Empty Nest Goals

Well, now that Steve and I are more or less official empty nesters (Megan is not living at home this year as she is in her second and last year of earning an Associate's Degree in Ag Business at Penn State), I have decided to make a few goals for myself.

1. Read through the Bible. It has been many years since I have actually followed a plan and read through the Bible in one year. Megan made the comment that she was going to do it this year and I thought it would be nice to do it together. We started the beginning of September and have made our way through part of Genesis and the entire book of Job. I will admit that I was happy to get done with Job and move back to Genesis. The book of Job is well...just a little repetitive. I kind of feel sorry for Job's friends because I think they were really trying to be supportive. I really like the fact that they sat with him in silence for seven days. It was when they opened their mouths that they got in trouble. This is something good for me to remember.
2. Finish Megan's scrapbook.  For each of my children I have made a scrapbook from birth to 18 years of age. Megan's got stuck after her Junior year and I need to finish it. It has been laying around for too long. I started sorting and going through pictures last evening and already I can't believe how long ago it seems since Megan was 17. What a difference a couple of years can make in a person's life. High school is just high school and once you leave those halls, you tend to become a different person and start a whole new life. I need to finish this book while I still have some memory of those high school days.
3. Clean my upstairs. My upstairs is a disaster. No one except Megan has used the upstairs for years and it has become a place to throw things to get them out of the way. I tried to walk through one of the old bedrooms the other day and it was so cluttered I could hardly get through. This fall, I need to make some sort of organization out of the chaos. Just for an example, the old toilet in the upstairs bathroom broke and we replaced it several months ago. Instead of taking the old one completely out and to the junk, it is still sitting in the bathroom and when Megan comes home she has to walk around it. That is totally unacceptable. Why do we leave things go like this? Does anyone else do this or are we that abnormal?
4. Lose some weight. Ha. This will by far be the most challenging. With everyone out of the house, Steve and I decided to take the "easy" (losing weight is never easy) way (and most expensive) and join one of those weight loss plans where you have the food delivered to your door. We are planning a trip to Europe in early December and would like to be a few pounds lighter by then. We are about three weeks into it and of course the weight isn't coming off as fast as we would like, but it hasn't been too bad. Having your food choices already decided for you, has certainly made sticking to the plan easier. We will see where it takes us. (I'm suspicious that Steve is cheating a little!) I'm not holding my breath.

So...those are my main goals going into this fall season. Since I don't have to spend any time with meal planning, hopefully it will be easier for me to accomplish everything. We will see. I can be quite a procrastinator when there is something in front of me that I really don't want to do. Hopefully, writing this out, will give me the motivation to follow through.