Jennerosity

Goals . . . resolutions . . . whatever you want to call them, I make them. One of my favourite things about the New Year’s Eve holiday is this part. I started doing quarterly goals last year, and I think that works even better. Helps to take some of the pressure off this time of year and sets up a review period so you can see how you’re doing. I always try to work on goals from the same general categories. Last year I did them each as separate posts (reading, fitness, money & random), but this year I think I’ll do one overview¹, but do less detail about each goal.

Reading

• Read at least 50 books
• Complete at least 1 non-fiction reading challenge
• Read at least 12 books that are currently on my to-read shelf

Fitness

• Be able to run for 30 minutes straight by the end of the year
• Establish a daily walking habit

Travel

• Plan a trip to Japan in 2013
• Research a trip to either France or Hawaii

With Locutus around I don’t want to push myself too hard to achieve things. Instead I’m just focused on building a strong family foundation. The older Locutus gets I’ll be able to re-asses my progress and add more goals as I’m able.

1. With the exception of the money goals, which get their own post with more details [↩]

For my next reading challenge I’m tackling books that I already own, but for one reason or another, haven’t read yet. Some are books that I won in contests or giveaways. Others are books that Benevolance bought/had in his collection that I’ve been meaning to tackle. In order to keep focused, I rounded up a bunch and stacked them up on my nightstand so that I can work my way through them. I’m hoping that one or two of them aren’t worth keeping because we’re kind of looking to thin out our book collection at the moment. I’m setting up a new goodreads widget for the sidebar and might be blogging reviews if I have time. Just for fun, here’s a visual of the stack of books I gathered up.

Quite the variety, hunh? I’m starting off with Graceling and we’ll see where I go from there.

Here goes one last installment in my mid-year review.

I haven’t really talked about it much on the blog, but one of the areas in which I wanted to set some goals this year was Adventure. At the beginning of the year we had tentatively planned on making several shorter trips this year including: a steampunk convention in Arizona, crashing a wedding in Mexico, a stagette trip to LA, and another wedding celebration to Las Vegas. We ended up nixing all but the trip to Mexico. As we started planning the rest, circumstances just kept coming up to make them more difficult. Plus, when we found out I was pregnant, we had concerns about the radiation levels of the TSA scanners. The alternative option of having someone pat me down weren’t very appealing after hearing many stories about how invasive it actually is. In retrospect, we’re very happy with all of our travel choices. Plus, we do have one last adventure planned this summer . . .

• Attend PAX!!!

I’ll be very pregnant when we go, but so long as I’m still feeling as good as I do now, I shouldn’t have any problem attending¹. We’re looking forward to picking up a giant pitcher of dice. I’m going to keep my eyes open for any must-have geek-baby gear as well. Definitely looking forward to a weekend away to check out all the latest gaming stuff :)

Finally in the realm of Finance I think we’ve also made some good progress so far this year. I actually started up a Money Club and we’re working towards a savings goal that will ideally be a chunk of money against our mortgage. My overall purpose for this category was to have a better sense of control over our finances and doing the money club is definitely helping me in this respect.

When I started doing this little review, I felt kinda bad about my progress on my goals. Especially lately where any planning seems a little pointless because I know this huge life-altering event is going to happen in just a couple of months and change everything. Plus, a lot of goals I did set for myself this year didn’t see completion because having a baby does take over a certain portion of your brain, body, and life.

Looking back after typing everything up I’m feeling much better though. Despite all the changes of plans, I still feel like I’ve managed to accomplish a lot this year. Plus, I didn’t really touch on a lot of the other things we did, goals made and met, BECAUSE we’re having a baby. It’ll be very interesting to get to the end of the year and do my final review. One caveat readers . . . expect that one to have more than 4 parts to it!

1. though I will be making a lot more frequent bathroom stops this year!!! [↩]

Continuing on my mid-year review, let’s jump into some academics . . .

My Reading goals are the only ones where I’ve made any real progress lately. My Goodreads challenge was to read 30 books this year and I’ve already read 25. I’ve also done Cait’s Reading Challenge and am just wrapping up the R&R Reading challenge. I’m part-way through a baby/parenting book that I’ll finish off soon.  I also just finished another romance ebook I downloaded from the library and put the third book in the series on hold.  And I even know what my next (and possibly final) reading challenge of 2011 will be!

