that's it?

Wait? That's it? Today is the end of my year of blogging?! I can't believe it. After a shaky start and questioning why I ever decided to to it, here I sit and write one year later, full of ideas. Wondering what to do next.

A whole year passed. I blogged 364 posts. I missed two days, but blogged extra. I wrote haiku's (both were posted on the 24th of the month...!). I posted pictures. I cooked a lot of meals. I'm not famous. No one called me wanting to make a movie out of this. I averaged forty readers a week (repeats included, thanks Mom, Dad!). I'm a better writer. I traveled to Indiana, Nashville, Chicago, Bay City, Detroit, Savannah, and Dubuque. I walked 167 days since January 1st. I had pink hair.

And here it is. The end of the year.

Or is it?

I've been thinking about continuing. Is it still a challenge if I keep blogging every day?

A habit is supposed to be formed after eighty (or is it ninety?) days.

I think I've made this a habit.

But what if I don't have something to blog about?

Saying something like, "I'm going to blog every day for a decade" just sounds insane. But if I don't do it every day, I know I'll slip back into my old habit of blogging once a month, if that.

My question is, dear readers: do you care enough? Do you want me to keep going?

I have more things to blog about. I've come up with many ideas. Which of course don't include the every day happenings that sometimes pop up. No, not every day is a good day. But it's been fun. At least for me. So, what do you say? Another year?

Editor's note: I took the time to link each word to something that I thought was appropriate. I hope you'll take the time to click each one to see where it takes you!

it's not junk in my trunk

Last year I blogged about the Jr. High youth group's efforts to stuff socks for homeless people who come to our church on Christmas Eve morning for breakfast. It's called Casey's breakfast, because a man named Casey used to serve breakfast out of a restaurant. Unfortunately the restaurant was closed. Our church had been a part of the Christmas Eve breakfast service, so we continued the breakfast out of our own building.

The gifts that are given are a pair of socks, one stuffed inside the other; then the rest of the sock is filled with toiletries and other goodies that you and I might not consider to be extravagant.

The Jr. High has been helping to stuff socks for years. This year we're stuffing 50 socks for men, 50 socks for women and 50 socks for kids. After reading last year's post, I can see why I'm a bit tuckered out from all the shopping. We're stuffing three times as many!

The youth group went shopping on the 20th. There were three groups; one shopped for the men, one for women and one for kids. Each group had a budget (and went drastically over, which is okay because thankfully our church is generous and there's plenty to spend on the socks). Today, I met up with Sami (Chandra is still on maternity leave... lucky) and we finished the shopping at the Dollar store.

Hence the picture of my trunk stuffed to the guild. Oh, that's not all the stuff. That's just what we bought this morning.

Many donations are given, but the congregation is also asked to stuff socks (so that we have around 400-500 total), and no one really knows how many we (the Jr. High) are stuffing. Truthfully, neither do we. We're making this up as we go. Which is why we're doing more this year than last.

A few of the things I needed to pick up today were things like socks for the women and kids. We had enough donated for the men, in fact we only needed 31 more socks to equal 50 for the women. It's a very complicated system.

Sunday, I'll be setting everything out according to group and making sure I really did buy enough of everything. I'll have to take some pictures on Sunday. It's a very efficient system. There's a lot of stuff.

Winter workout

It's time to change my workout schedule to fit the winter.

Each year the goal is to walk outside from the beginning of March through the end of November. I've already walked while snow has been falling, twice in the last couple of weeks. More snow is coming. I think I can make it out on Wednesday, but I have to mentally start preparing for the change.

It's not that big of a deal. Bill and I will get up and go mall-walking three times a week through the end of February. That's the winter goal. Unless we break down and get a monthly membership to the Kroc Center.

I'm going to keep doing yoga three times a week.

Plus the shoveling. Oh the shoveling.

Pray for us.

Or send us cookies.

That won't help, but that will just force us to go walk.

It made my day

We went and saw the Muppet movie.

I don't know if you realized that I wanted to see it.

I may have mentioned it a few times.

We planned to go see it today because we don't have youth group tonight.

It was a Muppet Movie. I liked it. I thought it couldn't have been any better.

Okay, it could have been better if Mr. Jim Henson were still alive. I'm not a movie critic though. With the exception of a handful of movies, I like most of them. I don't like ticket prices, but that's another post for another day. All that matters is that today we had a coupon for a discounted Matinee price. Yes. I am that person. Coupons are my friend (when I remember them).

Anyway, I had to tell you that I finally saw the movie, and liked it, before I got too distracted between the Red Wings game and putting out Christmas decorations.

freeing the bathroom

We have liberated the bathroom.

It wasn't really under any kind of restraint, other than it had a door.

Did you catch that? It had a door. Well, wait. It still has a door. The door is what's been liberated. It's been freed from its hinges. And layers of paint.

Bill took the door off the hinges and took it to the basement. There he coated it with eco-friendly paint remover. I continued removing the paint off the trim in the hallway.

We're removing the paint, wait for it, so we can paint.

There are only so many layers of paint you can put on before it no longer looks good. Especially when your house is from the 1920's. That, and the last few layers weren't really done well. It was as though the owners were in a hurry to sell the house and sort of slapped on some paint in places that needed it. The problem with that is it shows. In a bad way.

So we're working on removing it. Then we'll paint a nice fresh coat. It will be purty.

In the meantime, for a short while, we don't have a door on the bathroom. It's sort of liberating in its own way.