Resolutions

I'm a big list-maker. My memory is generally good, but often I need to get things out of my head and onto paper. There's a tradition I've cultivated of writing my goals for the year ahead at the beginning of each year. (For me it feels like a more meaningful ritual than getting tanked on December 31st.) The list is filed away and I pull it out occasionally, just to see how I'm travelling. Some years there may be three or four items, other years I'll have a dozen tasks to complete. Certain ambitions become carry-over champions year after year: improving my fitness, reading more, watching my finances. Looking back at last year's list, I did reasonably well: painted the study, learnt to knit, took a singing class, remained gainfully employed, got my keyboard shortcuts up. Obviously there's still some room for improvement as far as regular blogging goes...

This year I've chosen two broad targets to aspire to: to waste less and to create more.

First, wasting less. I'm not converting our egg cartons and toilet rolls into craft cash (although that would fulfil both targets), I'm thinking about that food in the fridge that get forgotten about and invariably ends up in the compost heap: two-week old bread, sad mushrooms, wilted herbs, limp lettuce, almost-liquid bananas, mushy cucumbers, leftovers left-over for a day too long. A shameful waste of resources and money. Recently I read about virtual water, which is the water used in an item's production. At the top of the water consumption list is beef, with roughly 16,000 litres needed to produce one kilo of meat! (This fact comes to mind whenever, walking past fast-food places, I see abandoned half-eaten burgers.) We need to get better at using the fresh produce we do buy. If an ingredient is bought for a specific recipe, we need to find ways to incorporate it into other things. If something's looking sad, we make using it a priority. Imagination will be required and will hopefully encourage some positive changes in our recipe repertoire. Ultimately if I can increase the amount of food making its way into our bellies instead of our compost bin, I'll be happy.

Secondly, creating more. There are a number of self-directed creative projects bubbling away in my head, waiting patiently to be poured out and served up. Is it lack of a deadline which stops them happening? Is the number of list items overwhelming? Is it working full time which takes my energy? Is it fear of failure, or a combination of all four? I know that self-directed projects can be incredibly rewarding and are great for boosting creative confidence. Maybe the solution is to break these projects down into smaller, less challenging components. To begin. Watch this space.