new year

What Lies Ahead

Christmas has come and gone, and in only one short week, we’ll be enjoying the first days of a brand new year.

This is always a slightly surreal time of year for me — this week between Christmas and New Years.

What day even is it?

With businesses closed for Christmas and no mail delivery, my standard ways of marking time fail me, and I find it hard to keep my days straight. Today might be a Wednesday, but it feels like Monday after four straight days of Saturdays and Sundays. And next week it’s more of the same with a repeat of the schedule.

It’s not “normal time” because the kids are off school and people take days away from work in order to spend extra time with their families. Plus, those same people are looking for things to do, which means the places that are usually deserted during the day are packed with people.

And though it’s still the holidays, the end is in sight. Sort of like when there are only a couple of days left of your summer vacation. Vacation isn’t over yet, but the end looms on the horizon.

But not quite yet! So don’t rush it!

Embrace the slower pace of this week between Christmas and New Year’s Day because it’s the perfect time for reflection and introspection. Thinking back on the current year in order to plan ahead for what’s to come.

Savor the end of this special season by celebrating YOU!

Look at you! You’re still here…and that’s not nothing.

What big things did you accomplish in the past year? What challenges did you overcome? What good surprises came your way? What were your absolute best moments of the last 365 days?

And then what lies ahead?

Turning over a new year on the calendar is like taking a first step into a meadow covered with freshly fallen snow. Where will those tracks take you? Where will your life’s journey lead you? What are you looking forward to in the new year? What change do you anticipate in the days that are spread out in front of you?

Take a moment to think about the amazing gift a new year can be – filled with possibilities and new challenges.

Fresh starts are the topic of the last lesson in my Savor One Season – The Holidays online class, so as my gift to you this holiday season, I’ve got a coupon for anyone who wants to sneak in Savor One Season. Just visit the class online at Teachable.com any time between now and the end of the year, and with the coupon code HALFOFF, you’ll receive a 50% end of season discount on the class.

And, I want to send out a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has already joined me on a journey to Savor One Season – The Holidays…THANK YOU! I hope you learned as much from the course as I did during the process of developing it.

I hope to see all of you in 2019! I’m excited about the possibilities of the upcoming year, especially a new online course I’m creating called “The One Who Dies with the Most Fabric Wins.”

Keep reading my weekly mailings or dropping by my blog, and I promise to keep you posted with details. 🙂

New Year’s Cleaning

I don’t know what it is about the new year rolling around that makes me all hopeful and optimistic.

One of my favorite first of the year things is filling in all the currently known dates on a brand new calendar. One of the tricks I’ve come up with in the past several years to keep things a little more in control is the time & events on one of those multi-colored sticky dots (9:40a G:dentist) and posting that on the calendar on February 22. Then, if (and these days, it seems it’s more likely “when”) things change, I can pull up the dot without leaving my calendar a mess of scribbles and Xs marking through things.

At the end of the year, my calendar doesn’t look like a train wreck — just a bunch of happy colorful dots on the days they actually happened. (Yes, it’s the little things!)

By the same token, that post-Christmas clean-up when we put away all the Christmas decorations, always makes me happy, too. My son and I love decorating for the holidays, and we love packing ia all away, because our newly pared down living space seems so much cleaner and clutter free. I guess that’s what happens when you take a 7 1/2 foot tree out of your living room!?

In years like this year, when New Year’s Day falls on a Friday, the 3-day weekend is so wonderful. De-Holiday on New Year’s Day, and then on Saturday and Sunday, there’s time to take a day or two to tidy up the rest of the house, putting things back in the places that they go. Because we live in small farmhouse house built in 1947, we’re short on closet space, so keeping a handle on all the stuff is key for us to not getting overwhelmed.

Making time to sharpen all the pencils so they have nice pointy points, test the dry erase markers and magic marker and throw away any that are running low on ink, and hunt for all the lost scissors and stick them back into the scissors spot. Double-check on staple items: ruled paper, unlined paper, tape, and … well…staples.

It’s a new year!

Time to hit the mid-season reset-button. Give yourself a boost to the start off year right! Maybe, just maybe it will help us stave off the wintertime doldrums for at least a while because February….it’s out there…

Out with the Old

Each fall it’s back to school — a new start to the educational year, a mid-year chance at a do-over. A fresh start complete with great sales on pencils, pens, papers and folders.

Now it’s a new year for real (woo hoo!). The year 2015 has transitioned into 2016, with all the endless possibilities a new blank calendar represents.

But that also means there are a million and one things to think about in anticipation of the coming 365 days (only 359 days til Christmas!!). Looking ahead to all the things I want to get done “before summer,” I inevitably realize there’s simply no way to get everything done.

It’s so easy to get carried away with all the things that we could do, might do, should do, neeeeeed to do. Sitting here in January, I realize again that winter will end sooner than I think, the year will zip by faster than I figured, and there will be a long list of things that will have to wait until next winter — or maybe be ditched completely.

And that’s okay, too.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that life is all about adapting on the fly to the opportunities that present themselves.

Doing my New Year’s Day retrospective on the past year, looking back at last year’s day planner, there are all kinds of things that weren’t on the official plan for the year that ended up being fun, spontaneous and hugely important.

Seriously, I would never have planned on January 1, 2015 to “find a Doepke Yardbird and restore it.” (Mostly because until May of last year, I had no clue such a thing even existed!).

Instead of my best laid plans (which involved a new paint job in the living room), we walked into an antique shop, found this cool old hand-crank railroad car, and our son decided he wanted to do a project “just like Rick Dale on American Restoration!”

What followed was an incredible learning experience filled with real-world skills. Sanding, painting, welding, problem solving on the fly, budgeting, and dealing with the inevitable snafus (dust in the paint…it ain’t pretty!)

After that, what good is a rail car with no rails? A few hacks with metal fence posts, and he’s got a rolling rail car!

And the living room — maybe it can get painting this year.