Time flies!

I have been working extra hard lately on my goals because it is only a few short days until it's been a year since I started this blog - eeek!  I can't believe how time has flown.

Slowly but surely going to the gym is becoming a habit.  Matt and I have gone consistently for at least three days a week if not more, and Matt just signed up for a personal trainer.  He's only meeting the trainer for one day a week, but he gets workouts scheduled for the entire week in addition to many, many other benefits.  And when he's not working with his trainer, I can do the workouts with him.  They may be a little much for me, but I'll try my best to hang with Matt because I'd like as much as he would to drop fat and build muscle much faster.

I think the most consistent theme of the past couple months is giving things up and making sacrifices.  We know what we want and not only have we been willing to give up things to get it, we have actually been giving things up.  With the exception of this past weekend going out to eat with Matt's mom while she was in town, I don't really remember the last time we ate out.  We've also been cutting back in a lot of areas (like television) in order to save money for the things we really want (like a personal trainer).

While my goal was always to get healthier and learn German, I have been about 300 times more successful since Matt decided to join with me.  I'm not anywhere close to where I hoped to be or thought I'd be when I started this adventure - I still have more weight to lose than I care to admit and my German is really not that great - but I have made progress and I am finally heading in the direction I want to be heading and getting healthier is becoming habit.  The German is slacking a little bit, but I have made a conscious effort these past few days to really bring that back into the forefront of my mind.

I think that part of the reason that I'm so motivated is that we booked the trip to Austria.  I now have a set deadline by which time I need to have met my goals: August 17, 2013 -- 296 days from today! I want to be down to my goal weight by then and to be comfortable speaking the German language.  I know I won't be fluent unless I have some sort of traumatic brain injury that magically renders me capable of speaking German, but I can increase my proficiency quite a bit by then.  I hope to finish with Rosetta Stone within the next couple of months (right now I'm at the beginning of Level 4-2 so I have to finish basically 3 lessons for level 4 and 4 lessons for Level 5) and then I'll probably go through my German textbook and through my German grammar book working on problems and making sure my understanding of the language and ability to write is where I want it to be.  In addition to doing that, I'm going to make sure to converse in German as much as possible with my native speaker friends.  It's something that for some reason I really struggle with, so I'm going to focus on that.

I am so excited to see where the next year takes me.  I hope to be in better shape than ever in my life and I hope to have made much progress with my German.  I am going to use every resource available to me in both areas.  And I think I'll add a few new goals as well.  I will definitely have a new post for my One Year Blog-aversary if not beforehand.

Tschüss!