I don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions. If you made some this year, how many are you still maintaining and how many did you ditch by Superbowl weekend (be it the food, skipping a routine exercise plan, maxing out on your beer-a-day limit, whatever)… Point being, we all know January 1st is just as arbitrary as any other day, but there’s way more peer pressure involved and what you need to make goals/resolutions work is your own personal motivation, regardless of other people. That’s part of why I made a list of 36 goals to work on over the course of a year. That one year deadline is still a few months away in early April, but here’s a check-in with how I’m doing with them; the ones in bold have had some progress or I felt the need to comment on them:

1. post to my blog at least once a week – Fail!
2. record and donate an audiobook
3. edit new commercial and animation demos - Produced a new commercial demo last fall, didn’t have anything to add to my animation demo, this one’s done. 10/2/09
4. re-record my audiobook demo – Completed 11/27/09.
5. adjust the inputs in my home and work studios for optimal sound – My work studio sound is inferior to my home studio, but also not 100% within my control. I’m going to start bringing a few pieces of my mobile studio gear with me if I can’t get a cleaner sound out of that chain.
6. stick to a realistic workout routine that fits my lifestyle (ongoing, check in every 2 months) – Going well! 26mi bike ride every Saturday, 2 and sometimes 3 days a week at the gym, pretty consistently over the past year, aside from when I had pneumonia.
7. volunteer my time once a month
8. hike Camelback (summit), Squaw Peak (summit), Lookout Mountain (summit), South Mountain (National trail), Cave Creek (Go John trail), Estrella Mountain (Rainbow Valley trail), White Tank Mountains (Goat Camp, Ford Canyon to Mesquite Loop, or Mesquite Canyon to Willow Springs trail) http://www.visitphoenix.com/visitor/index.cfm?action=trails – I’ve got a lot of hiking to start doing…
9. donate blood
10. get back to Raleigh for at least 5 days – Completed September ‘09
11. renew my passport – Meant to do this in 2009, since my husband is an amazing photographer and I could have a flattering passport picture.
12. use my passport – Making grandiose yet vague and unresearched plans
13. plant a garden on the back patio with native plants – So close! Took classes with the Phoenix Permaculture Guild on how to get things to grow in our wacky soil, and it’s going to be planting season again shortly.
14. get more agent representation – I’m going to consider the few producers I work with who have large clients come through their studios to be completion of this, ongoing goal…
15. learn how to use Photojunction
16. reconfigure the layout of my home studio for ease of use
17. improve my technical photography skills – Can you ever really be done on something that is an improvement-based goal? Always striving to improve my skills in whatever I do…
18. organize business and tax paperwork – I’m so good about this, my tax guy loves me because it takes 15 minutes to do our joint married taxes and 2 businesses because I’m queen of spreadsheets.
19. study with a voiceover pro
20. beat GH 80’s (Electric Eye + encore song), GH3 (Battle for your Soul level) and Rock Band 1 (Green Grass and High Tides) on expert guitar
21. give handmade gifts – We gave our close local friends mango chutney and home roasted coffee for Christmas this year.
22. research composting and determine whether it’s something we can do (and if so, start doing it!) – We’ve got a bin, we put stuff in it, sometimes we remember to water it and stab it with a piece of rebar we bought for that purpose (keep it mixed, aerate…) It’s not a fancy schmancy compost bin that spins, but it’s cut down drastically on how much food gets thrown in the trash. We feed our compost bin every 2 days or so with how often we go through biodegradable coffee filters and red pepper cores, etc.
23. find a local farmers’ co-op – Have researched a few but not taken further action
24. get together with other recent newlyweds and hang out/drink beer in our wedding dresses
25. babysit for friends to give them a night off
26. use our National Parks Pass twice to go somewhere besides the Grand Canyon – Hmm… I think this has expired.
27. cook dinner for friends once a month – Good intentions, tough to schedule.
28. create parents’ albums with our wedding photos using Photojunction
29. learn a new craft or take an old hobby up a notch – Yes! I would have to say gardening/compost maintenance type stuff qualifies.
30. spend more time with Andy and our kitties
31. get allergy tested – Turns out, I’m not allergic to much. I also now have a fabulous ENT to keep me working at full capacity with little down time.
32. sign on 2 more radio stations for imaging (voice and/or production)
33. mail letters/photos to out of town friends
34. finish painting throughout the house – I’m going to cross this off now, because it’s very close to being completed.
35. help someone else put together a voice demo - Offered this to a friend, hope to get together to help her with that soon.
36. participate in (or be entered and training for) a triathlon or duathlon – I hate running.

