The New Year is a more hazy concept for me than for most, I think, due to my acknowledging the winter solstice as an ending/beginning mark, and my birthday being wedged in there. Clustered in with the cultural meanings of new beginnings attached to Christmas and New Year's, this means I end up with a ten-day transitional period where I haven't quite decided whether a new year has started yet or not. The following is therefore a loosely organized braindump of things I've been thinking about for the last week:

2006 was notable for the number of growed-up milestones it included:

• I finished that last grad school project in February and formally graduated in April.

• I got a Real Job (salary, benefits, regular schedule, commute, the works), then left it five months later for a different Real Job, trading better job security and an instant "please don't leave" raise for every idealistic young planner's dream of walking to work, itself really only a symptom of working for a town you care enough about to want to live in.
• I worked up the motivation to actually take advantage of health insurance and take care of some deferred body maintenance, visiting the dentist for the first time in three years and the optometrist for the first time in five. ("So, have you been having trouble driving?") No cavities, bite plate to prevent teeth grinding and associated headaches, and new glasses.
• We bought a house, and moved out of Jorvik; aside from bouncing around student housing in New Jersey (and the fact that Andra still lives with us), this is the first time I/we have lived on our own. On the achievements side of the scale, this means we started making mortgage payments and utility payments (rather than having a House Treasurer take care of all that) at the same time as my student loan payments started, forcing me to (successfully) start keeping track of things-that-need-mailing.
• We joined our fledgling neighborhood association, and I seem to have allowed myself to be elected Vice-Chair, to a Chair who is likely going to abdicate her position in a month for maternity leave. I'm growed up, but I continue to be a sucker, apparently.

Some other things I did this year:

• Went to Costa Rica with Cara for our honeymoon. Did some good relaxing, saw lots of monkeys and sloths, talked to cab drivers in broken-but-good-enough Spanish, and discussed export agriculture, ecology, history, and the economics of eco-tourism with local tour guides. (The state-run tour guide training program seems to provide a pretty thorough education...)

• Travelled to Austin, TX, to visit Glenn, see all the places that Richard and Michael sigh wistfully about, and meet folks I'd only known digitally to that point, such as memeatron, spyderella, and valetoile.
• Read lots of good books, though did more tv-on-dvd watching and less book reading than I'd hoped. My personal wiki has a partial list of books read. (I started keeping track in August, and hope to keep track more thoroughly this year.)
• Finally took advantage of the local music scene to decent effect, making it to at least parts of Madisonfest and Mittenfest, as well as a few shows at the Dreamland Theater (coming soon to a downtown Ypsi near you), and finding lots to like, including at least Chris Bathgate, Canada, Casionauts, Dabenport, and Fred Thomas as the selection that motivated me to the point of buying cds. With Brandon now departed for the bright lights of the big city, one of the things I need to get better at is actually finding shows for myself, since I think that there was maybe only one show this year that I went to without his organizing it or at least pointing it out to me. (Two, actually - since Valerie took me to an Octopus Project, White Ghost Shivers, et al show at Emo's in Austin; Brandon, to my knowledge, has no hand in Austin's local music scene.)
• Decided not to call myself a vegetarian anymore. The above-mentioned reading list, which was heavy on the food systems, helped me decide that I could better advance the political/economic/environmental reasons I had for being vegetarian by eating meat, but only in cases where I knew and approved of where and how it had been raised and processed. My meat consumption for the year has been limited to the lamb raised by my godmother, across the road from my parents' house, small amounts of meat from Ernst Farm, and some "when in Rome" consumption of meat in Costa Rica and Austin (brisket at Ruby's - kinda dry).
• Continuing on the food theme, we (my neighborhood association) engaged in the initial planning of a community garden, with Growing Hope's assistance; we hope to gain approval from City Council in January to use a chunk of public land, our neighborhood being singularly short on vacant lots, and begin operation this coming growing season.
• And further, advanced my food craft skills at canning, drying, freezing, pickling, brewing, and cooking. Positive feedback was provided by birthday/christmas gifts of pasta maker, mushroom-growing kit, and worm bin IOU. At this point, I would consider taking up bread-making, but for the fact that the River Street Bakery provides a local, organic, coop-owned bread supply that's so good I have no motivation to make my own. (Swoon!)
• Did I mention homeownership? I'm slowly remembering skills that I picked up from my perpetually-DIYing parents, including drywalling, heating, caulking, plumbing, electrical(ing?), and cursing one's decision to own a house.

Things I'd like to do this year:

• Take more bike rides, since I've replaced my serviceable second-hand mountain bike with a nice second-hand road bike.

• See if I can organize soccer and ultimate games within my neighborhood association.
• Set up a regular schedule of Games Nights and provide people with more advance notice than noon that day.
• Get better at applying food craft skills towards, y'know, making dinner on a regular basis, rather than making stuff for the act of making stuff. (This and the previous two items are intended to address the fact that our newly nuclear household hasn't yet adapted to the built-in social pool and cooking rotations provided by our past two homes. We need to rebuild our networks for social reproduction.)
• Help make our neighborhood association grow and be awesome, since that would seem to be an avenue for replacing some of the social reproduction lost in non-group living. (Juliew sent me an article recently that included the term "retrofit co-housing," which allowed me to stick a label on my not-actually-nefarious plans for my neighborhood.)
• Overhaul the kitchen, at least to the extent of reorganizing the space to provide for efficient access and workflow. Implement simmering plans for the wreaking of havoc upon the bathroom. Organize the basement for more efficient (and floodproof) storage and less efficient banging of heads on heatducts, etc.

That should be enough to work towards, I'd think. Happy 2007.