New Year's Resolutions

Why January 2nd? Well, because I gave myself January 1st as one last day to sit around and do absolutely nothing productive. Also, because I woke up yesterday with a cold that seems to have broken my give a damn, though I'm kicking it into submission.

So I have a list of things that I want to do this week, all of which I will accomplish 15 minutes at a time (thank you FlyLady!). Most of them are small things--change bed linens, clean bathrooms, take down the Christmas decorations (which I may start today, despite my intention to leave everything up until Epiphany). These are my around the house things to do.

But January 2nd is also the start of my academic new year. My to-do list for the next week and a half is as follows:

• Rewrite syllabus and course schedule for 1020. I changed books over the break, so I've got to fix everything to go along with that. I think it will really be a change for the better. This needs to be done by Monday so I can get copies made.
  
• Order my first set of books for my dissertation. I need to consult with Dr. K about a couple of these first, so that's on my list. She already told me which edition of Tennyson I needed, so now I need my editions of Browning and Arnold.
• Begin work on my teaching award application. This is going to mean substantially rewriting my teaching philosophy, so I'm putting thought into that.
• Study each day for preliminary exams. This is really going to be the front-loading of my semester--I take them the last two days of March. I'd like to put in two hours of studying a day. I think that is a reasonable goal. I need to start with finishing a book that Dr. K loaned me--Desire and Domestic Fiction by Nancy Armstrong. While a lot of people are kind of skeptical about some of the ideas, I do think there are some really interesting ideas in there. (I don't agree with all of them either, but it is interesting.)
• Anxiously await hearing back from the State Department about my Fulbright application. I don't expect to hear back until the end of the month.
• Go to the Lower Division Spring Curriculum meeting on the 10th.

I'm sure there are more things that need done, but this is the beginning. Guess it's time to stop procrastinating and get started. I can do this fifteen or thirty minutes at a time too!