Being a very goal-oriented person, I am all about the New Year’s Resolutions. There is nothing like a fresh start with a new year to give you hope that you may, in fact, accomplish what you set out to do in the future, though you may not have in the past.

Here are a few of mine, in no particular order:

1) Plan ahead. Some things come around every year without fail, yet I still manage to be caught by surprise and unprepared more often than not. I never seem to have a Halloween costume, am always scrambling for birthday gifts for close friends and family, and have yet to get out a Christmas card or letter since…well, ever. A far off friend I treasure manged to get off a birthday card to me this year WITH a thoughtful personal note and have it arrive right on time, despite being a first year doctor working an impossible number of hours. I want to be like her. So this year’s question to ask myself: “Why do tomorrow what you can do today?” Or maybe even better, “what is coming up that I know is coming up that I should start thinking about now?”

2) Be prepared. Now, to be clear, this is distinctly different from resolution #1. I am talking about emergency preparedness here, people. We live on a fault line (or insert your potential disaster here), have had to evacuate my parents’ house twice in recent years due to fires, and I guess I have just seen one too many disaster movies. This has been on my mind for a while now and being unprepared for some unforeseen calamity is something I stress about in my free time. So, in the near future I will be putting together a disaster preparedness kit and for those playing along at home, I’ll be sure to post as I add things to it in the future.

3) Eat what I buy. Food, I mean. Unless of course the disaster comes before I pull together my emergency supplies and we are forced to subsist only on the weeds we have growing in the backyard. Nothing pains me more than throwing away food I’ve bought and not eaten. Whether it was the leftovers from a night out swallowed by the fridge only to be rediscovered well past its edible expiration date, or an orange that I just never got around to peeling, it breaks my heart. What a waste!  A waste of money at the store, the gas to get it home, the fridge to keep it cold, space at the landfill, and worst, a waste to whoever who was hungry and would have eaten it!  I do find some solace in the fact most things I throw away will decompose perfectly naturally; I just am really bothered by it. Hence, resolution #3.

So there you have a sampler of my resolutions. Next time you come over, remind me when your birthday is, please bring a canned good to stock my emergency supplies, and by all means, let me know what you find at the back of my fridge!

Happy New Year!

Wife