My August goals:

Family and House:

• Do something every week with just me and Kaleb before school starts. This week we have already gone school shopping twice and it’s been so much fun!
• Be brave and have the conversation I need to have with one of my kids. I don’t want to reopen wounds but I also feel like there is some festering going on…
• Go on another actual date with Kendell.
• Get all of the lingering stuff from my mom’s house organized, boxed, and put away. (I inherited so many beautiful things from her. I just don’t have a place to put them right now.)
• Get the kitchen painted. (I HATE PAINTING)
• Continue working on finding somewhere new to move. This experience has been so frustrating. It is mind boggling how expensive houses have gotten here. It makes me worry about what my kids will do in the future (I mean…how can they even get started when a small starter home is $600,000??????) and it makes me feel like a failure (if I had made different choices perhaps I would’ve attained some measure of financial security) and it is emotionally draining. We found some lots a few weeks ago that would’ve been perfect, not too expensive, the right size, a view of the mountain, but they all sold in five or six days.

Health and Exercise:

• Continue with my solstice to equinox streak: At least 30 minutes of exercise every day.
• As the uptick in cardio has done absolutely NOTHING to help my weight, I’m going to tweak my goal a little bit: I’ll still do cardio on most days but not every day. But I am adding a muscle-strengthening goal to do some sort of muscle strength exercises every single day.
• I’m not sure I’ll get 100 miles again this month, because we are going on our summer vacation and two of the days will be harder to run. (Walking around an amusement park would totally add to my mileage, I know, but does that really count as “exercise”?) So, I’m not going to worry about total mileage; instead I am setting the goal of lengthening my longest run to 8 miles. We’ll see how the knees do!
• At least three hikes this month with Kendell. Four might be hard because of that vacation.
• Have a good, long discussion with my gynecologist about hormone levels to see if she has any advice about my weight issues. If not, make an appointment with my GP.
• Get my mammogram done.

Creativity:

• Most importantly: Finish my poem and submit it.
• WRITE MORE. On my blog but also with the goal of writing something I could submit.
• I want to start scrapbooking again, but I don’t think I actually will this month. I want to achieve my other goals first, so for scrapbooking my goal is to do a deep, brutal purge after we get home from our vacation. If you know anyone—individuals or groups—who need scrapbooking supplies, please let me know. I want to send it off to good homes.
• Before we leave on vacation, I want to finish Jake’s quilt and get it to the quilter. Make a good start on Kaleb’s quilt (I realized this week that I don’t have enough of the main neutral fabric, so I had to dig into the dusty corners of the interwebs to find a few more yards, and now I’m waiting for it to show up!) and keep putting together my pink & black squares.
• Finish the book I am reading right now and then finish two others. (Stop getting distracted by my phone when I have time to read, in other words.)

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What are your goals for August?