Goals for 2011

I'm still working on finalizing my goals for 2011, but here's the list as it stands now.

1. Start a business (any one of the 4 ideas I've got swimming around in my head).
2. Be in the best shape of my life.
3. Study for and take the GRE with satisfactory results (so... I'm thinking two to three rounds).
4. Narrow down the list of grad schools to 5 that I'll apply to for 2012 enrollment.
5. Complete my first 10K.
6. Complete my first triathlon.
7. Write in a journal daily.
8. Have personal prayer and scripture study every day (I've become very bad at this).

Lots of these coincide with my 101 things, which I'm still working on...

Happy New Year!

For My Next Birthday (in 6 months)...

... I'm giving myself the gift of being in the best shape of my life. 'Cause that birthday's a big-un. And because that's a far enough--but close enough--date (to motivate me to reach my goal, but give me time to see a significant change).

I registered for the Freedom Run 5K today, so I feel like that's a good place to start. A celebratory kick-off of my journey to a strong and healthy body.

With Both Feet

A while ago I posted about all of the different options I was thinking about for school.

Well, I made a decision, and I start classes on Monday.

I'm currently going back to BYU as a Post-Bac/Evening student, taking prerequisites to get into the Art History and Curatorial Studies MA program. My end goal is to work in Museum Educational and Family Programming, and I would also love to teach part-time (maybe full-time eventually. We'll see.).

So that's it.

At least for now. There is the one hurdle of actually getting accepted to deal with. GRE, here I come.

Change

I like change. I crave it. It's refreshing and renewing to me.

My college roommates used to joke about me being pregnant all the time because I always wanted to move our furniture around in different configurations. When I owned a house, the artwork on the walls changed about every 6 months.

So. Why bring this up? Well, I just realized today that it is an important factor to consider as I'm weighing different career options.

My most recent career decision is Museum Studies. And I happen to think it's a perfect fit for me.

For the past 6 months or more, I've been trying to decide between art, education, and public administration.

Museum Studies combines them all. I decided I would really love to be the education director of a museum--coordinating workshops, seminars, school tours, creating curriculum based on permanent and temporary exhibits.

Think about it: I would be involved in education (check), surrounded by art and constantly thinking about/researching/talking about art (check), and the content I develop would change regularly, as would the people to whom the information is presented (check). Art, education, public administration, and change.

It's been a long time coming... but I feel really good about it!

So, to help get some experience under my belt, I am volunteering as a docent at both the Springville Museum of Art and the BYU Museum of Art. I'm really excited.

(I just hope it doesn't mean another 4 years of undergrad studies before I can do a Museum Studies Certification.)

Keep your fingers crossed for me! ('Cause I'm going to do it all while working full time.)

Sibling Inspiration: Amy

Amy has started running.

I used to love running, but not so much anymore.

I want to love running again. Come to find out I have not only diabetes in my family history, but a history of heart attacks at an early age.

For months I have had this couch-to-5K running plan saved in my external hard drive and eventually posted on my wall.

So today I put each week's workouts on a 4x6 index card so I can easily prop up an outline of my workout on the treadmill at the gym.

It's a nine-week program, and I'll be running indoors only until the spring. (I don't do inversions.)

The idea is to not only lose weight, but to increase my health altogether and have an established running habit before I (potentially) move away to graduate school.

Wish me luck. Join me if you'd like. It will do your heart good. (Mine, too, since I'll know I'm not doing this alone.)


Another goal I've set for myself that's inspired by Ames: Journal keeping. I'm only good at it when it's require for getting good grades in school. Lame. Amy is great at it. So, I'm going to buy myself a new little journal that I can carry with me wherever I go and see what happens.

Get Cooking!

I got "How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman. I think she was the one who said she learned to cook by just cooking her way through his book, and it inspired me.

Not only am I going to learn how to cook "everything," but I am also going to become a creative cook and ingredient-combining guru with the Ingredient Bible, which I bought for myself because it's my birthday.

