Year-end round-up

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, as I find I never manage to keep them. And then I use my failure at keeping them as an excuse to feel bad about myself. So my new tradition for the past few years is compiling a list of things I did in the past year that made me happy.

It’s amazing how many happy things there are, once you start making a list of them. It’s even nicer if you’ve been doing this on a weekly or monthly basis, which in my better weeks I manage to do. It doesn’t have to be anything big – some weeks it’s little things like “did all the handwash” or (more fun) “tried intarsia.”

It’s also really nice to look back on prior years’ lists and see what I was doing with myself back then. So, without further ado, I present the 2006 list of “Things I did this year that made me happy.”

1. Traveled

I went to Tucson (visiting family), Austin (college friend’s wedding) , Berkeley (best friend’s 30th birthday), and Paris (The Paris part was for work. And not as glamorous as it may sound, as I basically traveled for a day and a half to have a day and a half of meetings. Although I did eat a crepe, see the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame and the Louvre and any number of other beautiful places. And I smoked and drank coffee while being roundly ignored by snooty Parisian waiters at an outdoor cafe, and I was yelled at by my taxi driver for not speaking French. So I guess I did have many of the essential Parisian experiences all in one whirlwind afternoon. Plus, in one of my favorite all-time travel experiences, I saw an ambulance pull up to the curb at the airport and was startled to see that both the ambulance driver and the paramedic in the passenger seat were smoking cigarettes out the window -WHILE THEY WERE DRIVING THE AMBULANCE. It was so gross it kind of made me love the French for more than just their delicious stinky cheeses).

2. Knit my first pairs of socks.

3. Designed my first sock.

4. Knit my first lace project (Branching Out, from Knitty)

5. Started blogging in earnest.

6. Took the weensiest little baby steps towards joining the knitblog community – went to the KnitOut and actually wore a blogger name tag, started delurking to post comments on other people’s blogs, and (most ballsily), submitted a post to Yarnival.

7. Imagine my surprise when not only did my post make it into Yarnival, but I got more hits in two days than I had gotten in the previous two months combined. Such is the enviable power of Cara at JanuaryOne.

8. Got ten credits closer to finishing my library science degree, with good grades (though the Technology for Information Professionals professor that gave me a mathematically impossible A- will be on my shitlist until the end of my days)

9. Turned thirty with a minimum of fuss, weeping over lost opportunities, or bewailing the supposed end of my youth (or the end of my twenties, whatever).

10. Worked damn hard on having a (mostly) functional, bordering-on-grown-up romantic relationship, which involved talking about issues as they come up (as opposed to just seething resentfully) and sharing feelings (instead of pretending they don’t exist or, if their existence must be acknowledged due to, say, visible weeping, refusing to discuss them).

11. Read forty+ books.

Hope your year was a good one, and best wishes for the upcoming year.