "special drink" after work, so I've begun drinking them more often than I would like.  This resolution seems the least realistic of all of them, actually (even less realistic than #5), so it may become just limit soda, and only drink soda from Whole Foods.

9.  Continue making things.  As a child, I was always terrible at doing anything with my hands, whether it was cutting something out, drawing in the lines, or putting things together.  I'm still pretty terrible with scissors, but my husband has shown me that with a little imagination, a lot of things are more doable than I might initially think.  Together, we made a lot of the furniture for our apartment, and I even made a spice rack on my own for our kitchen.  I want to continue these kinds of projects in 2014.

10.  Practice my Polish.  I worked so hard to maintain my Polish and I am determined not to regress into a horrible Americanized-sounding Polish.

11.  Follow a strict budget.