Stars Aligning....

Isn't it strange how sometimes things seem to 'line up' by accident?

I subscribe to a number of blog feed/email alert type thingys...(not sure what proper term is, but I get emails to my inbox when someone has written a new blog post). Most of them are semi work related - about marketing, organising, etc and I have a couple of 'simple life' type ones too. Not so many from creative bloggers, as I tend to look them up more infrequently and hop from blog to blog to see what I might find. Anyway, I have taken a number of classes with Shimelle over the years (well, have signed up for and partially completed many classes...have only really every finished one...but that's for another day) and last week I got an email to say that she was having an on-line crop or cyber crop as they say. Hence all the activity on the blog over the past weekend.

Am thrilled to find out yesterday that I won a little prize as part of the cyber crop of two little owls - in navy and red from this etsy seller. And you can see from my blog that I don't like owls at all, of course! So now I'm going to start a little owl collection. I had thought about collecting frogs at one stage (not real frogs obviously!) and have begun to collect 'cow' paintings and art (a little bit...because we live on a farm and they are a bit 'in' at the moment. We have a barn owl knocking around outside too - so owls are apt I think.

But, back to the 'stars aligning'. Shimelle also mentioned a new class starting (well an old class, re-starting, again for the month of September) called 'Learn Something New Every Day' which I decided to sign up for. I'm not really sure what it's about, but last night I decided to sit down and brainstorm the kind of things I'd like to achieve in the 30 days of learning new stuff....and this is what I came up with...

How to make curry from scratch (by scratch, I mean spices, etc and not just a jar of paste)
How to make brown bread (from my mother...wholemeal bread)
How to sew an item from a pattern
How to crochet an item from a pattern
(note that the two above are not giant steps; I make stuff, just usually from my head and I'd like to be able to follow standard patterns too)
How to make a granny square - crochet
How to make a crochet flower (again this should come if I can follow a pattern!)
How to tweet (maybe)
How to budget and save
How to exercise regularly
How to have a weekly dinner menu and associated shopping list
How to organise my phone contacts
How to organise my friends address contacts...and keep in contact better!
Learn about philosophy
Learn some new words
Learn to look after my skin (establish a skincare 'regime' as they say!)
Learn to medidate (or consider it anyway)
Learn how to create a digi layout in photoshop

So I don't have a full 30 things there and I'm sure I'll think of a few more but don't want to put myself under severe pressure! A lot of them are one offs and some of them are about establishing a habit! Which, is where the stars aligning bit comes in....

In my inbox this morning was an email from Simple Mom about how to approach your goals gradually, and that 30 days was a perfect amount of time. She referred to this article from Zen Habits which might also be interesting to any of you with that in mind.

So, I think that was a 'sign', don't you! So the main habit I want to establish is regular exercise which is the one I'm going to work on most. The skincare one is just a case of doing the same thing every night/morning for 30 days. I have the products. It doesn't take time. There's no need for baby steps (which will certainly be required for the exercise challenge). It just needs to become a habit.

One thing I've actually found is that if you make a 'to do' list and write it down, you're more likely to get them done. I made a list of 'presents I would like to receive' 3 years ago, which my husband found recently. I had almost everything on the list. Bar a cricut....hmmmnn...which may now be a Silhouette...which I was thinking of getting for my iminent birthday/christmas. So time to start thinking about another list. (granted there was nothing overly extravagant on the list...my hubby had four things on his - he only got one of them, but that might be because he wanted a Jeep!) Good luck.