8 Weeks: Week Six - Home Sweet Home [plus a home picture/update]

Naturally, I missed a week.  Last week was busy, then the weekend hit which was even busier, and so on and so forth... blahblahblah.  Week Five was Loving Life & Having Fun, I believe.  I think it's okay that I missed last week because I am totally loving life right now anyway! :)  But here we go onto this week -- Home Sweet Home.  Easy peasy to come up with goals since we just moved into our little rental house.  I've been losing steam when it comes to organizing and decorating the last things and places because we've been unpacking forever.  Hopefully these goals will help that process along and give me a second wind.

1. Frame pictures/posters and put them up on walls.  And to add to this, finish putting up pictures that already have frames.  All the walls in the house, except for the great room, are pretty much bare.  Not pretty.  
2. Find a duvet cover for our master bedroom.  We have new sheets, now we need a new duvet.  Not having one is killing me.  It makes the bedroom look incomplete to the max.
3. Buy a few more bins, label them, and start using them for the recycling.  We have kind of mandatory recycling here, which is fine by me -- housewife and I loved to recycle.  What I mean by that is, we don't have trash or recycling pick-up out here (oh how spoiled I was on Oak Street!). Maybe they have it in the city limits?  Not sure.  But we have to transport our trash & recyclables to the recycling center.  When you take stuff there, you HAVE to separate things out (including a separate bin for kitty litter!) to dispose of it.  Before, I just piled all the recyclables into a few big bins and set them out on the street and they magically disappeared every Wednesday morning - no sortin', no nothin'.  Well, our recycling gets backed uuuuuuup because we don't have enough bins to hold all the stuff for one week and I'm tired of using part of our counter as empty bottle/can/jug/container storage until our next trip to the center.  So bins & labels to organize recycling it is!  

Here's a picture of part of the inside of the house.  The bookshelves on the lower level of the loft.  We are fortunate to have tons of built-ins upstairs and down.  For two English people, this is awesome... we actually have bookshelves NOT filled with books!  The lower loft level is our "office" with the big writing desk, computer, reading corner, craft closet, record player and fiction and poetry section of books.  The upper loft is our "guest bedroom" with a double bed and way more bookshelves filled with CDs, reference books, school books, yearbooks, and anthologies - up here is where we have bookshelves unused!  Once everything is put away and decorated a bit more I will take some pictures -- I just found my camera(s) from the move!  Finally.

The coloring is weird so it may be hard to tell.  My books are sorted by color, aside from my "favorite series" shelf in the middle, LOTR, HP, THG, etc.  (ha!)  Mister's books are sorted by genre.  This explains our personalities.  And we still have some strays that need to find homes.  The bottom middle shelf holds records and a decorative screen I received as a gift in Hong Kong.


Hopefully more (better quality too -- I snapped this one really quickly before the battery died, now to find the charger! ha) pictures in the near future.

8 Weeks: Week Four - Loving Yourself

Okay, so I missed last week.  Here's my excuse... I was packing up the last of stuff in Kentucky, partying with 30+ family members in celebration of my Gramps being 90, getting home late Sunday night and spending the rest of the week unpacking/organizing, and then going to Mister's old apartment and packing up the last of his things.   We finally FINALLY have all of our things here (BOTH OF US), and I'm slowly getting the rest of his things unpacked and organized, while staying on top of laundry and meals.  I will be so happy once I've unpacked the very last box.  I might have a celebration just for that box.  I should also note here, that with every item we've packed, moved, hauled, whatever our decision to stay put for a while was made stronger.  While we aren't 100% sure right now, we are very strongly leaning towards staying in this little rental house until the end of the year -- originally we were going to try and find something by the end of summer and move again, but we are both just so physically and mentally exhausted from moving every single day for the past month. 
Annnnnnnnnnnd... back on track!
The topic last week was Healthy Eating.  Something I used to be not so great at, but honestly I've been doing so well with it in the past month.  I've said in previous posts that our location alone makes healthy eating not only super easy but eating UNhealthy really really hard.  What I mean by this is there are no fast food restaurants conveniently near by, the town is super "crunchy" (aka "buy local!" and catering to organic foods), and so as long as the two of us make our major shopping trip a smart one, we try to only buy good-for-us foods.  I've been cooking A LOT.  Which was one of my own personal summer goals and it's been pretty awesome.   Aside from our road trip food stops that weren't always as healthy as they could be, we've eaten really decent colorful meals and haven't had too many gross things.  We've been taking our vitamins, drinking our smoothies (remember how I told you the Mcakes Way of the Smoothie a couple months ago), laying off the soda a bit (I'd be lying if I said completely - ha!  maybe someday), eating lots of greens, etc.  So yay!