• I will endeavor to read books that I own, but have not yet read

Yup, it’s the ‘Own But Haven’t Read’ reading challenge. I figure this is a good challenge to tackle before baby arrives, when I might not have as much time for reading as I used to. Plus, I’m so busy now that I don’t have a lot of extra time to stop by the library to pick books up. And there are lots of books that I have in my collection but haven’t yet read, so I know I won’t be lacking for material. I’ll definitely have my progress on goodreads and I’ll try to do a few blog post book reviews as I read them.

The flip-side of progress is stagnation. Which sums up my Writing progress nicely. Not a word or any progress whatsoever. And I’m not setting any goals for this quarter either.  I haven’t even been able to blog as much since my wrists have been bothering me more than usual thanks to pregnancy side effects.

I started the year with some separate and lofty Job goals too. And made pretty decent progress. I finished the Human Resources Management Course and loved it! But then most of my other job goals got nixed or made irrelevant by ‘the powers that be’ at my job. My final job goal was to get the necessary licensing credits for my 2012 license renewal before going on maternity leave. And as of today, that’s also done :) Now my lofty goals for my job are to just clean out and bring home my personal stuff. Since my computer terminal is getting upgraded sometime I’m not even too worried about un-modifying my personal setup (though I will have to remember to send some digital files home and/or delete them).

Here’s Part 2 of my mid-year review . . .

My Homemaking skills have also failed to develop as much as I would have liked. I haven’t really been learning to cook many new things and most of my energy has been focused on cleaning out things in the house to transform our former book room into a nursery¹.  But recently Lance and I decided that we needed to start making better use of the food in our freezer, which is more of my cooking specialty. Hopefully this will mean some more healthy meals and a bit less eating out too.

• I will cook dinner every Wednesday night
• I will make use of our frozen leftovers before they go bad
• I will continue to make steel cut oats in the slow cooker for breakfasts

Ideally I’d also like to also prepare some quick and healthy meals that I can freeze before the baby comes along. That way cooking might be a bit easier in those first few sleep-deprived weeks. But for now we’ll focus on getting the old stuff out of the way.

1. Don’t worry, I won’t be doing the redecorating . . . that I leave to my mom’s artistic talents! [↩]

I realized the other day when I sat down to do my summer goal review at work¹ that I hadn’t done a personal goal review in a while. And then I started typing and when I realized what a mammoth post it would turn out to be I decided it would be better to hack it up in several smaller chunks instead. So here’s part 1 . . .

The most challenging area for me has been working on my Health & Fitness goals this year. I spent most of the first trimester of my pregnancy with morning all-day-sickness and a lot of fatigue, in which I was feeling very nauseous, nearly all the time. Not sure if you’ve ever tried it, but jogging while nauseous is not recommended. Neither is downward-facing dog pose in yoga. I’ve been doing sporadic walking and yoga workouts during the second trimester, but not really enough to make me feel very fit. Now that I’ve hit my third trimester, fatigue has made a comeback² and our schedule is looking rather full. I don’t really know what to realistically expect to be able to do as the weeks progress so setting targets & goals for myself feels a little futile at this point. But I still want to keep fit and active since I know that is what’s best for me and baby. But, I don’t want that to be an excuse to not have any goals at all . . . so here’s what I’ve come up with for my goals for next quarter . . .

• I will continue to park the car in the far away spots & choose stairs over the elevator
• I will eat my veggies before I eat my fruits³
• I will take iron supplements every day to prevent anemia⁴
• I will do yoga squats in the morning and stretch before bed
• I will make sacrifices to my social life in order to be well-rested

1. which was a bit comical since the only goal that I could come up with was: start bringing home personal items from work [↩]
2. and thankfully left the sickness mostly behind [↩]
3. otherwise I would eat no veggies [↩]
4. and I will fill the Rx for the iron supplements ASAP [↩]

While I haven’t had a chance to sit down and do a formal quarterly review of my goals (yet) there are a few that don’t require much energy for decision-making on my part.  One of those is my job goals.  If you recall from my 2011 Random Goals blog post my job goals started out with some continuing education classes and getting our company website more filled out with content.

