For old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind....

New Years is a time to wipe the slate clean. All wrongs are righted, all slights forgotten.

Right?

Well even if it's not accurate - I believe that.

With each new year I try to change one thing about me for the better. I try to change one thing about my environment for the better.

This year I bet you all think I am going to say that my personal change is going to be to get to goal weight don't you?

Ha ! Gotcha WRONG.

That's probably going to happen or get close to it, because I am already on that road, comfortably and happily and refuse to put a time limitation on it. If it happens in 2007 - excellent. If it takes me into 2008 so be it. A time limit just adds stresses to the situation and causes setbacks. So no, not this year.

No this year, my goal is to go through my personal inventory of people in my life and keep all those that are good solid healthy relationships or work on a plan to modify the relationship so that it is mutually beneficial to both people or cut that relationship out of my life. With no guilt or anything like that.

Now to be honest I have already started that process. First of all, I am not ruled by pride. I took a lot of time to offer the peace to a dear friend with whom I had a falling out right before my dad died, but I did it. We both know that we are stubborn and we both know we didn't behave admirably but at the end of the day we are good people whose motivations were only for the best, we just acted on them stupidly. hell - we aren't perfect. But we are a road to recovery.

The second thing that I need to do this year is not sweat the small stuff. I have a tendency to grab onto a little thing and roll it, like a downhill snowball, into a huge thing. I tried to exercise this plan this morning in church.

We have a member of our choir who is a cherished person in my life. I have known she and her husband for most of my life. They are brilliant people and valued musicians. But they have had their share of musical trials in terms of post retirement employment. Peg was our interim organist and choir director after my father passed leaving the vacancy. She was not the best at it to be honest and fair, but we love her and we supported her 2000 %. So it was not the huge surprise that my new priest ( with a degree in music prior to seminary) asked for her resignation in his first year. He hired another choir director organist. Peg decided that she would remain at St Judes and sing in the choir as this was now her spiritual home. We were delighted but knew the transition would be tough on her. Now sitting firmly in Soprano 2 section of our choir, she creates her own descants on every hymn at will whenever the mood strikes her. This makes me crazy. Unless our director tells us to do that, I don't think we should be just arbitrarily creating things on the fly - what if the whole choir did that? There would be no melody and other than the words, no one would have recognized O come all ye faithful or any other hymn!

Today I chose to practice some anger management techniques with this one. yes it drives me crazy, but if it makes her feel more important to do that, after all she's been through ( that's not the first church to let them go by the way), isn't it worth it to keep her a little bit happy? She's an amazingly wonderful albeit quirky person, so is this really important? Is it going to really alter my day? NO. So I had to let it go.

A stupid story, but it begs the point about me holding on to things that do not matter in the grand scheme of things.

So I am working on letting the little things go. Some little things can't be let go because they create a precedent which isn't right either, or that little thing can rapidly snowball into a big thing if not reacted to quickly. The trick for me is to know which is which. this year I reacted ( or overreacted in many cases ) to everything to make sure that nothing slipped by. that really wasn't the best plan. So this year I am going to pick the battles differently. Perhaps with more wisdom. I may not react at all immediately I may just wait on it, think on it and pray on it.

This year is also about getting my allergies and immune system tanked up again. It's important for me overall but I have a ulterior motive in my singing. So - weight loss certainly plays a part as does exercise and intelligent food choices. Regulating meds and what not. I know what to do an I certainly just have to keep doing it and keep reading on it.

So this year the three important things that I resolving to are:

1. Review and restore / recycle the relationships in my life
2. Don't sweat the small stuff
3. Get Immune system pumped up.

Happy New year to my oldest, bestest friends Lena, Maple Mama, Bernie, Jax, Jenna - I Loev you all!

Happy New Year to my newer friends - Post-Doc, Jules, Lori, Val....

"Make new friends but keep the old, one Silver and the other Gold"