It's 2026!

Jan 02, 2026

I hate goal setting. Always have. For anything - personal, professional - doesn’t matter. They feel limiting and I don’t like throwing a big thing into the universe that I don’t know are for certain.

I also don’t know what ‘big’ things to even put on a list. I’ve bought a house, don’t have a desire to switch jobs, or change my relationship status. But I do suppose reflecting on what kind of year I want to have is a good exercise so here’s a non-exhaustive list of goals and resolutions I may or may not stick to this year.

Pay off my student loans. My remaining balance is low enough that I could just pay it off in one go but high enough that I wince thinking about dropping the amount to do it. I’ve decided that throughout the year I’ll make several large payment chunks toward it and by the end of the year it’ll be gone.
Start wearing sunscreen everyday again. I was really good about this before moving but my morning routine doesn’t have a natural time to make it back upstairs to do this step - especially since most days I don’t put on any makeup. I’m getting too old and spend too much time in the sun in the summers to get away with this much longer.
Try 24 new recipes. Especially for dinner, I make the same thing week after week. I’ve purchased and borrowed a number of new recipe books and I want to continue to cook and bake things out of them. 2 new things a month seems like a reasonable goal.
Develop and maintain a daily stretching routine. I like feeling nimble and a lot of injury actually comes from inflexibility.
Documentation. I don’t know what this is going to look like yet, but I want to make more of an effort to document, written and visually, my life in a private(ish) place for me to look back several years from now. Maybe a finsta of some sort??
Become tri lingual. Well sort of. With Spanish I want to be able to have basic conversations daily conversations while traveling, which I can do in Chinese. With Chinese I want to be able to express feelings, emotions, and complex ideas, which requires more of a vocabulary than one would think.
Throw my house a 100-year birthday party and celebrate my 30th! If you have ideas for either, let me know.