And noooooooow --- this week is Loving Yourself.  Probably will be one of the harder ones for me.  I have a lot of insecurities, especially where my looks are concerned.  I've gained bit of weight on my small frame in the past year (at first it was extremely depressed weight, and then it 180∘turned to being so stupidly happy and going on unhealthy eating dates weight), but whatever the reason, the extra pounds add extra insecurities.  I usually don't talk about my personal body-image insecurities online so it might seem like I don't have them, but I do.  Coming up with goals was hard for me.  But, here goes:

1. Make a list of 5 things I like about my body.  Either write them down or speak them out loud to myself.  Go over this list every day for the week.
2. Put on "real" clothes everyday.  Some days I don't leave the house, and I'm doing household chores and unpacking so I like to stay in my sweats.  I need to make the effort every day to put on clothes even when I don't leave.  When I look decent and presentable, I feel 100 times better about myself.
3. Stop with the negative comments (thinking and saying them) about myself.  I think a lot of people are familiar with this, I know I get on people when I hear them say things about themselves, but I never do it for me.  I need to not be so hard on myself.  Odds are, whatever I'm criticizing about my body isn't actually as bad as I think it is.

8 Weeks: Week Two - Fitness

I'm a little late with this because I was traveling all Sunday evening and then running on very little sleep yesterday while unloading my truck, another truck, and a small trailer full of things from Kentucky.  I've been a whirlwind of steam cleaning everything that is stationary, washing every pot, pan, & dish, and organizing all our stuff.  I really did give away, donate, or throw out so many clothes and other miscellaneous items but it feels like I still have entirely too many things.

But anyway -- this week the goals are related to FITNESS!  Oi vey!  Oh how fitness and I loathe each other most days.  I suppose it is a good thing that I must make some fitness goals this week!  I accomplished all my goals last week, too -- look at me go.

So here goes:

1.  Walk Rory outside everyday.  There are some interesting roads around our house and I need to get out and explore.  Exercise while I learn my way around, plus the pup could use some exercise too!
2. Buy a new yoga mat and look into yoga classes in my new town!  Someone told me there was an excellent instructor in town so I definitely want to check that out so I can get back into yoga and incorporate it into my life again.
3. Stop drinking Diet Coke/Pepsi at least for the week and definitely before noon.  It's so gross when I think about it.  I need to stick to water, coffee, yerba mate, and green tea.  Hopefully this goal will translate to stop drinking soda all together, but I'll tackle that longterm goal as it comes.

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In other news--  I've had a most fortunate experience moving thus far.  The universe has been very good to Mister and me to say the least.  Nothing but good signs everywhere letting us know that we are definitely making the right decision.  I hope we continue to be this fortunate -- we have been so grateful for our luck so far!

8 Weeks: Week One - Blogging

Danielle over at Sometimes Sweet is doing a new challenge called 8 Weeks to a Better Me.  I thought I'd join in since I need a bit more structure to get me blogging more.  Each week there is a new topic and you set your goals for the week on that topic.  The first week is "Blogging."  Kind of hard for me to pick some goals concerning blogging but I figured some out!

1. Finally get around to organizing my "Reading Material" page.  I used to just have a blog roll but I want to categorize the blogs I follow on the page for easier viewing.
2. Comment more!  I try and comment as much as I can but find myself just thinking about the lovely things people post and not commenting that often.  Or at least not as often as I should given the amount of blogs I read regularly.
3. Make a Summer Goals post on my blog.  I've got a lot of things to look forward to this summer and many things I want to accomplish -- writing them down and making them known always helps me stay accountable.  

Join in the challenge and make some of your own goals!!! :)