So, if you would like to be a guinea pig, let me know and I'll invite you over for dinner, lunch, breakfast, or brunch.

L'embarras du choix

At a ward activity with my church in Paris, there was a potluck with some of the most delicious-looking foods I've ever seen.

As I stood before the buffet-style setup trying to decide where to start, a member of the bishopric came up beside me with the same "Where do I start?" look of hesitation on his face.

"Ahh..." he says, "L'embarras du choix." Roughly translated, that conveys the idea of "overwhelmed by my options" or "spoilt for choice."

And that's the perfect description of my life right now. Really, where do I start?

I've been thinking a lot about graduate school, but for the life of me I can't settle on one program over another. It's kind of distressing, mostly because the deadlines are all coming up soon, and I'll need to get cracking on the GRE for some of the applications.

I feel pulled in several different directions. These are the programs I'm thinking of applying to:

-French studies
-French Teaching
-Language Acquisition
-TESOL
-MPA
-Literacy Education

If I did either of the last two, I would want to do both and end up working for a non-profit with a focus on literacy education (either K-12 or adult ed). But I also feel like I should work in that field for at least a year or two to determine whether that's something I would want to do as a full-time career.

I think with French Studies or French Teaching it's almost a no-brainer that I at least apply, but the catch with that is I don't think I would want to teach secondary, so I would have to also do a doctorate. Yowza. I'm 28. You do the math.

They're all sort of related, having to do with literacy, teaching, and language... but they're all different enough that they don't really overlap. Except maybe Language Acquisition and TESOL. Those probably have some significant overlap in the theories I would study.

So, I'm not gonna lie... I think I would love them all. I'm not really making salary a part of the decision, because choosing a career based on how much I would make is a recipe for disaster (based on previous experience).

That's all. Just needed to get it off my chest.

Decisions, decisions...

So, since I've been home from France I've felt like I should go back to school.

[Insert me whining here.]

I'm secretly (or not so secretly) looking forward to learning all kinds of good stuff, and I'm very openly annoyed about being a poor graduate student living in a crappy basement apartment in Madison, WI. Even though I haven't even applied to the program yet.

Shall I share with you my master plan?

Go to school and get my Master's. (Right now looking at PFMP at Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison and French Pedagogy at NYU)
Get a job at a university or junior college.
Use my faculty/staff benefit to take fine arts classes and become a famous painter, quit my day job, and move to the French countryside where the most difficult decision I will make each day is if I should do plein air painting or use my awesome studio.

Good plan, right?

I know. If you need any help formulating an awesome plan of your own, just let me know.

Days of Auld Lang Syne

As I have spent some time thinking of things I want to do or change in 2009, a few things have come to mind. I am not going to call them New Year's Resolutions, because I think that gives me too much leeway to "give up" if I don't keep them up within the first few weeks of the year (and considering what the first month or two of the year will be like for me, I'm not going to set myself up for failure. I know my limits.).

So, instead, I am setting goals for 2009. I will share them with you. (I hope they don't bore you to tears.)

The first goal is what inspired the title of my post*; it's the one I've been thinking about the most over the last month or so. Last year I took a "Writing Your Personal History" class to fulfill one of my last English requirements for my minor. Because writing at least 250 words in my journal every day was required to get a good grade, I wrote every day for as long as I was in the class. But, as you might guess, a couple of months later I had dwindled down to only a couple of times a week. When my wonderful friend Camille went missing and was later found dead near Bridal Veil Falls, I abandoned it altogether because I couldn't bring myself to write what I was feeling and thinking about. It was too painful--too final--to write it down on paper. But I feel really strongly about writing my personal history. I have a terrible memory, and I want my children and their children (should they be interested) to have access to all of the memories that will too soon fade away.

