Goals

It's been quite awhile since I posted an actual list of goals. I tried the 100 goals in 100 weeks, which had a lot of good goals on it, but my life is just too crazy right now to be dealing with that many goals.

So for now I'm limiting it to a few categories:
Health
House
Homeschool
Habits

{did you notice how I managed to use words that all start with H?}

A few goals under Health:
1. keep strengthening my knee and start running for longer periods of time/distance
2. train for and run at least 4 races by the end of 2012 (at least one half marathon)
3. be more careful with my eating and lose some weight

A few goals under House:
1. finish painting all the rooms
2. do the family room ceiling
3. finish building built-in shelves in the library

A few goals under Homeschool:
1. stick to the schedule I've worked out, as much as possible
2. be more consistent with violin practicing

A few goals under Habits:
1. practice the piano more frequently
2. index several batches every week for FamilySearch
3. have more meaningful daily scripture study (start journaling as I read)

How are you at keeping goals you make?

Our sad garden

the arrows are pointing to our sad squash plants

We've wanted to have a garden for years, and this year we finally managed it. Unfortunately, we're not sure how it will do.

Last fall Mr M and my dad tilled up the spot where we wanted to put in our garden, but there's so much clay and so many {large} rocks that they weren't able to accomplish much. We figured we probably wouldn't have much luck if we planted directly in the clay, so we bought some topsoil, hummus, and mulch, mixed them together and poured them into some trenches we dug. We then transplanted the squash and zucchini plants that we started in the house.

A couple weeks later we added a third row (the one on the left) with some other plants, and the difference in the rows is quite obvious. We're not sure if our dirt is getting absorbed into the clay, or what, but the dirt seems to be disappearing.

The plants are yellowing, but they have blossoms, so they haven't completely died. It'll be interesting to see how many squash and zucchini we do/don't get, as well as how well everything else does.

We're hoping to do some major landscaping in our backyard this fall, so we didn't want to do anything too big/expensive this spring. If nothing else, this will be a good learning experience.

Anyone have experience growing a garden in clay?