So that’s 16 completed or mostly completed, and 20 to go. It’s also interesting to see how my goals have changed, what’s important now vs what was important to me in my business or personal goals nearly a year ago. My current goals are much more focused and measurable in terms of results, vs having completion goals I’m now looking at number goals. I really do enjoy running my own business, I just hate running (see #36.)

All through college, my partner in crime was my friend Kristin. We were the laughing too loudly too late, closing down the coffeeshop, rewriting song lyrics, running around 24-hour stores late into the night/early into the morning, mostly innocent sort of trouble-making duo. I was so happy she came to visit me and Andy this spring. We took her up to Sedona and the Grand Canyon (oh, how horrible to have to go back to these places every first time friends come to visit us here…) and here’s a few photos from her time here.

While the rest of the country is cold, admittedly I’m enjoying the moderate weather in Phoenix, where we don’t have to worry about defroster settings on our cars or pipes freezing overnight. Being from the east coast, I do miss the cold every once in a while. So, when Jared, Ray and Allison came into town in late February, we did a 2-day trip up to Sedona, Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon.

While Laura was in town in February, she and I went to check out First Friday events in downtown (see thispost), went to some kind of delicious chocolate festival and walked around Bobby’s Rock at the base of the Echo Canyon trail at Camelback Mountain. We had our cameras and although it was too early for really nice light, I found a nice spot for some portraits of my good friend.

We checked out the Phoenix Art Museum and I especially enjoyed the lighting inside and outside. Below is the side-effect of something unofficially called “no flash corner.”

There’s also a cool exhibit I always have to go into when we go to the museum. It’s disorienting and very peaceful at the same time.

Andy and I weren’t able to get back out to Colorado to see her family and her baby until just a few weeks ago. If you’d like to meet him now (as opposed to whenever I work through photos from Feb-Nov and post them here!), Andy just shared his photos on his blog.

I’m one of those can’t be separated from my phone types. To be more precise, my iPhone and my Camelbak water bottle are usually both within arms reach. I’ve been contemplating jailbreaking my iPhone for a few weeks for a few reasons I consider to be worth it: I can stay logged in to run apps in the background (Pandora or the infamous Google Voice app, for example) while I use other features (like check email or answer a text.) I could use quick SMS texting to not even bother with switching between apps to answer a text. Also, I’d like to be able to customize my email and text sounds beyond what is currently offered since my husband and most of my friends have iPhones and nobody knows who’s getting the text or email when we hear it (since we all use “tri-tone” for texts and don’t have an option for email sounds.) And last on my short list but certainly not last on my list, is using the Google Voice app itself. Jailbreaking is easy and the newest version won’t brick your phone, and you can still sync to iTunes and buy things from the app store. Maybe I’ll really do it this coming weekend, I keep chickening out.

Maybe that’s because I really am otherwise very happy with my phone. Besides recording voicework, I hardly ever have to get out my laptop at home. I’m quite content to plug my iPhone into the nearest outlet and drain the battery with email, looking up recipes, youtube videos and playing games. I wanted to share some of my favorite apps, mostly time killers but they’re wonderful time killers.

1) Remote (free) – This is the most awesome yet simple thing I can do with my phone, and I love it. We have the audio inputs from our receiver hooked up to our Airport router, and our desktop mac is usually on. You can use this app to play music off your iTunes library from wherever you are in the house, and then by just changing the input on the receiver to Aux 2 or whatever it is, voila! Our entire library is accessible in our living room via our cell phones. Other friends with iPhones, once given access via a numerical password from the computer, can put in “requests” for music, since they can then also view the library. We can thumbs up or down their choices. I love it!!!

