2015, Day 2: The New Year’s Jar

I didn’t make any traditional New Year’s resolutions (well, besides the standard “quit smoking, get in better shape” thing, partially because I don’t yet know where this year will take me. I have a feeling it’s going to be a wild ride (as if the rest of my life isn’t anyways.) But, someone had posted a link to a neat idea (and I’ve already lost the link, so I don’t remember what it was called) that I’m referring to as the 2015 New Year’s jar.

Instead of writing down resolutions, and keeping track of them, this thing is supposed to be for when you accomplish something (and, it doesn’t have to be a BIG thing, just something you think is of note), you write it down and stick it in the jar.  What a cool idea.  It’s also supposed to be a “crafty” sort of project, where you decorate it and all that good stuff.    Knowing me, I’d never be able to find a pen or paper when I wanted to write something down.

So, instead of decorating it, my New Year’s jar has three mini-composition books in it, and four pens (all of them dead cheap), so I’ve got at least 240 notes I could write in there over the next year.

I’m not sure what qualifies as “noteworthy” for this project.  I do a lot of stuff, and I can’t write down everything I do, so I decided if it was something major I did for myself, I’ll write it down.  But, the majority of it will probably be about the stuff I do for other people – already, there are six notes in there for Jan 1st & 2nd for stuff that I did that was for other people, not myself.

One of them I wrote down was all about a smiley face.  I have a thing about making waitresses smile – they have a fairly hard job, particularly at bars.  I happened to have a meeting at The Anchor, and the waitress wrote a smiley on the receipt.  After inquiring about it, she thanked me, and told me most people don’t notice it.  So, when I left, I drew something between a smiley and a caricature on the receipt, and left it on top of her tip, that way she’d notice it.  It’s trivial, I know, but she was trying to make people smile – and, I think the world needs more smiles, so I gave her one back.  Sometimes, I’ll be putting stuff like that in the jar, just because I felt it made the world a better place, even if only in a very small way.

This post, by the way, is actually for Jan 2 – I was waiting for the video of Gel E. Bean’s 36th birthday to upload, and was going to post some thoughts about it.  After all that waiting… I decided I want to post about it tomorrow instead, so later today I’ll be posting it, and the video on here. 🙂

How long will I keep posting things in the jar?  Probably about a month, then I’ll loose interest, like I do with many things 🙂  But, it really was too fun of an idea to pass up.  🙂