Yikes!!

For the love of the Lord, I did not know that this beginning month of 2008 would be so flippin' congested with everything under the sun. That is kind of a vague statement, but I just need to blog about the craziness of my life right now before I can go back and continue trying to tackle it.

1. Young Life - Two of my teammates are leaving, I want to try to create a small group with girls, we are going to be doing All-Area clubs, I don't know what to do about camp this summer, there is a complete absence of other volunteers, Feb. Banquet, and we need to plan for the semester. It feels like it would be a lot easier if I just volunteered once a month at a soup kitchen. Which I probably should do anyway.

2. Work - Signature: Putting together Powerpoint presentation for our annual Employee of the Year meeting, setting that meeting up, planning for it, coordinating our Awards Banquet, working as a team leader, putting together that powerpoint presentation, helping my boss put together his presentations for those meetings, implementing a new HR system company-wide and conducting training classes, continuing to test the new HR system, creating a new company cultural program - the 4C's of Trust, creating posters for that program, coordinating employee development training, coordinating and putting together meeting arrangements for our Quarterly Business Review, putting together that agenda, finding a way to cater the event, getting the appropriate people to create their presentations. Baseball: Putting together financial statements for the Braves, meeting on Sunday for the Braves, collecting contracts, following up on documents and payments that still need to be turned in, start thinking about fundraising opportunities, coordination of golf tournament for 08, ordering t-shirts for winter campers, putting together a program for the marketing interns this summer, finding the interns, NVTBL financial refunds, requests, turning in documents to start new money market sweep fund, continuing to fill in for our administrator who suffered an aneurysm this fall, set up a meeting for ODL teams, website maintenance, alert and to-do maintenance.

3. Personal - Set up the financing for my new car (which, yes I did buy, and have accomplished one of my 2008 goals, yay!), sell my old car, change registration address on my new car, driver's license, town decals, and register with the Commissioner of Revenue(?). Continue working on my first half of 08 goals.

So much to do (and most has to be done by month's end!) and SO little time! But I'm going to try to make like the ants (thanks analogy that I read last night) and chip away at this a little at a time. Hopefully it will all get done without my hair turning completely gray!

On the road to being a "Meaningful Specific"

Well, now it's time for a more upbeat post, one that has to do with goals.

I still don't have these all figured out, but this is what I'm going to pursue for at least the first half of '08:

1. Buy a new car. I may actually get this one done by this weekend, unbelievably. This is something that I've been thinking about and researching for a while, and I've put the wheels in motion to make it happen, so that's a good start! I've just had it with my car and though my baby has been very, very good to me, it's time for a new one. It's kind of sad to think that my Corolla will be gone, but the vanishing of the fear that my car is going to blow up driving down the road will be most welcome!

2. Start a small group with my YL girls. I think that I've lost sight of what my ministry is supposed to look like. It's not just about the events that we put on on a Monday night. It's supposed to be much deeper than that. It is so easy for me to use busy-ness at work and the craziness of kids' schedule as an excuse to not do anything. So I want to be very intentional and get this started this year.

3. Read More. I am a TV-holic. It is so easy at the end of the day to go home and numb the brain with whatever is on the tube. But there are SO many books out there that I want to read (which if you are a friend of mine on GoodReads, you know this well!).

4. Establish discipline in my life. This is a lofty goal, because it kind of covers at least three subsets:

a. Reading my Bible daily with a daily QT - the most I ever learned in my walk with Jesus was my 4th year in college, when I practiced this. I don't think the correlation between the two is a coincidence. I've waffled in this since moving back to Warrenton, so it's time to really try and stick with it.

b. Exercising - Ugh. It's not that I don't like to exercise, because when I do it, I'm glad that I did it. It's just the fact that in the war that goes on in my head between laziness and exercising, laziness usually wins. I guess I just need to aim for baby steps with this one.

c. Disciplined thinking - My brain goes a million miles a minute, from one thing to another to another. My head often feels like a cluttered mess, with all these "things" crowding and swimming around and it often leads me to do nothing because I'm just jumping from one thing to another. This is particularly bad at work and makes me very unproductive, because when I can't focus on what I need to do, I just end up suffering the internet and reading most every news story out there. So I need to become better at just thinking - organized thinking. Lists, etc.

5. Figure out how to go to Italy and Young Life camp and handle my baseball responsibilities. There's just gotta be a way to do it all.

6. GOLF!! This is one hobby that I really want to get better at. There are at least three golf tournaments that I will participate in this year, and I would like to have fun and hit that ball a long distance, straight and true. So, taking a lesson will definitely be on the docket, as well as using the passes to VA Oaks that my boss gave me as a Christmas present! I'm going to start by practicing how to yell "Fore!"

7. Work - I just need to figure out how to reconcile the two different aspects of my job: Baseball and Signature. I love both and I can handle both, but there might be an opportunity staring me in the face with baseball that I could seize if I want to - being the Northern Virginia Youth Baseball Czarina kind of sounds impressive, but might give me more grey hairs than I can handle! In the end, I just want to be able to be productive at work and start feeling like I'm accomplishing something, which I think will happen once I start down the path of disciplined thinking.

I think that is it for now...those are good goals for the first half of the year, don't you think? (Now to print these out and post them on my bulletin board so that I remember to do them!)