2011 Goal Check-In, Month 4

It’s been a crazy busy month Chez Diana. I’ve had book festivals and conferences, revisions due, and tons of houseguests. Q has been growing like the weeds in my garden — I guess they really start packing on teh pounds when they go from just milk to solid foods — and she’s also started getting really fun. This is my favorite baby stage so far. She sits on her own, plays with toys, and is taking her first tentative “steps” toward crawling (she inches backwards, mostly, and just rolls to get where she needs to go). Her favorite activities include: sticking things in her mouth, pulling out Rio’s and my hair, sticking things in her mouth, smiling and laughing, sticking things in her mouth, rolling, sticking things in her mouth, and banging on stuff. Oh, and Sailor Boy started a new job.

Biz-ee.

So forgive the lateness of my goal check in. Where were we?

Writing: Finished my revisions. Yay! My goal this month is to write my latest short story for an awesome Random House antho and fix a few little bits of clean up for my book so it can go into copyedits.

Home: Major progress on this one this month! We cleaned out the basement and turned it into Sailor Boy’s new home office, and finally unpacked all the boxes of books and put them in my new ginormous bookshelves. Seriously, I have my cookbooks (my darling Bittman!) back at last. My favorite improvement, however, is our new, child-friendly piece of furniture:

Previously, we kept our liquor and glassware in an IKEA Billy bookcase, which, as you might imagine, is not friendly to exploratory kidlets like Q. But there’s no way she can get these doors open with her chubby little baby fingers. She won’t even be able to reach them until she’s old enough to know better, and then, when she’s old enough to know even BETTER (i.e., get into our liquor) we’ll revisit the issue. Also, it was an awesome Craigslist find we scored for 80% off retail. And it has custom touch lighting installed. I can’t tell you how much I love this thing.

Blog: I blogged 12 times in April and this is only my third blog for May. Must get on that.

Quality time with SB: We haven’t had another date night (see aforementioned business trips) but we have spent a lot of time together in the evening after the baby has gone to sleep, and we’ve also had a lot of lovely quality family time (like the big family hike we took last weekend). Also, having him working from home also is Ah-maze-ing.

Rio: Poor Rio has been to the vet TWICE this month (with ear and bladder infections). My poor baby girl. Sailor Boy has been doing most of the walking of her, lately.

Garden: Coming along. My mint is surviving, the strawberries are mostly rabbit food, the herbs are doing well, I picked up some flowers (citronella that’s already planted, coxcomb and marigolds that need to be), and I’m putting the tomatoes in today. I also have a few tomatoes coming up from last year. Yay. I think I may also do a squash and a zucchini, but only one of each this year. Not sure what else I want to do. I’m open to suggestions, though.

And, the big list:

  1. Revise/finish my contracted novel.
  2. Write short story #1
  3. Write short story #2
  4. Write short story #3
  5. Write short story #4
  6. Write new proposal #1
  7. Write new proposal/book #2
  8. Go to one writing-related conference.
  9. Walk my dog.
  10. Plant a garden.
  11. Make sure I spend quality time with Sailor Boy.
  12. Do at least two home improvement projects.
  13. Cut our budget.

How are you all doing?

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