So, with that abbreviated version of my thought process, I want to share with you a new blog project I started. It's called "This Time It's Personal," and the purpose of the blog is to provide prompts for people who want to write their own personal histories but don't really know what to do. I make no claim of expertise. The only thing I'm an expert on is failing at journal-keeping. So... if you're interested in writing your personal history (or encouraging your children to write theirs), join me in my journey. You can go to mypersonalhistoryblog.blogspot.com or just click here to check it out and read about how it is going to work. I posted the first prompt just a few minutes ago.

If you like what you see there and want to share, I would love for you to link to it on your blogs. The more, the merrier (and frankly, I think the more, the "successful-er" we'll all be at keeping journals or making progress on our personal histories)!!

My second goal is a bit more simple. :) It is:

Exercise at least three times a week for 40 minutes or more.

Exercise wasn't something I ever thought about when I was younger. I played soccer and danced for years and years, so I never needed to think about it. But since abandoning soccer, clogging, and track, I've never been really consistent about exercise unless my grades depended upon it.

Well, it's time for that to change. It's time to make healthy living choices my go-to, default, no-questions-about-it way of life.

Since I won't have a car in France, and I think I'll have quite a bit of spare time every day (who knows what my schoolwork will be like), I am committed to exercising at least three times a week for a minimum of 40 minutes. Now, I'm not going to put a lot of restrictions on what counts and what doesn't. I'm also not going to require of myself that the 40 minutes be consecutive. I'm also not going to require that my heart rate reach a certain level, or that I burn a certain number of calories per day, etc. The most important end goal for me isn't weight loss (though that is important for me), but a healthy and active life. My big hope is that by the time I come home, I would rather walk to the grocery store or to work, that I would rather go to the gym and get a workout in than eat Sour Punch Straws and watch TV. It's a big change, and it's going to be really difficult for a long time. I may not be to that point when I come back, but I know that if I am consistent, I'll be much closer than where I am now.

So, maybe two goals isn't super ambitious, but I feel like they're big goals that will take a lot of self-control, discipline, reflection, and TIME. So I'm okay with just having these two main ones to work on.

*I saw on Wikipedia that Auld Lang Syne has been used as a rough equivalent to "Once Upon a Time," so I thought it fit in with the idea of writing my personal history, since I think of personal histories more as an actual story, like a memoir, than a journal.

James Judge - Contemporary Painter

I would buy these two paintings if I had money and a house big enough to have an art gallery.

James Judge seems to create abstract landscapes for the most part, which I'm not a huge fan of. Landscape paintings very seldom appeal to me. But the two shown below, 'Echo' and 'Watermark' respectively, are just un-landscape-ish enough for me to love the mixing, blending, splashing and bleeding of the colors.

I would really love to be able to paint like this. Maybe some day.

Click on the paintings to see a larger version via the Adam Gallery website.

Last Post Today (I Promise) -- A New Blog

Today I set a goal to lose 20 pounds by December 31st. If you haven't seen me in a while, well... I've gained weight. Ta da!
If you have seen me recently, then you know I could stand to shed a few. There's really no denying it. (And this isn't a request for compliments of any kind. I'm just telling the truth). My long-term goal is to lose about 50 pounds. By when, I don't know. I'm just setting time-specific goals for the short-term and eventually I'll get to the long-term success.

I am a member of a weight-loss and healthy living success group at my work. Initially I joined because I was a trainer, they asked me to teach a class on exercise to the group, and (of course) I wanted to lose weight. It's pretty much done nothing for me up to this point because I wasn't really accountable to anyone and didn't take it seriously enough.

The group is only meeting on the first Tuesday of each month, so today we did some brainstorming about how we could help keep each other motivated for the other 28-30 days of the month.
I suggested a blog so everyone could contribute their ideas, successes, recipes, etc. and be able to access the suggested resources outside of their work e-mail accounts. No one else knew how to start it, so... I am officially in charge of said blog. I'm thinking that will help keep me motivated.

So, here it is:

Success Group

Stop by if you feel so inclined. And wish me luck on my way to a healthier life. :)

*I'm not posting a "Before" picture. The fugly one of me below should be sufficient.