Happy 2013!

Oh how I love January.

I'm serious. The holidays are behind us, we haven't yet had enough snow where I'm sick of it, the days are getting longer, and the fresh new year teems with possibility. And then there's Maine shrimp, lots of delicious citrus for marmalade making, and it's still plenty cold enough so that no one blinks an eye should I cuddle up on the sofa with my knitting for an hour or two.

I hope you had a wonderful holiday and are looking forward to the new year, too.

I don't do formal resolutions, but I do think about things I want to do during the year. This year, I've decided that I want to read more. When I was younger, I was a voracious reader, but in the past couple years I've barely read anything beyond cookbooks, knitting books, and the occasional nonfiction title. This year I'm focusing on novel reading. My mother bought me a Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas, so it's the perfect vehicle for my goal of reading one classic novel each month in 2013. For January, it's Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, a novel I managed to avoid reading in high school and college. So far I'm enjoying it. (Anyone else think Dickens is funny? My husband is baffled as to why I would think this, since his recollection of Dickens' writing is of sheer torture.) And although February is a short month, I think I'm going to tackle the 1,000-plus pages of Alexandre Dumas's Les Miserables (en anglais, bien sûr), which I may have read when I was in high school, I forget.

I have a lot of other little goals for the year, but what I'm doing is making changes month-by-month. For example, I want to move more than I did in 2012, so in January, I've committed that I will walk at least 20 minutes a day, every day. When I break down big goals into easy monthly commitments, I'm more likely to meet with success.

I don't really have any knitting goals, except that I'd like to finish my aran sweater so I can wear it on St Patrick's Day. Knitting is just fun for me, so I don't like to tie it up in goals and production quotas, know what I mean?

How about you? Any resolutions for 2013?