This one’s hard to write, because I am not sure what’s going to happen in 2019! We’ve spent the last couple of years laying the groundwork for our future and I suspect 2019 will be more of the same.

I’ve established some good routines around family, fitness, food, hobbies, sport and voluntary work that I am really happy with. After a few years of struggling with taking on too much, I feel like I have a good balance between doing all the things I want, and taking time to connect with the couch.

But there are also plans afoot to change things up this year – Stephen and I are both working on shifting things around in our careers, so watch this space to see how that pans out. Ooooh, mysterious!

I took the bold step of putting my hat in the ring to be a candidate for Community Board at the end of last year. Because I have opted to stand as a People’s Choice candidate (left-aligned local body political grouping), there is a bit of a process before I can actually say I’m in the running. I can’t say that I love Politics (with a big P) but I love working in my community, and would relish the chance to get more involved. I’ve met a lot of hard-working and dedicated people since I’ve been on the Dallington Residents Association, and if I could do half the job they do, I’d be pretty proud of myself.

I think this is the first year in a really long time that Stephen and I have no (national) travel plans! We have opted not to do our usual Auckland /  Wellington / Tekapo / Random trips this year, and save it all for a big trip overseas instead. We haven’t been away on a big trip since 2015, and we actually weren’t planning on going away this year either. But when Rachael and David’s wedding invitation arrived, how could we say no?! Especially since they are getting married in Edinburgh. I can hardly wait! We are planning to go to Iceland and Ireland also – two big bucket list places for me.

I’d like to get some more renovations done this year. There are two main things I’d like to get done – the rest of the windows double-glazed and the butler’s pantry installed. But I’m not sure the budget will stretch that far, so we will see.

I haven’t really bothered with goal-setting for the past few years. Stephen and I plotted out some substantial goals after we got married and purchased the house, and we’ve been slowly working our way through those. We have fixed up the kitchen and tidied up most of the rest of the house.

This year the big goal is to renovate the main bathroom, and convert the laundry into a butler’s pantry with a side of laundry. The bathroom planning is well underway and should begin in the next month or so.

In order to pay for this, we have opted for little NZ-based trips only this year. We’ve planned our usual Tekapo trip for August, and will go to Auckland for Armageddon. Other than that, we will stay close to home. We are going camping in Akaroa for a few days in February, and then nothing else is on the horizon for the time being.

Personally, my main goals are around fitness and health. I’ve been working on my abs with some pleasing results, so I will keep that going. I have signed up for the City 2 Surf again this year, so have started training for that. I would like to bike more this year. The roads are much better these days, with some good cycleways between home and work. The only issue I am having with that is how to manage the rest of my life around a bicycle. Typically I go either to the gym or out after work each night, and lugging all my gear around on a bike just makes the whole thing much harder! I have committed to regular biking to work in February and then I’ll see how it goes after that.

At the end of last year, I made the decision to cut down the amount of dairy and meat I was eating. I am almost entirely dairy-free now, and eating mostly fish and a little bit of chicken. I would like to keep that up for this year.

For work, my goal is to learn as much as I can, and be as awesome as possible. I really feel like I am still getting to grips with how it all works, so this year I will be concentrating on what I can do to work at my peak.

As with other years, my focus will be on achieving a good balance between family, work, fitness, and hobbies.

Well, it’s that time of the year again…where I try and dredge up some goals for the year. In my 20s and 30s I had heaps of goals – I had a 5-year plan and a 10-year plan and I revised them each year as I ticked things off. Life is much more stable now, and it’s harder to think of what my goals are beyond the things that everyone wants – success in my career, a comfortable life, a happy family, travel.

If my goals were to be things that I knew I could achieve in the coming year (i.e. things I know that I will actually do), they would go something like this:

• Buy all the Apple-y things
• Go to the gym a lot
• Spend a lot of time at the ice rink – playing hockey and supporting others
• Spend lots of quality time with my beautiful children and  grandchildren
• Travel within New Zealand – Wellington, Auckland, Waitangi, Dunedin are sure bets
• Try and carve out space for relaxation but not really succeed, realise that relaxation is not really my thing

I struggle so much with the relaxation thing. My husband often tells me in a very stern tone that I need to slow down, not do too much, sit down and relax. And I really try. Sometimes I manage it – I can go hours (well, hour) without doing anything. But the truth is that I am just an ‘on-the-go’ person. It’s not that I’m bored if I’m not doing stuff, I just feel like I’m wasting time to be sitting around. I only have so many heartbeats left and I don’t want spend them watching the world go by. So this year I resolve not to worry about this. I will be as active as I feel I need to be! The only condition I’ll add to this is that I would like to spend more time at home.

Last year I resolved to spend more time at home … and then spent most of the year travelling to and from Auckland. It’s like fate was laughing in my face. “Spend more time at home? HAHAHA, no – spend more time EVERYWHERE ELSE!”. Less travel and more time at home in the evenings in 2016 would be nice.

Stephen and I have financial and career goals that are slowly taking shape, so I am excited about those. They are not things that I will document here – until they start to happen anyway!

So I guess what I’m saying is that my goal for 2016 is to do whatever I feel like doing. That sounds achievable.

I’m going for my first proper run (not on a treadmill) this morning. It scares me a little – in the past running has hurt my back and it’s just starting to get better. I miss running so much when I’m not doing it. I haven’t been since July.