2) Shazam (free) – Hold it near the speaker and it’ll tell you what song is playing. Apple did a commercial featuring this app and I think most everyone must have it by now.

3) HeyWAY Pro (paid) – There’s no use in texting my husband when he’s somewhere along his commute, but trying to coordinate dinner and evening schedules calls upon this app. You send a request to someone to share their location, and with one button they can agree to do that. You then get a pretty accurate mini-google map and a ping on your phone once they’ve responded. Also, you can send out your location without being asked, and only send it to certain people (friends you’re meeting up with, etc). It doesn’t require a separate login/password, but allows you to add friends to your list only once they’ve confirmed via email on their phones. Pretty slick.

4) Defender Chronicles (paid) – This is not a productivity app, if you hadn’t already guessed. It’s a tower defense game and it’s awesome. I seriously love this game. When you have actual work to do, or an incoming call, it auto-saves wherever you left off when you close out of the app.

5) CatPaint (paid) – Don’t just blow this off as some stupid pointless app. It’s a wonderful, pointless app. Select any photo in your library, click to add resizable cats (and shake your phone to delete cats you’ve added.)

I present, Exhibit A, created to pass the time:

…and Exhibit B, to make a point:

Panthers 0wn Cardinals

Go back and add some cats to yesterday’s Thanksgiving festivities!

I’ve spent considerable time today working on a backlog of photos I’d had sitting on my laptop for months. I used to be so much better about this, posting pics from trips and friends’ visits within a week or so of when it happened. So without further delay, here’s part one of my photo update! This is from when my good friend Laura came to Phoenix to visit for a weekend. Andy had left for the Southern Short Course photojournalism workshop that weekend and it allowed for a lot more girl time. We didn’t stay up late braiding each other’s hair and eating Twizzlers like we did in high school, but nothing beats time with awesome people who you’ve known so long they’re just family.

I don’t remember anything specific about the movie Renaissance Man, aside from the fact that we were watching part of it during high school history class and I don’t think it really tied into anything being taught in the class. And I’m pretty sure Robin Williams was in it. I did, however, take away the idea of a Renaissance Man… and I liked it, and at that moment I thought it’d be a good thing to strive for.

My friend Jill, a multi-talented photographer/crafter/amazing cook/gracious party host, wanted someone to take gardening classes with her. When my family lived in upstate New York, my pastry chef-turned-Realtor dad grew vegetables in a huge 30×50ft garden, and also had probably 20-30 fruit trees in a large orchard AND we had several flower beds on our 3+ acres, all beautiful and blooming and producing so much we had to give it away. While that’s a great example of what can be done in more ideal growing conditions, it also stands as a great example of what amazing and productive things can be done in your spare time. At this point, after gardening classes with Jill, Andy and I have a compost bin in our patio/yard space and somewhat less vague plans than a few months ago on how and what and when to plant in this tiny space to be able to enjoy homegrown vegetables in the desert.

It’s easy to lead a more well-rounded life when things are going well with your relationships, your job, your finances and all the other big determining factors of life. When one or more of those areas are suffering, that’s when it’s a struggle to find the energy to do more than just exist in your own life. That’s when I think it’s most important to push and fill your time with something enjoyable and give yourself something to look forward to, to help through those down times. I know I’m lucky to be in the radio industry and to never have been laid off, to have a freelance career that continues to grow even in a down economy, and to live in Phoenix and be on the positive side of a mortgage in a city ridden with foreclosures. I have a great husband, wonderful friends, a career and job I enjoy, pets I love and hobbies I can delve into and share with friends. I expect myself to live that Renaissance woman life in times like this.

I hope to share some of these interests on this blog. Moreso, I hope to get back in touch with a lot of the things I enjoy and use this blog to help me remember to do that. I have half a closet, several drawers and boxes full of hobbies I’ve set aside and seldom visited. I don’t know that I’ll be cross-stitching or quilting or doing any still-life drawings this week, but I hope to bring more of my hobbies out of storage and enjoy them in the time I certainly can make in my day. Being a voice over talent is an enjoyable part of my day, but there’s more to life than how you make your living.