happiness project: travels + misc (oct)

Simplify and Prepare, Project 43 and the monthly projects in my Happiness Project … so many projects! In reality, they are all facets of the same project, guiding me to finish or give up old projects and move forward on the ones that are most important to me.

September’s main theme was Learn. Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to realize that I can’t learn everything I want to learn about all at once! I’ve now started to force myself to focus on one class or new skill at a time. At the moment, I’ve finally gotten around to taking the amateur radio class that I’ve been meaning to take for over a year. And it’s enough! I have been making sure I read a bit of my “ancient literature” (just finished the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides), watch a couple movies from my “1001 Movies” project, do a few French lessons and keep up with current events each week, however. I have a long list of things I want to “learn” from photography to knitting and more, but I need to wait until the ham radio class is over first!

October:
October’s main theme is “Travel”. It seems fitting then that I’m working on this while on the road. Alas, the kids have many activities and are much more reluctant to go out of town these days. I’m hoping to figure out how to balance “local” travel, roadtrips and solo-trips so that we all are happy. It isn’t easy.

In addition, my plans for the month include small items from other month’s topics, such as decorating the dining room, working on the provider directory for the ArtisanDecatur list, continuing to learn about ham radio, getting a better will written, updating our budget, cleaning out my old e-mail, starting to redesign this blog a bit, some menu planning, creating an emergency preparedness plan, and keeping up with my weekly resolutions. This month, I increase my daily goal to 12K steps a day. I just have to keep at it, and I’ll get there!

Many of these small items are the same as last month, but some big ones have been crossed off, and I have moved forward on all of them, and a few more of might finally be completed this month. It really is a great feeling to be able to cross off many items “for good”!

As usual, whatever doesn’t get done gets cycled back into the plan at a later date. I’ve crossed off a number of ongoing projects in the past month, and I look forward to getting more things organized and done as well as progressing in the longer-term projects. Yet again I wish I had taken more photos!

diagon alley – 16 sep 2014