As I mention frequently, I’m a huge fan of the Happier podcast with Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft. At the beginning of 2019, they revealed their 19 for 2019 lists, which is pretty straightforward — it’s a list of 19 things to get done in 2019. My bestie, also a big fan of the podcast and the one who got me hooked on it, suggested that our friend group should challenge ourselves to do likewise. So at the beginning of January 2019, we crafted our own 19 for 2019.

My list was a mix of stuff I had always wanted to do, stuff that was nagging me in the back of my mind and stuff that was just a little weird and random. Here’s how everything unfolded, despite all the MOVEMENT of 2019.

1. Practice daily gratitude ⭐️

This one gets a gold star. Having a space directly in my calendar (which I use religiously) made this an extremely easy task. I truly believe taking a couple of minutes every day to reflect on the positive and good in our lives is the biggest contributor to ongoing happiness. It’s so easy for us to focus on the negatives, but the reality is we’re all pretty blessed because we’re sitting here alive and breathing, reading this blog on some sort of technology connected to the internet. Practicing daily gratitude reminds me to put things into perspective. It doesn’t mean life is all sunshine and rainbows, but it allows me to look at a situation fully and appreciate everything that’s going right in life.

2. Read more books — 19 books in 2019 ⭐️

More than just a gold star here, this one gets a giant gold star! I surpassed this goal by 13 books, reading 11,727 pages across 32 books in 2019. I found the Goodreads reading challenge to be invaluable with this quest. Seeing the progress each time I closed a book, motivated me to always have something in the currently reading column. Now at the end of the year, reading is something that is a near daily habit (more on this under #6 on this list).

What I read quickly evolved. I entered 2019 with this reading list and quickly strayed. When the year began, I was living with my parents, working in their at-home office and staring at their collection of books day after day. Instead of purchasing the books on my original list, I started reading their “free” books that caught my eye. Later in the year when we moved to DC, I discovered our house was within walking distance to a library. So I continued my free reading, randomly selecting whatever looked good, and experienced a new love for libraries. Totally didn’t realize you could borrow e-books and renew online. It’s amazing… and FREE.

3. Edit my photos from Zion ⭐️

Another gold star! It definitely came later in the year than I initially expected it would going into 2019, but once again, life was pretty busy. When I edited the photos, I also played around with some new techniques in Lightroom, which made it even more fun. I love when you get the opportunity to expand a skillset.

What makes this gold star even more exciting is it allowed me to finally do something that was rattling around in my head for the past couple of years. I’ve wanted to do more itinerary-type posts like I did while we lived overseas for some time now, and I did it for Zion with these photos! If you haven’t yet, check out the 5 Amazing Hikes in Zion National Park post, especially if you plan on visiting any time in the near future.

4. Edit our adventure to Machu Picchu and Ecuador 🚫

Sigh, just when you thought I was on a roll and superhuman, we come to the first demerit. I didn’t make any progress on this one; HOWEVER, I have found a way to be much more productive (see #6). I’m pretty sure I’ll not only cross it off in 2020, I’ll also have the bandwidth to blog about it like I did for Zion. So that makes me feel better about this demerit. Also, the Zion batch had way more images to sift though so I did get the harder of the two sets finished.

Here’s a derp dog to distract you from this demerit.

5. Find celebration in movement—2,019 miles in 2019 ⭐️

Technically, yes, this one gets a gold star. Over the course of the past year, I walked, ran and hiked 2,264 miles with running accounting for 479 of that. (See, I don’t run that much!) The reason I’m not as excited about this is because I chickened out in 2018 when I wrote it. What I wanted to write instead of this list item was finish a marathon. I went back and forth, writing it and crossing it out, writing it and crossing it out again. In the end, fear won. I was so nervous I wasn’t going to finish, despite having a near textbook training cycle, that I didn’t want it on my list in case I didn’t actually make it. And if you read this post, you already know I should be giving myself a way more awesome gold star right now than I currently am.

I thought if I didn’t finish the marathon it would feel like a double failure, so I wrote this 19 for 2019 instead, which sounds impressive, but it's really not. Honestly, if you do about 10,000 steps a day, you can also give yourself a gold star because that’s about how many miles it is.

Lord, grant me confidence in 2020…

6. Develop a calming nighttime routine ⭐️

Yes! Another gold star for the list. This one led to a whole chain of awesomeness in my habits. My original impetus for this was to address my issues (read: lack thereof) around self-care. I thought developing a nighttime routine would be a small step in the right direction to address this and ended up being correct. So what is the nighttime routine? It’s pretty simple and it varies a little day-to-day. I began utilizing my bedtime reminder app which notifies you about an hour before you’d like to go to bed that it’s time to start winding down. This is when I make a decision. I check in with myself to see what I need that particular day. Did I have a hard run and feel sore? Then I’ll take an Epsom salt bath and read until I’m sleepy which usually aligns with the pre-programmed bedtime. Was work insane and I’m just fried? Then I’ll allow myself to do something mindless, like scroll Pinterest. In the past, I would be so inflexible about stuff like this that I would have done something “productive” like reading just for the sake of it. We all need down days occasionally and the nighttime routine gave me that.

