May Goal Update

June goals are coming on Monday. In the meantime, here’s how I did with my May goals.

This month wasn’t the best. Between Emma being sick a full 1/3 of the month and Jose’s mom visiting for a week, I didn’t have as much time to do “me” stuff as usual. Although 5 of 6 items are definitely in progress, I wasn’t able to finish a single one. Oh well. That’s life.

Clean up the rest of my office. I was fairly successful on this one, as you can see from the photos above. What was a pile of junk so deep that I couldn’t really get to the bookshelf is now in much better shape. There are a few things still to find homes for, and a few things to drop off at Goodwill, but overall I’m happy to have made progress. This weekend we’re going to put together two new bookshelves for Jose’s side of the office, which will allow us to move one of his current shelves to my side. I’ll have more storage, which will be a good thing!

The biggest thing I’m stuck on at this point is the pile of boxes you can see on the lower right. The two baskets are empty, but the other boxes are all filled with photos. Both albums and prints. And I can’t figure out what to do with them! Some of them have been scanned, but some of them haven’t. Even if I send those off for scanning (which I will likely do), I still don’t know what to do with the prints once they come BACK. Since they’ve been scanned and I have them digitally, do I throw them away? I’m not sure I’m quite ready to do that yet. Do I throw them in a big storage bin and find someplace to stuff them? Seems silly. What do other people do with their piles of old prints??

Make a wedding photo album. I decided to go with Blurb to make our album. I haven’t done anything with them before, but they seem to get decent reviews and they allow several different levels of customization. I got a good start this month by going through our photos and narrowing them down to ~150 that seemed the most album-worthy. Now I need to size them appropriately, put them into a book layout, and print! Hopefully I’ll be able to finish it by the end of June.

Write Emma’s birth story. It’s not finished yet, but I spent a little time on this. I’ll start posting it in chunks next week.

Schedule a regular cleaning service. I hired the cleaning service again last week for a one-off appointment but still, there’s really no excuse for not having done this because it’s not hard to set up a regular day and time. I even have the name of someone recommended by friends. This will happen next week. For real.

Complete M.A. project outline. My project is in limbo right now. I know it’s been in limbo for years, but this time it’s different. I’m waiting on UHCL to decide whether I can partake in a new option for completing the M.A. capstone requirement. They have created a “design studio” of sorts where students can be tasked with actual design work for actual clients. I REALLY would like to do that as a method of finishing my degree, but the general set-up is that students will basically work 30-40 hours per week. I can’t do that and also work full-time at my real job. I’m trying to convince them that it could still work for me if they are able to accept a slightly different format. We’ll see.

Finish decorating the guest room. This is the goal that I just completely ignored. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have put it on the list at all — I had added it as a fun, motivational goal but the reality is that I just don’t care about this enough to make it high priority. It’ll happen whenever the mood strikes, but I’m not going to spend time worrying about it. Lesson learned — monthly goals need to be something I actually want to put a priority on doing.