Oh, hello, 2013. I hope you are better than your predecessor.

Happy New Year!

We didn't do anything special to celebrate New Year's Eve last night, but we did have our anniversary dinner a few days early (carry-out with a gift card we received for Christmas.) I started the new year off this morning by having breakfast with my husband (something that rarely happens), and writing letters to my Compassion kids. My family is going to have lunch together later at my grandparents' house. Mammaw is making fried oysters. I'm pretty excited about that- they're delicious and we usually only get them once a year. My evil reflux has been acting up lately, though, so I hope lunch goes ok in my tummy and doesn't make me feel bad for the rest of the day.

Did you make any resolutions for the new year? I did. I'm not going to be mad at myself if I mess up, or whatever, but I think it's good to set goals, and what better time to make a life change than the new year?

This year, I would like to do the following:

1. Do one kind thing each day. This world desperately needs more kindness. Every little bit helps.

2. Clean out my house, top to bottom, giving away as much as I can- and making a point to not collect a ton of junk throughout the year. My money can be spent on better things.

3. Eat more vegetarian meals. I'm still contemplating going vegetarian full-time. The fact is, eating lots of meat is bad for you, and we should all be eating more fruits and vegetables anyway. Plus, eating animals can make you sick because of the poor way we treat the animals we eat.

4. Read 1000 books. This actually shouldn't be that hard, but I do want to also make an effort to read more Christian non-fiction books this year (for example, I have a few by Priscilla Shirer checked out from the library that I want to read in the next few weeks.) I also want to read more non-fiction, too. I kind of slacked off on that. I've got a huge list of stuff to read on Goodreads, and I've already got some great stuff picked out on all kinds of topics.

5. Pay off my smallest student loan. Getting rid of it will lower my total loan payments, and it will be nice to get rid of a chunk of debt. The smallest loan I have is a little less than $900. It may not seem like much, but when you make minimum payments (or even a little more than that), it takes forever to whittle down, because they apply the payment to the whole group of loans, plus the interest. So my goal is to continue making my regular payments, but to also specifically work on knocking out that one loan- which, like I said, will lower my total loan payment (at least, one of them. I have six.)