Running feels like freedom.

I think I like this list better than my own….

In fact, it’s a useful addition to my slightly more specific goals since it incorporates my goals of:

• Take some little trips and Go to a country I’ve never visited before = Visit a new place
• Read 10 books = Read a difficult book
• Less derby, more other things = Break a bad habit

I’ll have to think about how we can make the others more tangible…

I’ve been trying to write this for a couple of weeks. It seems like each year it’s getting harder to think of my goals for the coming year beyond the mundane things that I intend to do – which aren’t really goals. I have plans, but are they the same as goals? Plans seem more concrete than goals. Argh! Anyway, let’s give this a shot. At the very least, it’s nice to be able to look back at the end of the year to see how my plans relate to what I actually did…

If 2014 was all about saying yes and no more carefully in order to get some balance, I want 2015 to be the same, but more so. Once again there will be no big projects or grand schemes. Instead there will be a little bit of everything – travel, sport, family, work. All the things that make me happy. Specifically, my goals are:

Take some little trips around New Zealand

• Wellington not for work: already booked in for January
• Kaikoura: definitely in November, but also at least once more before that
• Somewhere I’ve never been before but want to go – maybe Hawke’s Bay or the Fox/Franz Josef glaciers (about the only places I want to go that I’ve not been to!)
• I’d like to visit Queenstown this winter
• Tekapo, of course!

Read 10 books

Because my work involves a lot of paperwork and reading things I’m not particularly interested in, this isn’t the leisure activity it used to be for me. I used to read dozens of books each year, and then when I started university, reading for leisure stopped. I’ve never really got back into it – I read news and magazines but have trouble committing to whole books. Added to this is Audible – why read when I can have someone read to me?! But Amazon-Audible recently added this nifty thing called WhisperSync where you can purchase the e-book and audio version of a book and it marks your place from one to the other so you can listen in the car on the way home, then pick up again with your eyes once you’re deposited on the couch.

I’ve got two books ready to go already. I might tackle the Game of Thrones series. That will keep me busy.

Go to at least one country I’ve never visited before

So Stephen and I have booked a trip to Europe from 3rd to 25th September. I’m not adding that to my list of goals – it’s a sure thing at this point. We are planning on starting in England (this time visiting the south west) and Wales (again, the south west), and then France and who knows where else, and then flying home from Frankfurt.

So instead I make it my goal to visit either Ireland, Switzerland or Luxembourg – all places I’ve not been before.

Spend more time at home

I probably need to quantify this in some way otherwise I won’t really know if I achieved it. In 2014, I was often out most nights of the week – derby on Mon, Thurs, Sun, hockey on Tues, meeting on Wed, socialising Fri and Sat. As much as I love it, it gets to be hard work. Some weeks between work and gym and sport and friends I felt like home was just somewhere to sleep and change my clothes.

I need to make a commitment to be home at least three nights a week. I think that’s manageable. That means hockey once a week, derby once a week, dancing once a week (more on this next), which leaves one more night to do something social. If this means skipping something that I want to do some weeks, I will have to do that.

The good thing about this list is that there is much less derby and more things that I share with Stephen, I’ve missed him in the past year with all the derbying!

Less derby, more other things

So I’m not going to be doing derby three nights a week any more. What do I fill this time with? Couch-sitting? Of course not … except those three nights I’ve committed to!

This year I want to play woman’s league ice hockey in winter. I signed up last year but then derby got in the way when the training night was changed. I was very disappointed with this, and I’m really excited about signing up this year.

I made a hard decision to give up dancing when I started derby. It wasn’t just about the derby – the studio had moved after the quakes, the class got smaller (sometimes it would just be Stephen and I) and we just weren’t enjoying it the same. I was also struggling with some pretty painful OOS in my arms that made it a bit torturous at times. Then when we went on the cruise last year one of the things we did was ballroom/latin dancing each night. We realised how much we had forgotten, and how much we enjoyed it! So this year we want to get back into dancing lessons – at a new studio. I’m really looking forward to it.

In 2013 my main goals were to pass roller derby freshmeat and skate with Dead End Derby, and to travel with Stephen. Achievement unlocked.

The themes for 2014 will be skating, hockey and travel.  This year I want to:

– pass my yearly roller derby skills test, including completing 27 laps in 5 minutes

– be good enough to be selected for the Living Dead Rollers roller derby travel team

– improve my ice hockey skills: run with the puck more, work on passing and shooting at goal. A goal would be a lovely bonus

– finish the roller rink and have a launch party

– travel: to the West Coast and Sydney/Vanuatu in March, Tekapo in June/July, Kaikoura in November at the very least

And less specifically, I will schedule my time less so I have more downtime. I will not take on any new big projects this year – I have plenty of project ideas bubbling away, but I won’t move them forward this year.

This means I will need to say ‘no’ more often. I struggle with saying no, and I’ve been contemplating why this is. I feel like I missed out on a lot of things in my younger years. Having children in my teens closed a lot of doors for me. Now my children have grown up, there are all these doors that I can peak through and I don’t want to leave any of them unopened!

So this year, I intend to do lots of interesting things, but my attention will be more targeted on a few things that I really enjoy – skating, hockey and travel. These are things that I can do with my family and friends, they keep me fit, make me happy, and keep my brain engaged.

I’m picking that 2014 will be a good one.