2023 Edition
I am not a fan of new year’s resolutions. I’m a person prone to waiting, for the right time, for permission, for inspiration… it’s not workable for me to hold onto a specific date that way. There’s all the anticipation, and then, all of the sudden, it’s an obligation and, for whatever reason, procrastination kicks in, and then… failure. Right at the beginning.
This year I’m striving for continuity:
- Continuing my education and experience as a master naturalist;
- Continuing the habit of doing yoga 5-6x/week for 30 – 45 minutes at a time;
- Continuing — and expanding — a nascent sketchbook habit (that has been nascent for years — I’ve been playing at it for a long time);
- Finding new recipes, and continuing to tweak the ones I found last year;
- Settling into working with the OLC’s birds on my time and on my terms, rather than trying to be the “best volunteer of all time, ever in the history of the world.” (Don’t get me wrong, I want to be a good volunteer, in the sense that I try to make things easier for the people I work with… or at least not make things harder. But I need to — consciously — take a step back from the impulse to try to claim ownership of any of it, because it’s really — and I cannot stress this enough — not. my. project.)
There are some new things on the horizon, of course:
- I start graduate school in January. That will be fun, and hugely challenging… not just the content, but the structure. I’m looking forward to placing my existing skills into a new context, and learning new skills.
- I want to buckle down and spend some time learning animal anatomy, animal drawing and rendering, and creature design. This is another thing I’ve been playing at, and I want to stop playing at it and take it seriously. Because it’s fun. (And it can be somewhat related to master naturalist stuff, so there’s that…)
I guess I have one, sort of, resolution, and that is to limit my time on social media. There’s *a lot* of great stuff on social media — don’t get me wrong — but there’s also some really not great stuff, and I find myself spending more of my time and attention on the not great stuff, and it’s bumming me out. So there’s that.
The first order of business?
Get rid of this godawful cold, that I’ve now had for *checks notes* TEN DAYS. It’s in my lungs AND my sinuses, and it’s miserable. (It’s also not Covid — five negative tests over nine days — and while I have no doubt that it’s a virulent respiratory illness, it’s not THAT PARTICULAR virulent respiratory illness… I’m wearing a mask when I leave the house.)
Carmen Yount 