The new year is just over a week old now, and I am already hanging on to my resolutions by a thread. They were three-fold this year: Exercise, Organize and Write. Each has met a stumbling block in this first little chunk of the new year, but somehow I am hanging on to the hope that if I just keep trying, I will make some progress, however small it may be.

    Let’s start with the whole piece on exercise. For years, my New Year’s resolution has been to lose weight, and since that hasn’t happened, I decided to change my strategy this year. I would change the title of the resolution from “Lose Weight” to “Exercise,” and maybe logistically, one would lead to the other. Brilliant, huh? So, on day two of the New Year, I took off on a walk. The day was beautiful and I saw a turtle jump into a creek, an orange and black butterfly giddily maneuvering along the path, and most amazingly, a squirrel run with all his might and literally fly across the stream. Things were going swimmingly, no pun intended, when two blisters, one on each heel, suddenly and painfully erupted. I had walked perhaps 30 minutes at this point, and I couldn’t imagine walking another 30 minutes that it would take to get back home.

    This necessitated that the other person walking with me would have to return home and fetch transportation to deliver me and my blisters to our starting point. That was about a week ago, and I dutifully intend to resume exercising once the blisters heal, and once the other person on the walk with me is convinced that they will not need to bring along a vehicle on the next outing. Then, there is the whole thing about getting organized. I don’t know why, but I idealize organization. I fantasize about being able to find a family member’s birth certificate without wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth for a week before I give up and go to City Hall to purchase yet ANOTHER birth certificate. (Truly, this scene has played out at my house many, oh so many, times.) So this year, I’ve mulled over catalogs for those stores where organization tools beckon. I haven’t actually made it to one of those stores yet, and in fact, I have wasted quite a bit of time poring over the catalogs; time that perhaps I could have actually spent organizing.

    So this week, on the very day that I was having a dinner party for 20 people in my home, alas, also the very day that our guest bathroom toilet stopped up and overflowed with what appeared to be a whole ocean of water, I surveyed the house with dismay, plucked a huge basket from a tangle of such items in the garage, ran through the house throwing items willy nilly into the basket,  stuffed all the aforementioned items into the laundry room, and shut the door.  Thankfully, not a single guest needed to wash or dry anything, and my guilty secret went undiscovered. That leaves the last resolution on my list for 2009; Writing. While I have grand plans for writing my first novel this year, I guess for now, I’ll just have to be content that I churned out this column by deadline. And that must mean that somehow, against all odds, I am somewhat organized.

    So, that just leaves that last piece about exercise…………..