Goals

Now that I'm home, now that the weather is nice and now that I have almost nothing but free time on my hands, here are some new goals I'm setting for myself:

1. Walk or ride my bike to the clubhouse more than I drive there. The clubhouse is where we go swimming and workout. It is just about half a mile away. It takes about 2 minutes to drive there, 4 minutes to bike there and 10 minutes to walk there. Obviously in the dark and dead of winter, we've been driving there. There is no excuse now not to walk or bike.

2. Walk with Anne in the wagon to the grocery store. This one is going to take some guts. The grocery store is 1.25 miles away. Walking there with Anne will take me probably 25-30 minutes. But again, why do I need to drive there? If I take the wagon, I have more than enough room to put my groceries in. I'll get extra exercise. And again, nothing but free time on my hands. My friend Kate does this all the time-her store is a mile away too. This is going to be a challenging one though for so many reasons. I'll be taking Anne, who is fickle and a toddler. Soon it might be very hot out and walking just isn't realistic. Plus, walking there alone will take almost an hour out of our day. Still, I am determined to give it at least one chance.

3. If I or Anne need new clothes, I want to start going to the Goodwill first before I go to regular stores. Again, (see the post below) because I grew up getting a lot of my clothes from there, I don't have a stigma attached to it. If you are washing the clothes when you get them home, there's nothing gross about wearing someone else's old clothes. Plus all the Goodwills I've been too are really nice. They are clean and organized and the clothes are in good shape. There is no harm in trying there first.

4. Plan our meals better and start eating with more environmentally friendly products, mainly beans and lentils and meals without meat. I have nothing against meat, but for a long time now I've been wanting to do one meatless meal a week that includes beans or lentils instead of meat. We do this from time to time but I'd like to start making it more of a priority.

5. Go to the farm stand more often. Unfortunately this one is a balance of eating locally versus gas. The farm stand is like 6 miles away. However, I do get pretty close to it at least once a month (when I go to pick up John's beer of the month-Haha), so maybe I can plan to go there when I pick up his beer...we'll see.

6. Research homemade cleaning products. We already exclusively use vinegar and water to clean our kitchen, but I'd like to see what I can use to clean the bathrooms and toilet and maybe even the floors. I bought the clorox green works to stuff a few weeks ago (because I was pregnant...sigh...) so I'm not sure how pressing it is for me to figure out this particular goal. I'm sure that stuff will last me months and months (considering in an incredibly good month the bathrooms get cleaned 2x a month), so I guess we'll wait and see if I need to actually achieve this goal.

I think that's it for now. We'll see how I do on keeping up with these goals. Wish me luck!