Goodbye 2014, Hello 2015

2014 came with a lot more challenges than I’m used to. Several of those were health-related, but most were a lesson in time management. 2014 was the first year I was the prime person in my role at work (and what a role!) — with a more than full-time job, it was a struggle to tack on grad school with up to 2 classes at a time. Once the boyfriend and the health issues and the other interests (blogging, orchestra, etc) were thrown into the mix, I was hitting unprecedented levels of stress.

The theme of 2015 is going to be time and stress management. Here are my goals:

• Less overtime at work
• Only 1 class per semester (and I’m taking the summer off!)
• Read 50 books (that’s less than 1 per week; should be totally doable, and it’s half of what I read in 2013)
• At least one post per week
• Get my new blog location up and running
•  Organize the apartment (I seriously feel like we haven’t finished moving in yet, and we’ve been here almost a year already)
• Make serious headway on saving for a down payment on a house

I kicked it all off with a road trip with the boyfriend. We drove from Washington to North Carolina by way of California and Texas (ie, the LONG route, but the one without snow). In total, we put about 8,900 miles on the car — you remember that nice new one I bought a couple months back? This is why I decided to get something new. I met the other half of the boyfriend’s family (his mom’s side lives locally, so I’d already met all of them), and I got to spend a couple of days with my grandparents down in Texas.

And the best surprise from the trip was that I got to listen to audiobooks the entire way. Normally the boyfriend isn’t thrilled with audiobooks in general, and he certainly doesn’t care for most of the ones he’s heard me listening to. But with a few compromises on genre, we found some great books we both thoroughly enjoyed, and reviews for them will be going up shortly. Since I didn’t get a chance to write my reviews while we were driving and visiting with family, these will be shorter than normal; after all, it’s been two weeks since I finished the first one.

That said, as I ease back into work and school over the next week or two, I’m going to ease back into blogging. Goodbye hiatus!