New Year's Resolutions

Let's be all stereotypical and write a New Year's Resolution post, shall we?

2010 was a whirlwind of life changes. In May, I graduated from grad school, in June I was hired for my first teaching job, in August I moved to a new town and started the job, in November I met a boy.

Well, gee, when I put it that way it doesn't seem all that exciting. Nonetheless, it's been pretty crazy, especially the last half of the year.

I really have two New Year's Resolutions for 2011....

1) Be a better teacher. Not that I think that I'm a bad teacher or anything, but teaching is something I'm incredibly comfortable doing, especially considering I'm a first year teacher. And especially since my weird medical issues started right before Thanksgiving, a lot of the effort I was putting into teaching has gone more into just making it through the school day while trying to ignore the pain. (More on that in a moment)

2) Run again. That's right, I didn't say MORE because that would mean that I've been running and I haven't. In fact, in 2010, I think I could count the number of miles that I ran on my fingers. The picture above is of me running 10 miles in one fell swoop...something's wrong with this picture. I will not be running to lose weight or to break any records, except my own. I inadvertently lost between 10 and 15 pounds when I started teaching, I guess because of the constant walking around the classroom and the fact that when you're teaching, there's no time for mindless snacking. Both of those things are good things, and at the beginning of the year I was doing yoga (while still at JMU) and end of the year I also started attending a Boot Camp class, which was awesome. The only problem is that I now pay a monthly gym membership which I won't admit how few times I've gone since I joined in August. As soon as we figure out these medical issues, this will change!! Time to be a runner again!!

Medical issues - the Friday before Thanksgiving I woke up with intense pain in the lower right abdomen. Pain so bad that I took off from work and went to the doctor fearing appendicitis. Since then the pain has not gone away and I even spent one night in the ER because the pain got so bad. Ultrasounds have ruled out an ovarian cyst, CT scans have been done, and I've been to my primary care doctor 3 times and two specialists. So far, they have not found the source of the pain. Next Friday I go to a GI doctor and I really hope that he can find a better solution than continuing a regimen of Tylenol with Codeine when it hurts. Anyway, this has caused countless days and nights of pain, three days off from work and did not make for the ideal Thanksgiving or winter breaks. Also, it's caused me to go on survival mode both at work and in life -- doesn't let me be a very good girlfriend (although because I have the best boyfriend EVER, he's stuck with me through all of these even though it's still the very very beginning of our relationship), haven't worked out since all this started, and I just feel all around pretty crappy. Six weeks is way too long to be in pain with no answer, especially when you are no closer to an answer than when you started. So, there's a third resolution, but it better take like just January of 2011 and not the whole year --- GET BETTER!!!!

So, there they are, my resolutions... one for work, one for me. Reasonable, right??