Life Tips Daily

There are only two more days left in 2007, and perhaps you’ve been looking forward to a fresh new year without any blemishes for a while now. Many people like the idea of having a brand new year to dream about and hope for, one to resolve to take up good habits and abandon bad habits. Some people have dreams of changing their lives completely, or just tweaking certain parts of it. But how do you get started?

Marina over at Sufficient Thrust has created the Ultimate Guide to New Years Resolutions which is a must read for any of you who have trouble making resolutions that are measurable, or if you have trouble making resolutions that you can stick to. Your dear hostess on this here blog has problems in both areas so you can bet she’ll be consulting this guide carefully in the coming days so that she can hit 2008 running, with goals that she will be able to put a check mark beside in a year’s time.

One thing that’s really great about the guide is that Marina takes you through how to make an awesome (not just ok, or good) resolution. If you want to lose weight, for example, simply saying that you want to lose weight isn’t enough. You need to be specific with how much weight you want to lose and how you will go about doing it. This gives the resolution a much greater chance of being accomplished.

So, as you reflect on the coming year, grab some paper and a pen, or get your fingers to a computer and get writing. You may feel there are a million things you need to change but don’t overwhelm yourself! Write down a few (Marina mentions making five resolutions) and work on them. There is always next year to tackle the other resolutions!

The gifts have been given and opened and hopefully the stress of Christmas is behind you. Now that you have a moment to breathe and reflect on your Christmas experience, take the time to ask yourself the following questions. I will do the same and hopefully you can look back on the answers next year and avoid any pitfalls or unpleasant experiences of this Christmas, and make some tweaks to improve things next year.

1. Did you mail out all the cards/gifts you wanted to? If not, how could the process be improved?
2. Did you get people the gifts you wanted to get them/gifts they had requested? If not, how could this process be improved for next year?
3. What things did you forget to do/omit due to constraints on your time or energy or pocketbook or all three?
4. What did you spend too much energy, time, or money on that didn’t end up being worth it?
5. What changes would you make for next year?

My answers are below:
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Christmas Eve is one short week away. How are you coming along with your shopping and other preparations?

My shopping is somewhere between one half and two thirds completed for family members, and somewhere near 0% completed for friends; but I’m not at all stressed about it this year for some reason.

For those of you who have purchased all your gifts and perhaps even wrapped them all, where are you hiding them so that the curious don’t have a chance to feel or shake gifts in the hopes of guessing its contents? Do you keep your presents lying in plain sight, but leave the gift labels off them to confuse recipients?

Here are some good hiding places for gifts:

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I’ve been mailing off Christmas gifts these past couple of weeks, and sort of following these tips, and while I am sure they will get to their recipients on time, I can’t deny how irritated I’ve become at having to pay over six dollars to send a measly fifty or one hundred gram package! This is because I’m sending it by air in most cases; sending by ground generally costs one third less, but takes three times as long and let’s face it: I don’t have three weeks.

The post office I tend to go to has an employee who is really good at inspiring panic in the hearts of holiday gift mailers. As I waited in line, he told each customer that there were only seven mailing days until Christmas, then asked if they’d like to send their package by an express service. If the person said yes, he stopped his spiel, but if they said no, he’d begin what sounded almost like a guilt trip, about how you wouldn’t want the recipient to get their gift after Christmas, would you? And with all this bad weather we’ve been having, you wouldn’t want to risk the possible delay, would you? If you are a guilty “last two weeks” shopper and mailer, his comments can make you throw your cash at his face, as long as he guarantees your friend in Maine will get her gift by the 24th of December!

So the lesson here is start early, and always start earlier than you think you need to; you won’t regret it. For next year, my goal will be to mail off Christmas packages going out of the country during the last week of November, and send by ground because it’s cheaper. I figure if the recipient gets it early, they can enjoy the suspense of wondering what they received, and my gift to them may even have the unique honour of being the first gift to be placed under the Christmas tree.

That’s not such a bad thing, is it?

What better way to start off a new week than with a Your Turn! Yes, I know it’s Monday and not Friday but this dilemma came to me and I’d love to know what you think.

(I may be biased but I can say that I trust this person’s accounting of the story fully, and have no reason to believe any of it has been exaggerated for effect or told in a way to make one side sound better or worse than the other.)

What do you do if you work in an environment (in this case a department store) where your coworkers, for whatever reason, do not like you. At first you think you’re imagining it, because you’ve always been polite and they have been the same to you, but then you catch the coworkers whispering not quite behind your back constantly. You’re called to the office of your boss one day to talk to two coworkers who have told the boss a story about something you did (which you did not do). It’s two against one and you’re hardly given a chance to tell your side of the story before your boss tells you that you are expected to shape up or face the consequences.

What should this employee do? She is unsure about whether she’s ready to leave a job she’s been working at for over 10 years, especially in light of the fact that the coworkers that reported her have been there less than a year, and her boss less than three years.

Other bits of information that may or may not be important:

• The two coworkers hang out socially with each other outside of work
• The two coworkers hang out socially with the boss outside of work hours
• Other coworkers have started repeating similar (made up) stories, leading to a very tense work environment

Is anybody else suffering from the “Christmas is coming far faster that I want it to arrive” blues? Well instead of suffering, here are some ways to enjoying the fast approaching day. These tips are guaranteed to halt most, if not all cursing, and put you back in a cheery mood.

Take a day off
If you work somewhere where you can take a day, a half day or a couple of hours off, do it! If you’re worried that your shopping list will never shorten, spend this extra time shopping, if you’ve been shopping like a fiend and need a little extra shut-eye, sleep in, then hang out in your pyjamas all day (afternoon…rest of the day). The key is to do what will make you feel better at the end of the day. I’ve followed this and taken every other Friday off from my full time job so far in December and it’s been great shopping during less busy times.

Get a cold nose
If you’re lucky to live somewhere where the snowfall has been excessive so far, get out there and enjoy the snow! Snow is a hassle if you’re the one responsible for shoveling it, but nothing says winter like snowy days and if you live somewhere where it snows, you know how much better it is when you have a white Christmas. Go out and enjoy yourself in the snow: build a snowman to guard the house, make some snowballs or even do some snow painting. If your inner child is calling especially loudly, make a snow angel. When your nose starts running and your cheeks are red and you’ve lost sensation in your fingers and toes, it’s time to come in and warm up with hot chocolate or coffee.

Bake Therapy
When the smells of something delicious is coursing through your house, I dare you to be sad…unless you use so many bowls and utensils that the cleanup is staggering! If thoughts of baking make you think “more work I haven’t done!”, then bypass the mixing of ingredients and buy your dough ready made. Everyone knows the fun part is decorating the cookies anyway, followed closely by eating them.

It’s very easy during this season of giving to keep on giving to everyone but yourself. Give yourself permission now, not after the season is over, to do something that’s just for you and has you singing along with the Christmas carols in the mall the next time you have to venture there.