Keeping Things Lively in 2009

I love New Years and the alleged ability to start over, do better, make fewer mistakes, and make tons of improvements. For years I happily made a New Years Resolutions list. In the last couple of years, I decided it would be better to list instead things I’d like to learn. This gives me a zero base for messing up because I am already at the newbie bottom. I can only go up! The sky is the limit. Here is my 2009 short list:

1. Learn to sew I was terribly scarred in Junior High by my stern and exacting Home Economics teacher “Mrs. K’. We made simple beach bags for our BIG PROJECT. I spent most of the project time “ravelink the edges to make sure they were straight!” Mrs K. had a rather Doctor Ruth like accent. She had zero sexuality, so don’t think anything like that.

Side note to the Home Economics teacher in high school who answered a student’s question about what sex was like by thinking deeply before saying it was “like pulling a t-shirt over your head”. Yeah sure. An obvious laundry freak….

Anyway, I have modest needs as a potential sewing meister. I would like to make my own curtains, and I’d like to make skirts and jumpers and perhaps do some dolls of the sort mom used to make for craft fairs.

A customer this week was taking out books on learning to sew and I mentioned I was going to learn too but I had been cowardly so far. She said she had been that way too, but she just got an old pillowcase or towel and practiced the basics on those and it was a good way to reuse materials and no worries about messing up a nice piece of cloth. Great idea!

2. Master photograph restoration in Adobe Photoshop Elements I use this program at such a basic level. The skill set that would be most useful for my purposes would allow me to replace the missing sections of very old photographs of my dad and others who need a bit of restoration.

3. For the library computer classes I teach, I would like to hone my presentations and my public speaking skills (which have already leaped forward just from teaching these classes). I need to be able to read the audience better so that I can see when they need additional explanation. I’m hoping we can move forward this year and teach an e-mail class and I think I know Publisher fairly well so I could offer that as well.

4. HTML basics I have meant to learn HTML for a long time. I copy a lot of already done widgets and pictures and stuff from others, but I would like to understand colors and making banners, page layout, etc so that I can really customize my blogginess.

5. Become an excellent Bread Baker. You’ll see in a separate post how I have already begun the process. When I graduated from college I was baking my own bread and for some reason I just got busy or lazy and stopped. I am really enjoying small artisan breads available locally, and why not make my own?

So I cheated, and there is a bit of improvement in these but my current skill level is such that any improvement would be miraculous!