Plans, Not Resolutions

Everyone is thinking about New Years Resolutions, either making them or declaring that they do not make resolutions. I guess I'm doing the latter. I don't make resolutions but I do make plans. Resolutions feel like formal commitments. Plans can be casual, tentative. Plans can be changed or adjusted.

It seems like most people make resolutions that are hard or unpleasant. Eat healthy, exercise more, make peace with a problematic relative, write a book. But resolutions don't have to be a challenge or sacrifice. You can resolve to do more of what makes you happy even if it's just spending more days being a couch potato.

Of course there's nothing wrong with self improvement but even in that case thinking in terms of plans instead of resolutions might put you in a better mental space and more likely lead to success.

So anyway, I have plans for 2024.

1. Write something on this blog once in a while. No firm time commitment right now. Maybe once a week, maybe once a month. Probably irregularly.

2. Make 2 or 3 quilts. It has been several years since I worked on a quilt and I have several in mind that I really want to make.

3. Try harder to work down my huge fabric stash and possibly give some pieces away.

4. Go through my stuff and try to get rid of a few things.

5. Finally finish the latch hook kit I started over 42 years ago.

6. Keep on living my life pretty much as I have been for the past few years because life is great and I don't want to mess with that.

Orange

TV Drama... or Comedy...

Kind of a funny story, I think, but I'm easily amused so, as they say, your mileage may vary.

Sometime last year - probably almost a year now, I don't know, my time sense is almost totally gone - our son (adult, lives upstairs in our house) complained that the TV (yes, the only one in the house; we're weird) was making an annoying high pitched noise and wouldn't watch TV with us anymore and that's kind of a big deal to me. I like to watch TV with my son, like I used to enjoy watching TV with my mom.

His dad and I could not hear the noise at all, not even a hint of a noise. The TV was, and still is, working perfectly just as it has for more than 10 years. But we decided we could solve the problem by buying a sound bar. We had thought about buying one anyway, though not very seriously. Apparently the soundbar did solve the problem. Son is happy to watch TV with us again.

Several years before, we bought a DVD player with the intention of using it both to watch DVDs and to stream Amazon Prime Video. But it turned out to be crap for streaming. It was either buffering more than half the time or wouldn't work at all. We assumed the problem was our best we can get out in the boonies Internet connection and gave up for a while and did a lot of bitching and whining about how unfair it was that we couldn't stream video like normal people.

For some reason we finally decided maybe we should try a better DVD player/streaming device. This was after the purchase of the soundbar. We read reviews. All the reviews said all the DVD players are crap for streaming and a lot of them said we should get a Roku instead. So we did and (heavenly light, angels singing) it worked and we love it! Oh my gosh! Life changing! But now it requires four remotes to watch TV: the TV remote; the DirecTV remote, the soundbar remote, and the Roku remote. (Yeah, we're not giving up DirecTV, for a number of reasons, the main one being that we're old and pig-headed)

So just like every company you ever buy anything from, Roku started sending me emails trying to get me to buy more stuff and that's how I found out that Roku soundbars exist. Why couldn't anyone have told us that before we bought the soundbar? (several really bad swear words) To think! We could be using only three remotes to watch TV instead of four!

I do kind of want a new TV and we could easily afford a very nice one but both of us have always been conditioned to wait until things do not work at all anymore before replacing them and did I mention that we're old and pig-headed? So anyway, that's the story and we're just sitting here wishing for the TV to hurry up and quit working. It's an LG, by the way. The darn things last forever.

What We Did New Year's Eve