This adjustment made me feel so much more calm that I carried it to other parts of the day. On a Happier episode (told you I was obsessed), they interviewed Marie Forleo, a motivational speaker and author of Everything Is Figureoutable, and asked for her “Try This at Home” tip. Her tip was “create before you consume,” which spoke to me. During the week, I don’t start work until 9 a.m., and with the help of my new nighttime routine, I was naturally waking up at 7 a.m., but I wasn’t doing anything with that time. So I began dedicating those hours before work to my creativity — be it editing photos, blogging, reading or knitting (more on that under #8). Once again, I was checking in with myself to see which activity made the most sense for that morning. Doing this has made work so much less stressful. I enter the workday already feeling accomplished and like my energy went to something I care deeply about.

7. Try Keto ⭐️

This one got crossed off the list, and to borrow from the podcast, abandoning an aim can be a way to complete an item. Here’s the thing… I was never totally on board with the whole Keto movement, but Mark was deeply committed when I wrote the list. I thought that as soon as we began living together again there would be some spillover into my diet as well, so I would at least try it. I was totally ready for this, but Mark started using his FitBit to measure calories in versus calories out before he returned to the states. I loved this idea so much more, so I started doing the same thing. By monitoring my calorie deficit, maintaining a primarily vegetarian diet (I’ll eat seafood occasionally) and running 3-4 times a week, I’ve lost 22 pounds since my heaviest in Las Vegas without much effort. And I think that deserves a big ole gold star.

8. Learn to knit ⭐️

Out of everything on the list, this is one that makes me the most proud… probably only second to finishing a marathon. In October, I signed up for a series of three, two-hour classes at a local yarn studio and learned how to knit. When I first expressed interest in learning this skill, everyone I spoke to said they taught themselves by watching YouTube videos. I searched around YouTube, haphazardly bought some supplies (they were all wrong I’d later find out), and told myself I was going to do it. As the year went on, I continued to not set aside time for it until I randomly found the yarn studio while I was writing the Design Your Fall blog. I was a little nervous when I signed up because it required me to go to a social activity alone. Knitting was a little challenging and frustrating at first, requiring extreme concentration and many learning moments, but now it is something relaxing that I look forward to and find myself doing whenever I have a small pocket of idle time. I’m even almost finished with my first project — a 3x3 rib stitch scarf.

9. Make time for friends ⭐️

Let’s just make it rain gold stars for this one. Relationships are something you need to consistently put time toward or they fade away. An easy remedy for this is to schedule time to foster the relationship, either in-person or otherwise.

I don’t have a ton of close friends, but I’ll do just about anything for the ones I do have…. like fly all around the country to see them (thanks, mil life). And I’m able to do so because of a remote work position (#blessed). Put the two together, and it’s the reason I always appear to be off somewhere.

These dear friends don’t care if I work from their couch for a week at a time just as long as we’re together. This year found me bouncing everywhere in the name of friendship — Austin, Las Vegas, Chicago, Jackson Hole, Virginia Beach and Denver… and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

10. Project Happy Mailbox—19 in 2019 ⭐️

I didn’t count whether or not I actually hit 19, but I’m pretty sure it happened with some help from #15. This year I only got a handful of addresses, but I sent love to the ones I did receive. I was also invited to revitalize an old friendship with a pen pal style exchange. I hope this has made her feel as fulfilled as it has made me. That said, I still have an abundance of cute and funny cards, so if I don’t have your address you should probably send it to me.

11. Try my hand at hand-lettering 🚫

I still have the practice book for this from 2018 and still haven’t made any progress. I thought about doing a page at the tail-end of December just so I could have another gold star, but in the end I decided to let it go.

I’ll do this at some point, but until then, you get another derp dog to distract you from this easy demerit.

12. Revive my website portfolio 🚫

Ugh, two derp dogs in a row. I did absolutely nothing with this one, and I think there are a few reasons. I have a loose idea in my mind about how I want to do this, but it’s a little bit more of a project than just uploading a couple of photos. I failed to break this one down into manageable steps and slowly chip away at it. At the end of the day this one is work and other items on the list were more fun, so they got done instead. What can I say, I’m human after all. Also, damn is it hard to work on professional stuff when you aren’t actively looking for a job. I know that’s not what you should do, but again, I wanted to have fun. Just like the item above, this one will get done… I just don’t know when.

