A Butter Ball Blog: The New Norm and Update on Things to Come

So I'm about two weeks? Actually I think it's closer to three weeks behind on blog posts which brings me to an interesting point. I've been thinking a lot lately about something that one of my coworkers said at the beginning of Lent. He argued the point that people can handle a Lenten resolution for 40 days but completely fail at a new years resolution after only a couple weeks because Lenten resolutions are just one thing. This idea intrigued me because I've had this problem so many times. With Lent, we say "I'm going to give up chocolate" or "I'm going to not watch tv" or any number of things, but usually there is just the one rule. For new years people tend to get a lot less specific. We'll say "I want to lose weight" or "I want to exercise more" or (for someone like me) "I want to focus more on spending time with friends". While it may be one idea, it is neither defined, nor specific. Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is "How can I meet this goal with one task?" or even "how can I break this up into manageable chunks?"
Over the past few years I've had so many goals and ideas that never came to anything and I think a major cause of this was the simple fact that I stretched myself too far. My new years resolution this past year was a list of about twenty things I wanted to do. As you can probably tell from this post so far, trying to start about twenty new habits all at once didn't work so well. As a matter of fact I can't even remember half of them at the moment. I've talked about it before, but this all ties in to the tendency that I have just noticed in myself fairly recently to make rules for everything. I'll define and make rules in my head for everything in my life and then I end up paralyzed. I'm trapped in a box of my own rules. So here's a new guideline "one rule at a time". Maybe that's the way I need to go. For Lent I gave up watching TV on weekdays. That was a rule that I could follow because it only involved one simple decision.
I like having goals. I like having something to work up to, but I've found that too many of then can result in less getting done rather than more. For my blog I came up with a rule for myself that I would do weekly updates, but the first time that I got too busy, I ended up skipping it. And then by week two, I had an enormous number of pictures and stories that i wanted to tell and it just looked like biting off more than I could chew. I got overwhelmed and ended up freezing up and producing nothing.
So here's my new norm: I will write when I want, about what I want. No rules, no structure.

On a less serious note, I've been keeping really busy in the past few weeks with lots of fun stuff I've been meaning to share. Here's a quick look at posts that I will probably write in the furture:

Butter Ball Indonesian Chicken