Looking Back

Last January we sat down and tried to come up with things that we would actually do in 2014, not necessarily resolutions but more of a list of reminders. We were able to keep to most of them for about half the year and then everything changed and we had to reevaluate our goals and reminders for 2014. In the end we were able to end 2014 in a good place, not quite where we wanted to be but never the less in a really really good place. For the most part our year turned from a year of sparking our interests and starting to do more of things that we had never done to a year of really letting things go and just letting things happen as they happen. Looking back we accomplished a lot of things and I tend to make our list of to-dos a bit on the high and time demanding side.
  Canning and Pressure Canning
 This goal was a huge success we ended up with a fairly decent canned food pantry. I have gotten pressure canning under my belt and we make and can our own chicken stock every few weeks. We canned just about everything that we could from our local farms and farmers market. We also have been coming up with a plan to keep track of everything we made and how much we used. in 2013 we only made 6 pints of salsa, we ran out in about 3 months so this year we made 12 pints of 2 types of salsa. Hopefully this will be enough for the year!
  Project Life Photo Albums.
I had planned to continue doing our project life for the year, but lost interest about 2 months in and never really picked it back up again. I still love it as a way to keep track of our lives but it got so that I was making myself feel guilty when I didn’t get a chance to work on it and then never wanted to work on it because I was so far behind. Eventually I just decided to let it go for the year and see what would happen.
  More Day Trips in the Area
 This was one of our more challenging ideas for the year. My varied schedule and only having one weekend off each month (sometimes not even one weekend off a month) made it hard to complete this challenge and we did not accomplish our goal of spending more time in the Richmond and Charlottesville area. We still plan to try and do a bit more traveling this year but just like this year we aren’t caught up in the idea of completing our challenges so much as thinking about them and enjoying the opportunities to take them on.