The derp dog does not approve of this demerit.

13. Rediscover shinrin-yoku ⭐️

We’re back on the come up! As a reminder, shinrin-yoku is a word I learned while we lived in Japan that captures the calming effect of forest bathing. Honestly, I don’t know if I can ever get enough outdoors time, but we did get a decent amount in this year in many different states. Shinrin-yoku took me scrambling along Gold Strike Hot Springs in Las Vegas to the muddy trails of Colorado Bend State Park. It also took me to two new national parks — Yellowstone and Grand Teton. Shinrin-yoku then proved to be the best way to see the fall colors for our first East Coast autumn, trekking around in Ohiopyle State Park in Pennsylvania and Emerald State Park in Vermont.

14. Explore the love of learning ⭐️

This one ended up working in my advantage. At the beginning of the year when I made this list, I had no clue where we would be living once Mark returned to the states. Needless to say, our move to DC morphed this item from watching a bunch of documentaries (which I did a fair amount of this year) to visiting multiple museums and historic landmarks. I’m hoping to do more of a roundup on my favorite documentaries, books and podcasts for this, but in the meantime, I’ll just tell you my top favorite learning moments. I loved going to Newseum, which sadly closed at the end of December. My favorite documentary was Forks Over Knives, though the Netflix’s Fyre was a close second.

15. Remember special days ⭐️

As I said in #9, I don’t have many close friends so I want them to know how special they are to me. This resulted in sending gifts on birthdays, and I got almost everyone (many sorries to those that didn’t get anything; your birthday hit during an odd moment of life). I’m a little conflicted on this gold star and don’t really know how to proceed. Gift giving/receiving is not my love language. Most often receiving gifts is a little weird for me. It makes me feel like I owe the other person something. Other times I’m overwhelmed with what to do with the sudden acquisition of a new physical object, especially if it’s something that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. Since this is how I view gifts, I don’t know if gift giving is my friends’ love language. I’m sure it is for some, but probably not all. This made me feel horribly guilty that I may be inflicting them with the same overwhelming or guilty feelings that I feel when receiving gifts. Because of this, I don’t think I’ll continue this in the same way that I did this year. I still want my friends to feel special, but I think I need to rework how this is done.

16. Reduce screen time by 19% ⭐️

This one still has room for improvement. For the most part, I abided by my app limits. At the beginning of the year, I identified Facebook and Instagram as my biggest time sucks and these were the apps that were restricted. On a handful of occasions, I overrode the app limit (which is extremely easy to do), though I tried to save this for special occasions. What this means is that if my limit hit at 9 p.m. on a random Tuesday, I decided it was enough for the day, but if it hit at noon on my birthday, I allowed myself to override it. This list item was a game changer. As hard as it was at first, I think it was one of the biggest contributors to getting so many other items done. Instead of scrolling Instagram for the thousandth time, I read a chapter in my book or went for a walk in the neighborhood. This helped me feel fulfilled and happy in ways that I didn’t think possible. Now at the end of the year, I’m not as “addicted” or reliant on social media to entertain me; I have new, more enriching hobbies now. Technology is a tool that should help us, not hinder. These limits will stay set in the coming year.

17. Get professional family photos 🚫

No, it didn’t happen. This demerit makes me the most upset out of all of them, though I really didn’t set myself up for success. It’s a little difficult to plan family photos when one of your family members isn’t around for the first half of the year. By the time Mark got back, we were so busy moving, setting up our new house and exploring our new city that we really didn’t have a pocket of time for photos until September. By the fall, I was so wrapped up in experiencing all of the new sights that we didn’t have a free weekend.

I did make some progress though and at least researched photographers in our area. This one will happen, I just need to get it on the calendar.

In the meantime, here’s a derp dog attempting to be a stowaway.

18. Plan a trip with my husband ⭐️

This guy was gone for half of the year, but he sure made up for lost time when he returned. First, we spent a weekend in Boston and Salem. Then, he took me to the birthplace of fall — Vermont. He found us the perfect place to camp for a long weekend during peak color, and then drove us all around the state. Knowing Christmas is my favorite, he booked us tickets to Germany and went to a million Christmas markets with me. I’m so happy that he loves to go and see new things as much as I do.

19. Collect lyrics and quotes that mean something to me ⭐️

I started a note for these, so gold star there. Even better, I think I know what do with them… hopefully in the coming year! No earth-shattering revelations for this one; it was just a little silly.

Whew! All in all I think I did pretty well. It seems like this year I invested more in myself and I think it contributed positively to my overall mental health. I hope in the coming year to continue building and leveling-up on the foundations I’ve set this year. This year wasn’t without its challenges, but it only makes us stronger in the end. Here’s to 2020 — and 20 new things to do!