New Years Resolutions

     I'm a little late at getting around to this. Chalk it up to fatigue or more probable, procrastination. For those of you who don't know me, procrastination is my middle name and no matter how hard I try to shake it, it sticks with me. I'm not really a big New Year's Resolutions list maker but this year I decided to give it a go and see how long they will last. I look at it as not as much trying to 'better' myself but as a little experiment I am conducting. So here are a few of my resolutions...

-Improve my/our French. We have seem to hit a point where conversations have come easy to us and we can get any point across but we are not as fluent as we could be. I am hoping that after our time here, we will be completely fluent. For those who are reading this and thinking we should be by now, it is no where as easy as you think especially when you have so many people who speak English in our area. So a friend has loaned us his Rosetta Stone and we plan to get going on that ASAP or I should say, à bientôt.

-Explore more. We normally are very good at this and compared to many others, we are still rock-stars but we have slowed a bit these last few months. Shaun's injury has definitely put a damper on it since walking was out of the question for the first 7 weeks but now that he is walking and driving again, sky is the limit. (I secretly think Shaun exaggerates his limp on Sundays coincidentally when football is on.) A few places on the list are Grasse, the French Alps, St. Paul de Vence, and a couple sleepy towns just over the Italian border. Oh and Corsica, but Shaun may need a little coaxing for that one and I can already envision the limp getting worse.

-Exercise more. In this department I am an 'all or nothing' kind of gal. Some weeks I run 30 miles and then poof, nothing for a month or two. I'm a little bi-polar with running, I'll admit it. But now that I got these bad boys for Christmas, there is no excuse.......

And the fact that this is 1 block from our house, again, no excuse.

-Organize all of our pictures. We have close to 3,000 pics on the computer in need of a little attention. Our friends Johanna and Fernando told us they make a photo book of the entire year and we liked the idea so much, we have decided to make one ourselves. It's a little tedious but I am really excited to 'sum up' 2012 in pictures because God knows we took enough.

-Speaking of photos, my next resolution is to learn how to use every function on my camera. Sure I can shoot in auto, but what is the point of getting a snazzy dslr and only using auto? Every once in a while I take a picture that is awesome on the manual function but when I try to do it again later, it never looks the same.

-Last but not least, I want to cook a lobster. I know, this is a weird one but I love cooking and am not intimidated by anything. I stuff things, fry things, bread things, make egg rolls, bake all sorts of stuff but cooking a lobster terrifies me and not in the 'its inhumane' way but in the 'I am afraid it will be rubbery' way.

So there you have it, a snapshot into my resolutions. Hope procrastination doesn't win out and I am not cooking a lobster with my running shoes on while listening to french c.d.s finishing up my photo book in December 2013. Here's to hoping....