jodi's weblog :: no promises. . .

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no promises. . .

January 1, 2009

but you might start seeing me around here more often.

Here’s that sock again:

I decided to copy Caro and knit stripes alternating from both ends of the yarn ball. Ugly or beautiful, either way this is absolutely the last time I reknit this sock. So, no ripping.

In other news, I tallied up the things I accomplished on last year’s überlist, and. Well. Not so hot, I’m afraid, even though I gave myself half-marks for some things because I sort of did them, or because I did them but maybe not consistently and the terms might have been fuzzy. Anyway. The following are the übelist items for which I earned full marks:

#2: knit only from stash: no yarn buying! (hello, that’s a HUGE one right there, surely I should get some bonus points)

#8: get website up to date. Done. Several times.

#9: once up to date, update website twice monthly. I gave myself full marks for this even though there are some pages in the portfolio section that, as of December 31 2008, need updating again. That is a heck of a lot of boring cutting and pasting of html coding, people, plus I totally overhauled the entire site and also (with Peter’s help) switched the blog over to wordpress, so I’d say I get a point for this one.

#12: re-evaluate (yarn) stash; give some away. Totally decimated the stash, gave some to friends, sent some off in the mail, gave some to Goodwill, and even (gasp!) threw some in the garbage, all in preparation to pack up my whopping pile of grad school crap and carry it all home. I got rid of a lot of good stuff but we just barely got everything into the rental trailer as it is.

#16: ride my bike more. I get marks for this partly because I didn’t really define “more”, and once I got home from grad school I pretty much got around town entirely on my bike, not forking out any cash for the bus until the snowy weather hit.

#18: draw during meetings instead of knitting. A resounding success with a side effect: fewer annoyed looks shot my way. Because for some reason people think it’s less rude to draw than it is to knit while people are talking. Fools.

19: eat less junk. Pretty much up until about December 6th, I was awesome with this one.

20: examine hungers. I have no idea what I even meant with this one, but I think maybe it had something to do with being alone all the time (at grad school, away from home) and not taking care of myself and looking at what unhappinesses were making me abuse my body by eating, for example, popcorn for supper and then again for lunch the next day. So if that’s what I meant when I wrote this one, I get the marks for it.

22: Goodwill or refashion 30% of my clothes.

23: put up shelves in basement. I think here I was referring to some wooden shelves we were planning to put up along one wall, but Peter beat me to it and did this before I got home from school in the spring. When our basement flooded later in the summer it kicked our arses into building the storage island we’d been talking about, in the middle of the space with metal shelving and lockers and drawer units and built-in places to stow the long bits of our SCA pavilion and other hard-to-store crap. So for that, I get the points.

28: get fall 2007 student work up on Flickr. Done. Don’t ask me about the spring 2008 work though; that I’m still working on.

34: can tomatoes.

38: eat locally and in season. Well, I didn’t say exclusively, so I’d say I get the marks. And I did some preserving of local stuff when it was in season: strawberries, tomatoes, applesauce.

46: go to bed earlier. Yup.

54: cut down bead stash; give away 50%. I can probably give away most of the rest now too. I have no idea why I collected so many beads in the first place.

56: make a new satchel.

57: make satchels for the etsy shop.

58: start some new house plants. Well, we bought a couple. Same diff.

59: water them. So far, so good.

65: reorganize record collection. Hell, yeah. I even made a list of everything we have, looked up all of the release dates (the ones I could find), and entered them into a database that Peter prepared. Phase one of our evil plan.

68: socialize more with the other grad students. Again, a failure to define “more”, but since I socialized more in my last semester of grad school than I ever had before, I win.

69: clean up my studio and keep the table clear. Two tasks in one, really, and requiring totally different parts of the brain too. I mostly kept it clear. Then in May I cleaned it all up and shipped it all away. Score!

70: cut up all the paper littering the studio for binding into books. Done, but most of that is now sitting in my new work space, not made into books. Some of it is half made into books.

78: cook with Peter more often. We have a crazy schedule this year and everyone has days on which it’s their job to make supper. We don’t prepare meals together as often as we used to before I went away to school, but when I was away we didn’t at all, so I’d say in this case some = more.

81: volunteer at Artcite. I’m on the programming committee now, for starters.

84: go to art galleries more often.Again, what’s “more”? I go to art galleries.

85: don’t bitch about people. Whoa. Buried in amongst all these easy peasy little tasks, a biggie. I was specifically thinking here about not getting sucked into petty workplace bitchiness, and for the most part I managed that. I could use a lot more improvement in the general bitchiness area but I tried. Points for me. Maybe it should only be half points but if anybody suggests that I’ll only bitch about you so don’t bother.

94: get my next tattoo. Yup.

98: take pictures of all the place I lived in Athens before I leave.

99: take pictures of all the places I lived in London.

105: take my vitamins every day. I was better about this in Athens than I have been since coming home, but I’m getting better.

Things for which I’m giving myself half-marks:

66: listen to all of our records in alphabetical order. No, I didn’t do it. I did it once before, about ten years ago, and was going to do it again but Peter said it was a stupid idea and that organizing them some other way would be better. So we’ve done the whole database thing and as soon as we can track down some more release dates (and add in some new purchases to the list) we’re going to listen to all of our records in chrononogical order. And blog it. I get half-marks because I made this one way more awesomer and did a lot of work towards making it happen.

67: eat at least one meal at home per week with chopsticks, for practice. Some weeks in Athens I ate with chopsticks every day. Not so much since I came home, maybe only once a month.

#89: try a new recipe from every cookbook we own. I use some books more than others, and while I tried a lot of new things and cracked a few books for the first time, I’d say I probably only made something out of a third of the cookbooks we own. We’ve also acquired a lot of new cookbooks in the last year though.

#96: get rid of all the dead ballpoint pens in the house. I did this in my apartment in Athens, but not in our house back home. Yet.

No, I’m not going to list all of the things I didn’t accomplish, because this is supposed to be a self-congratulatory exercise, not a wallowing in disapproval one. Plus you can see the entire list here if you really give a rat’s arse. Anyway, my paltry 34 out of 108 doesn’t look so craptastically bad when you consider that I EARNED A MASTER’S DEGREE which wasn’t even on the list! So there.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll post 2009′s überlist, if I can get arsed to finish it. Yes, I know it’s 2009 already and the list should be done. Making 2009′s überlist before 2009 begins was #108 on 2008′s list. And I didn’t get it done. Bite me!

I am totally putting “tell people to bite me more often” on my 2009 list, by the way. The easier the tasks are the more I’ll accomplish, right?

Posted by jodi on January 1, 2009 at 7.51pm
Categories: it's only sticks and string, überlist