Achievable goals

I don't do well with vague goals. I like having clearly defined, measurable objectives, so that when you've reached them you can definitively congratulate yourself on having achieved whatever it is.

Vague goals:

• I will lose weight
• I will read more
• I will get in shape
• I will write more
• I will make time for myself

Specific goals:

• I will lose 5 pounds
• I will read one book per week
• I will hike to Camp Muir
• I will run 5k in a single exercise session without keeling over and dying
• I will write five blog posts per week
• I will select one hour out of each weekend for myself and spend it however I please

Along with being clearly delineated, I belong to the Make Your Goals Achievable school of thought. I am not about to set a year's goal for myself of climbing a giant mountain, or writing a novel, or singing at Radio City Music Hall. Obviously, without the proper background for any of these things, I'm doomed to failure.

And I really don't like failure. You may have noticed.

So! In an effort to improve myself within well-defined, manageable terms, I have settled on the following goals for 2013:

• I will climb to Camp Muir at 10,000ft (this is contingent upon my lungs not having a serious problem with moderate altitude; never having been this high, I'm not sure how they will react)
• I will go on one hike per month (at least, might be higher, but this is an achievable level)
• I will check out books both digital and physical from the library instead of buying them 

It's easy to get carried away and set out 13 goals for yourself. But if you have too many, you'll probably decide they're not all worth the effort after about a week. Remember, there's likely a reason you weren't already doing this stuff, whether it be laziness, apathy, genuine lack of interest (I have a problem with this - doing stuff because I think I should in spite of not actually having interest in whatever it is).

I was tempted to set myself a bunch of other goals, but I tried to stop and think about it, deciding if I really cared enough about each particular goal to actively work at it. I really do want to achieve Goal 1. I've seen pictures of the views from Camp Muir, and I'd like to see them for myself. Also, I apparently have a fascination with mountaineering literature, but with my lungs and panic attacks I don't think I'll ever be able to climb huge mountains myself. Camp Muir is an acceptable compromise.

Goal 2 will help me to achieve Goal 1. Plus I genuinely do enjoy hiking, and since we just bought a bunch of gear for it, I feel that I should use said gear regularly.

Goal 3 is both an exciting opportunity to read a lot more and will save both space and money! I was hampered for years by not having enough money or space for all the books I wanted to read, and it's silly to buy them when you think you might only want to read them once.

I thought about making weight loss goals and blogging goals, but really? If I cared that much about my weight, I'd already be slaving away at the gym. I don't have any health problems related to my weight, and Patrick thinks I'm attractive, so meh. I can't be bothered to set a goal for that. The hiking should get me a little fitter, anyway. On the blogging goal front, I realized that I don't want to regard writing as a chore. I undoubtedly will if I think I'm being forced into doing it, even if I'm the one doing the forcing. Some days the inspiration juice just ain't flowing, you know?

Have any of you come up with goals for this next year?

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Happy New Year!

We spent today hanging out at home. Rugs were vacuumed, Christmas trees were taken down, food was cooked, multiple plants were groomed and moved around. Productive and fun! I do love having a clean(er) house to start the new year off correctly. I'm a neat freak, so it's never really messy in here, but now it's extra clean!

Also, does anyone know how to re-carpet a cat pole? One of ours is looking pretty sad on the lower vertical section. I figure you just get some carpet and staple it into place with a staple gun, but I could be wrong...

We watched Touching The Void last night, about two guys who climbed a mountain in South America. One of them broke his leg with a compound fracture and then, as his friend was lowering him down (which was itself miraculous at high altitude), he went over a cliff and was dragging his friend down. The only thing to do was cut the rope or both guys would probably have died (as far as they knew), and the one who dropped fell into a huge crevasse.

He finally decided that if he couldn't get out by going up, he had to go down. So he lowered himself by his extra rope to the bottom (or what looked like the bottom, actually a snow bridge that started collapsing under his weight) and found a way out. So over the next four or so days he crawled out of the crevasse, down the glacier, and through a huge rockfall back to his camp, all while his leg was broken and he was slowly going insane from thirst.

Amazingly the other guy and a friend of theirs who had stayed behind hadn't left yet, and they heard him calling in the middle of the night. They hadn't gone looking for him because the friend who had cut the rope was sure he was dead. No answer was forthcoming when he yelled into the crevasse. Anyway, everyone made it back alive and surprisingly no frostbite was had or limbs lost.

This was a tense movie, y'all! Even though it is also sort of filmed as a documentary with the actual guys, so you know they obviously made it, it is crazy scary in parts. No crevasses for me!

The well-trodden route up to Camp Muir with a bunch of people on it in midsummer will do well enough, thank you very much.

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