It's that time again: 2013 Resolutions

2012 was okay.  I made $21 blogging (yes, that's an annual figure),  we completed a few house projects and planned a late honeymoon, and the kids decided to be a little less babyish and a little more mature.  I managed to ignore my formal resolutions (except the reading one--I read over 100 books this year without even breaking a sweat. Some of them were quite hoity-toity, so now I can proudly shove my nose in the air when discussing post-modern fiction).  Katie did not learn how to read, although I never meant that seriously.  Early reading is for the birds!  Instead, we worked on deriving the quadratic equation, which is obviously much more important.

So this year, I've got to get more reasonable.  Be a little less ambitious.  Shoot for the top of the house rather than the stars.

Here goes.

1) Drink more wine.  A few nights a week, I'll have a glass of wine.  Thank goodness for Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck (which is more like 3 bucks these days).  It'll do. And if you're feeling snobby about your fermented grape juice, I've read studies showing that even experts are often unable to distinguish between cheap and expensive wines during blind taste tests.

Sparkling wine counts, too.

2) Train the kids to clean the house top to bottom.  I've been cleaning for years. I resolve to stop.

3) Meet and foster relationships with my neighbors.  My area is actually called "Neighborville".  And yet I only know a few of my fellow street-mates.  I plan on bribing them with beer and spinach dip.  And a nude-y dance.  By Ryan, of course.

My neighbors' house. I've met them walking by, but otherwise, know nothing about them.
That shall change, by golly!

4) Paint one room in my house gray.  Everyone else is doing it, so it must feel really good.  I'm thinking the girls' room with pink and white accents.  Of course, everyone's painting over their gray rooms now that the trend is dying, so I'll avoid being overly trendy by virtue of the fact that no one else is following the gray room trend anymore.

5) Make more money blogging.  I resolve to sacrifice my principles and morals, up to and including shilling for products I would never ever use in real life, over-processing my photos so that my children resemble stepford kids (whitewashed photos popped with colors not found in nature drive up pageviews, y'all), and hosting giveaways for useful items I found while dumpster diving.  Then I'll just sit back and watch the pennies roll in.

That hair is worth millions!

I hope that you, too, can come up with reasonable and worthy goals for 2013.  I think I'll get a head start on goal #1 tonight.  Bubbly for all!