Happy 2013, Everybody.
We’ve had a great holiday season, traveling to Denmark and
Sweden, visiting our friends and getting to spend some relaxing quality time
together. Last night, we welcomed in the New Year by having a small gathering
at our place and walking down to the beach to watch some midnight fireworks.
Loren and Elinor even decided to take a midnight dip in the Mediterranean.
 |
| Greg and Loren iceskating at a rink in Malmo, Sweden. |
We’re not doing any specific New Year’s resolutions this
year. Instead, Greg got the genius idea of doing 12 sets of 30-day challenges,
one for each month of 2013. The fun
thing about challenges is that they are non-intimidating periods of time
wherein we can focus our attention on working at one goal. We’re going to keep
a blog of the challenges as we do them. The point of these challenges is to
test our own boundaries with habits that we have or to push us to try new and
adventurous things. If you are interested in joining us in doing any of these
challenges with us, just let us know, and we can have a support community.
This is the list of challenges and corresponding
months. We might edit them as we go, but
this is the starting off point.
January
|
No Beer
|
February
|
Abdominal
challenge
|
March
|
1-hour
of foreign language learning everyday (Turkish)
|
April
|
Do yoga
everyday
|
May
|
Vegetarian/vegan
|
June
|
Eliminate
use of profane language
|
July
|
Keep a
journal everyday
|
August
|
Strength
training
|
September
|
Meditate
everyday
|
October
|
No potato
chips or fries
|
November
|
Cook a
different meal everyday
|
December
|
Do/taste/learn
a new thing each day
|
Here’s a brief
explanation of how and why we chose these challenges. No Beer in January was to
encourage us to stop drinking the mediocre barley water that they call beer in
Turkey and try more of the Turkish wines and the local drink, Raki. For
February, April, and August, we wanted to try some physical challenges, to
focus on some body parts and improve our individual yoga practices. In March,
in an effort to better our Turkish, we will practice learning the language for
one hour each day. In May, October, and
November, we will do some food challenges.
We both have a weakness for our potato snacks, and we’d like to try
purposefully going off them. In May, we’ll
be going very low on the animal products in our diet -Loren’s going vegan and
Greg will dabble in vegetarianism. The other challenges are just for personal
betterment: doing something new everyday
in December, keeping a journal, starting a daily meditation practice, getting
rid of the potty mouth, and learning some new recipes.