The Good Stuff

The first class I took was Human Resources Management through SFU Continuing Education. The downside was that even though I’d originally enrolled in the Central City location course (super close to work), that one was cancelled due to low enrollment so I had to go to the Harbour Centre location, which meant adding three hours of transit to class nights!  Other than that, I loved the course content. I know a lot of the other students found it overly bureaucratic, but the content and information totally clicked with me. One of the patterns I’ve noticed in the first 10 years of my career journey, is that I seem to always grow dissatisfied with the way things are managed. A lot of my dissatisfaction stems from very poor Human Resource Management.¹

The teacher was awesome! She actually used teaching tools and methods aside from lecturing. We had learning activities!!! In a continuing education setting!!! I was amazed by that fact alone. She clearly knew her stuff really well and aside from some time management issues did a fabulous job. Even with marking and assessment, everything was very clear – she had rubrics people!²

The textbook was also really great and had loads of sample forms and real world examples. I liked it so much, and think it’ll be useful to me, so I’m even planning on keeping it as a reference book. In fact, I’ve already used one of the sample forms to create a leave request form for my maternity leave this fall (which reminds me, I should finish filling it out and give it to my boss). Now that my grade is in, I’m going to be going through it and marking the specific areas of the book that I think would be most useful.

The Other Stuff (I don’t want to call it bad, it just is what it is.)

My original plan was to try to take a couple of other courses this year. The next one would have been Organizational Behaviour and would have begun in May. However, seeing how exhausted the extra hours each week made me, I figured I’d dial back my plans a bit. Plus, I’m going to be taking a birthing class soon anyway, which would have interfered. I’m kind of disappointed because everyone I’ve talked to who’s ever taken Organizational Behaviour has found it very interesting, and I think I would have too.

As my Human Resources course wrapped up, I realized I could apply a lot of what I’d learned about Human Resources to finding a replacement for me. I drafted a brief outline of a proposal that I could present to my boss. It would have had the added benefit of developing actual job descriptions for our employees and some core competencies to screen for when selecting any new employees (not that we’re in a growth cycle, but it could be handy down the line). I was going to present it when we came back from our week away in Mexico. But when we returned I found out that because two employees at a different office were requesting more work hours, they were just going to shuffle our existing personnel around.  So, my proposal and all the projects it would have created for me³ got tossed out the window.

New Quarterly Goals

So, the only other project I have to work on is an optional one and it revolves around having enough credits for my license to be renewed. Our renewals happen at the end of May each year and I need to make sure I’ve taken enough credits to qualify. I’ve arranged that for this year, but want to get my credits for next year before I leave work in the fall. This will take approximately three days of my time. A couple days at work to find the appropriate course(s) and then another day to actually attend the course(s). Not exactly super challenging, but it is what it is.

The other goal I’m setting for myself is to develop the habit of keeping work diary.  An link was posted somewhere in my twitter stream the other day to Harvard Business Review’s article Four Reasons to Keep a Work Diary and the points it raised were great.  I recalled my teaching days when I had a regular practice of taking a few minutes at the end of my teaching day to reflect back on the day. It was a great moment to stop and ask myself some important questions such as “what went well?”, “what went poorly?”, and the most important question “why?”  It really helped me to be proactive and shape my lessons to be more in tune with my students and what they needed and I found that I was a better teacher as a result. So, I’m going to try to incorporate the same practice here.

Establishing the work diary practice in my current job setting will have a couple challenges though.

• I have less control over my time. (A) Here, I am a customer service representative. Which means if a customer walks in or calls, it’s my job to drop what I’m doing and help them. (B) My shift ends before the office closes, so I can’t even lock the door and turn out the lights and take 10 minutes to reflect and write. (C) I carpool with someone several days a week and hate keeping people waiting.
• I have no obvious place to write. When I was a teacher I had a classroom with a door I could close for privacy and my daily lesson plan pages had areas I could jot down my notes and reflections. Here I have neither.

Anyone else bother setting their own job goals? Got some you want to share? Tips or advice for me on setting up a work diary?

1. My first major employer is now unionized, which tends to be a result of poor employee relations. [↩]
2. This has been the teacher geekness portion of this blog post. [↩]
3. that I would have really enjoyed working on [↩]

I think that my first reading challenge for the year has gone particularly well.  I had my friend Cait recommend some really great Young Adult books to me and got quite a bit of reading done despite all the other school and work stuff going on in the background.  Here’s a visual overview of the books that I read for the challenge:

And here is a list of the reviews I did of each book as I read them:

The Science of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
Harry, a History
Finnikin of the Rock
Jellicoe Road
Immortal Beloved
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
13 Little Blue Envelopes
Mercy & Matched (2 reviews in one post)

Things I liked about the challenge:

• Having someone else pick which book I had to read took a lot of decision making pressure off.  It really reinforced the fact that sometimes, I like surprises.
• Read lots of things that I wouldn’t otherwise have read or known about.
• It helped refine my reading tastes because I had to think about why I did or didn’t like the book for my review of it.  It also helped me to refine my rating technique on Goodreads.

