I’m sitting here pondering this change of years. And determined not to let this quiet, lowkey evening feel compared to the NYE celebrations I’ll see on Facebook, or the NYE celebrations of our past. We’ve had years of entertaining, themed parties, kids parties, go to bed early years, sit up and watch movie years. This year is a quiet one. I’m here at our cottage in South Carolina with 3/4 of my kids and 1/4 of our dogs. Ryans home with Porter holding down the fort. The kids and I made no bake Oreo cheesecake. We had half-assed pasta for dinner which wasn’t that tasty bc we don’t have all the seasonings I add here at the cottage. I just want to sit and revel in this year, and start planning for 2025.
I see so many people wishing for the year to be over, clearly 2024 took them through the wringer. I, personally, feel like we’ve had worse off years. It’s been kind of… ho hum. Nothing spectacular has gone on. Nothing too drastic. Sure there have been highs and lows but nothing I’m not grateful for. I’m grateful to be here. I’m grateful for my family. Health. Job. Animals. I’m grateful to have so much to look forward to.
I’m not sure my point of this post. Just rambling. I’m really excited about 2025. I know we shouldn’t (or so we are told) wait until a “new year” to make changes in our lives, because honestly each morning gives us a fresh new start, right? But somehow new year just feels…. Fresh. Blank. Clean.
I am excited to really dig into my business this year. Ive been complacent, running on auto. I’ve been the proverbial breadwinner in our home for the past decade, and for the past year or two I’ve allowed external circumstances keep me preoccupied. It’s time to stop dicking around and focus. It’s time to stop getting sidetracked and stop playing small. I’m so excited for things coming up this year and I’m ready to link arms with people who want to work, who want to succeed, who don’t listen to excuses.
I need to really focus on my physical health this year. Health meaning fitness. It’s been a doozy of a year with riding injuries (after 20+ years of riding I have 2 injuries in one year. 🥴). I need to focus on strength, building muscle and get back into moving daily (which I’ve been doing here in Edisto!). Since I turned 40, my weight has been such a struggle (and now that I’ve been in the 40’s club for a minute, it’s like I am seeing all the flashing signs warning us 40-something’s about how bad it is… and I’m like. Why TF didn’t anyone warn me???). Anyhow. I may just be destined to be chubby forever but I can focus on strength and that will ultimately help me with riding as well. I’ve been learning to jump on Bailey for the past year (minus my injury downtimes. Ugh) and it’s been so fun- it’s something I’ve always wanted to do but felt “too old” or it felt “too silly” or I didn’t have time bc I had babies at home. I finally decided to say fuck it and who cares what others think of me… of what I want to learn…. and I took my horse who couldn’t even canter a straight line down the length of an arena and we’ve come quite far in the last year. So I want to get back to that.
Dogs. My goodness. This has been such an unexpected joy this past few months. I’ve always had a heart for rescue, and over the past decade I’ve adopted 4 different seniors to give a soft place to spend their last years. And I’ve always felt like I needed to do SOMETHING with shelter dogs but just… didn’t know what. And this past summer I fell into fostering quite by accident, after a heartbreak saying goodbye to Barney, and not being ready to adopt another senior, fostering puppies has been so fun and rewarding. And I’ve met so many new people through it and truly feel like I’m doing something I’ve been called to do for a long time but just didn’t know how to go about it (silly though. Fostering is literally like… available… to anyone…).
I missed my reading goal this year. I wanted to read 50 books but only got to 41. I partially blame it on my decision to DNF books that don’t make me excited to read. So I started quite a few then just ditched them. But life is too short to read books that don’t make you want to ignore the world around you.
I am praying that 2025 does not somehow resemble 2020 in the sense that we had this crazy optimism on NYE 2019. God that feels like a lifetime ago. 5 years. Half a decade. I feel like a totally different person than I did then. I guess weren’t we all?
Anyhow. There’s my NYE brain dump. Happy new year, friends.
nicolebarczak.com 