Consolidating My Life

I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately.

This is the part where I start the word vomit because I have no idea how to properly sum up my thoughts and feelings.

I have too many blogs.

If you follow my blog via RSS, you’ll notice there are 50+ new posts. (Thankfully I’m the only one who subscribes my email so no one else’s inbox got flooded with 50+ new post emails. (Is that weird that I subscribe to myself? (It’s only so I can see what everyone else sees if for some reason someone subscribe.))) That’s because I imported all my posts from my short lived fitness blog. From now on, all posts will be here under the “Fitness” category. This blog represents me, and I realized I don’t care if it’s all over the place. Diving, travel, twilight, random crap, why not throw fitness in there too? Some posts will be password protected because I don’t know if I’m quite ready to announce my progress to the world. If you’d like the password, maybe I’ll give it to you.

Which naturally brings me to the next topic of my overwhelmedingness: Eating healthy is hard!

Nick and I started a new eating plan after our trip to Cozumel. For me, the hardest part wasn’t cutting all the unhealthy stuff out of my diet or eating almonds and beef jerky every day or even reducing my portion sizes. It’s the preparation. Planning out meals for the week, shopping, cooking, cleaning… Even though we’re following a plan that we only slightly modify to fit us, and event though our groceries get delivered, and even though we cook in large quantities to last a few days, it’s a lot of work. I’m excited that Nick is on board, and I’m happy we are suffering going through this together, but damn. It’s time consuming.

I tried to make a conscious effort after the new year to keep the kitchen clean, but sometimes I get so burned out that I let the dishes pile up because I think I’ll go insane if I spend one more minute in the kitchen. Also, switching from eating 95% of meals out of the home to cooking 95% of meals in the home makes a huge difference on dirty dish consumption.

And while we’re on the topic of Nick, if you haven’t checked out his Shirt of the Day blog, well… then you’re missing out. (This right here is a great example of a valid reason to make a separate blog.) Every night we take a photo of him wearing his SotD. I then crop the pics, upload them to the site, create a post with the appropriate categories and tags, and save it for him to finish later. It doesn’t take long, and I don’t mind doing it, but it’s just another thing I’ve committed to doing. Side note: I bought an Eye-Fi card, which delivers photos to my laptop wirelessly. I would be happy if the upload/download process worked a bit faster, but it still beats getting photos onto my computer the traditional way.

When Nick started his SotD site, I felt the need to have another site of my own, so I started Nailapalooza. I kind of got into a polish kick again, and I thought, wouldn’t it be awesome if I started a nail polish blog and became so awesome and popular that PR Reps for companies sent me free polish to review?

Yeah, it would be awesome, but it’s also a lot of work. And I quickly discovered there are a lot of polish blogs out there already. Does that mean I couldn’t find my niche? Not necessarily. I just realized how much work goes into making a blog with a large reader base, and I feel my time can be better spent doing something else. Nick likes it when I make my nails all pretty, and I do too, so I’ve decided to make this compromise: I will continue to do posts about my nails, but instead of having a separate blog and yet another identity, I will do it here. (Yay!) It won’t be as extensive as I originally intended. My goal is no longer to gain a giant following and free polishes (really, who needs a collection of 3000 polishes, anyway?). I’d rather post to a smaller audience who knows me and can say, “Hey, that’s really cool. Can I borrow that polish next time I’m over?”

Soon I’ll import my Nailapalooza posts into the blog, so expect to see those.

Also, I’m well aware that I have a reputation for not finishing things I start. Believe it or not, I do feel guilty and want to kick myself repeatedly while saying, “Damnit! You did it again!” But sometimes it’s better to just acknowledge something isn’t working and change it than keep doing it and be miserable.

Books.

I want to read more. Last year I set a GoodReads goal to read six books (not including audio books). I finished two. *sigh* This year my goal is 12, including audio books. Two down, ten to go. Hey! Maybe I’ll even blog about them!

I think now is the time to throw out there that I’m also going to write a book. By the end of the year, I’d like to have it completed so I can begin the tedious process of finding an agent or sending it to publishers.

Twitter and FourSquare and Pinterest and Tumblr and Facebook and Google+, oh my!

It’s ridiculous. How many social networking sites does one person need? And that doesn’t even include the one’s I’ve tried for a week before coming to the conclusion that they kind of suck a lot. I’m not closing my FourSquare account because I think it’ll be fun to use it when I travel. Maybe. We’ll see. Google+, while good in theory, just can’t compete with Facebook. And I’m really irritated about the Google Friend Connect service being cancelled for all non-Blogger blogs beginning March 1. I’m beginning to rethink my decision to be on their side when they take over the world.

I deleted a ton of apps from my iPhone, including one’s I’ve paid for, because even that was overwhelming. I had five reading apps. Five! Who needs that many books when they read two in a year?

And all of the stuff above doesn’t include time with friends, dance, the gym (which admittedly has been hard to get to lately), television, commute time, quality time with Nick, sleeping, Twilight related activities, or work. Damn, how do people with kids do it?

Anyway, I don’t remember what the point of this post was or even if I had one, but I’m feeling a lot better already. *phew*