Things I learned from the challenge:

• My rating system goes as follows:
  *= complete waste of paper & I’m not sure why I even read it
  **= still pretty bad, but may have a redeeming quality or two. Would not recommend.
  ***= glad I read it but I’m not likely to re-read it in the future. Would recommend to others to read.
  ****= really enjoyed it, would re-read it if I have the chance and is definitely a book I’d recommend others read.
  ***** = loved it, had a profound impact on me, want to re-read it, will probably purchase a copy (if I don’t have one already)
• I really do enjoy all sorts of non-fiction stuff, so long as it’s well written and I read it in moderation
• Angel books and crime books don’t really appeal to me

I will read more of:

• Melina Marchetta’s books as I enjoyed both her fantasy and her contemporary work
• The Immortal Beloved series
• The Matched series

We’re about half-way through the first quarter of the year and I thought I ought to address some of the goals I’ve set for myself this quarter and a few of the tiny steps I’ve been taking.  I think my tiny steps are good because they are more sustainable than giant leaps forward.  Less chance of injury too.

I’ve made up my mind that meditation should be a morning thing with me, along with exercise.  This morning I did get up and meditated for about 15 minutes¹  I’m going to look out for a good meditation app for my ipod and once I get a more consistent practice going, upgrading to a better meditation cushion.

I realized that I never step back from a book to analyze it as I’m reading it. Which means that it’s difficult for me to really figure out what the author is doing right (or wrong), until after.  The systematic part of me dislikes this.  The in-the-moment part of me does not.  We’ll see which one wins in the long run.  I’m curious what other writers do when they read?  Do you just enjoy, or do you take moments of pause to reflect on the story/craft/structure while you read?

I’ve decided what my next reading challenge will be. However, I won’t be announcing it until sometime in March at the earliest.

I’m loving the content of my Human Resources Management class and learning a lot.  And I was reminded last week that I still don’t like group assignments.  Unfortunately I have one more to get through.

1. I’m pretty happy that I managed that long.  I’d intended for only 10, but for some inexplicable reason, the volume on my ipod spontaneously set itself to zero so I didn’t hear when the timer went off. [↩]

There are a bunch of other goals that I have for the year, that I don’t think really warrant an entire blog post.  Plus, I’m really busy, and only going to get busier, so it’s more efficient for me to do it all in just one post.

Homemaker Goals

One of the things I really want to work on this year is my cooking skills.  Instead of simply trying to cook more as my goal, I thought it would be better and more interesting to set it up as a cooking challenge, like my reading challenge.  I’m working on a list of 10 dishes that I want to learn to make over the course of the year.  And breaking it up quarterly too.  I’m trying to ensure that I get a mix of healthy food and some vegetarian dishes as well.

For the first quarter, my cooking challenge includes the following three:

• pancakes – I figure this is a good one to start with, because there can be so many variations to have fun with throughout the rest of the year.  I’m working with whole wheat flour, which also tends to make really thick, dense pancakes, so I’m going to try to adjust the recipe to get them more light and fluffy.
• kung pao chicken – A basic stir fry that is one of my favourites.  Plus, stir fry recipes are another type that is easy to vary, shake up, and experiment with.
• perogies – I’d like to do up a batch once per quarter.  It’s a challenging and more time consuming recipe.  Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have gotten the hang of it.

The other homemaker goal I have is to expand the number of plants that we’ve been growing in our kitchen.  This year I’d like to grow some Christmas cactus.  I have a source for a cutting, I just need to get it and try to propagate it.

Job Goals

This year I’ve finally started taking some more continuing education classes.  Right now I’m working on a Human Resources Management course that I’m finding very interesting but also challenging.  There’s a lot that I’m learning that I’d like to apply to my job, but theory is often very different than practice.

I got to start a company website last year, and this year I’d really like to get a bunch of information content written up and posted to the site.

Adventure

Travel!  A couple of smaller trips planned this year.  We’re heading to LA for a few days in May and I’m looking forward to seeing the city as an adult.  Plus we’re going to be going to PAX again this year in Seattle.  It isn’t on the long weekend this year, which ironically will make it easier for us to attend.  And, there is a small chance of another trip to Japan in the fall.