5 x 5, or It's Never Too Late In The Year To Make Resolutions.

Do you ever get to a place where you feel like your day...week...month requires a do-over? Ever feel like things are really stagnate and you have a hard time getting excited about things you might have been very excited about several years ago? I'm there. I have been there for too embarrassingly long now. I feel like my life has gotten off track, despite all the evidence that says I am well on my way, at least, to being back on track. So I had this idea of mapping out a few small, not overwhelming goals designed to snap me out of it (if possible - sometimes I wonder if it is, but that's an awfully pessimistic, not very proactive stance to take and thus one I am resisting because, really, yuck). Feel free to copy the idea for yourself; I've divided my rest-of-the-year goals into five sections with five goals per section. Why five? Because it's a very small number and it makes these goals seem possible - that's all.

1. Five Books To Read - Well, knowing me, I will certainly read more than five but these are five books I've always meant to read that I will finally get around to:

1. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn - Betty Smith
2. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (yeah, sue me - she's the only Bronte sister I've never read a book by and she was the one who wrote the most and lived the longest!).
3. Geography Club - Brent Hartinger 
4. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe - Carson Mccullers (one of my favorite writers, so why the heck haven't I read this?!)
5. The Puttermesser Papers - Cynthia Ozick, because she's my most wonderful recent discovery and I need to read more of her stuff.

2. Five Movies To See:

1. Un Couer En Hiver - Emmanuelle Beart  (*swoon*) and Daniel Auteuil (pretty much my favorite French actor)
2. Raise The Red Lantern 
3. The King's Speech
4. Bringing Up Baby
5. Black Swan

3. Five Things To Do:

1. Go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Music Box. Ok, so I went to the Wilmette one. Same thing.
2. Ride a bike for the first time in years!
3. Go somewhere on the Metra.
4. See a movie at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
5. Visit a neighborhood I've never really spent time in.

4. Five Dishes To (Learn To) Make:

1. Quiche - I assume it's similar to making a frittata but...different.
2. Moussaka 
3. Scones!!!
4. Something with summer squash - maybe this!
5. Bubble & Squeak, just because I like the name of it. 

5. Five Places To Go:

1. The Garfield Park Conservatory
2. The Field Museum (nope, I've lived in Chicago all these years and have never been).
3. The Northshore Sculpture Park - Kathy and I drive by it whenever we are headed to Evanston, but I'd really like to walk through it and see the sculptures up close. I don't think that's too much to ask.
4. The Bean - I've never been by it, haven't had my obligatory stretchy-reflection picture taken by it. 
5. Virginia/North Carolina - Sometime this year (obviously not when I am in school), I would like a trip back to my roots. I haven't seen my sister, nephews or my few friends there in about five years and a visit is really overdue.

Fairly easy. Let's see how it goes.