Tomorrow is New Year's Eve.  I can't believe how fast time goes these days.  This was our first full year in the new house in the new city, and it was a good year.  Josh and I both made some really positive lifestyle changes this year, including walking the dogs pretty much every day, hiking a couple of times a month or more, reducing our portion sizes, drinking less alcohol, and eating better foods.  We've both seen payoffs in weight loss and just generally feeling better.  So things around these parts are pretty, pretty good . . . but there's always room for improvement, right?

So I have some ideas for the upcoming year.  For one, I want to start sewing clothes, so the first thing is that I am aiming to sew at least one piece of clothing a month.  I'm hoping I might be able to do more than that, but I figure that one per month is a good start.  To start, I've signed up for a skirt sew-along on another blog, which I will link to in a future post. 

The second thing is to start adding some weights into my routine.  Up until now, my main source of exercise is walking the dogs and hiking, and it's really been a benefit for losing weight and feeling better.  But I want to get strong!  (And I know that weights can be an even bigger help with weight loss, and while weight loss is really more of a secondary effect, rather than a primary goal, it's still something that I'm hoping to see more of this year.)  So I'm going to start setting my alarm at work and taking 5 minutes every hour or so to stop looking at the computer and start lifting some (very small to start) weights. 

There are more, but for now, I'll end on the third thing, which is that I want to start volunteering in some way.  I was looking in to serving food at a homeless shelter, but most of those require you to get there before I get out of work , so if we are going to do that, it would have to be on the weekend.  I need to think on it some more, but I guess I figure that if I put it in writing, then I have to figure it out and go do it.