Other years, I’ve thought about choosing a guiding word for the year the same way I think about drafting a fantasy sports team or having birds as pets: good for you, not for me, as Amy Poehler would say. I preferred an extensive list of specific goals and resolutions and Things to Do for an Excellent Year. I haven’t abandoned that approach, but for 2015, I’m adding a word. And three weeks into 2015, I’ve decided that I’m committed enough to it to make it public.

It’s a reminder to avoid distractions and focus on actions that support my core goals and values, a reminder, in fact, that I have core goals and values: developing and maintaining strong relationships, focusing on health, continuing to build the business, supporting and producing good design. I have a weekly resolutions chart with such goody-two-shoes-y entries as “dust,” “use slow cooker,” and “bring breakfast & lunch to work 4+ days” that seem a little dull/dreary, but support my larger goals of living in a clean, orderly home, making and using a meal plan, eating healthfully, and spending less on unimportant crap.

CORE is a reminder to keep plugging away at knitting projects I’ve chosen because I really, really want the finished item, and not to cast on for things that would be quick or easy or a good way to use up some yarn I have on hand. It’s also a reminder about paring down. I don’t have a way to quantify getting rid of stuff, so don’t really consider it a goal as such, but it’s basically my favorite activity at the moment. I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up recently and her approach, to discard everything you own that doesn’t “spark joy” and to assign a specific location in your home for every item you own, resonated very strongly. My other guiding principles include William Morris’s admonition not to have anything in your home you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful and the idea, whose source I don’t remember, that my home is not a museum of my (our) life. One or all of those will address pretty much any item under consideration; I can’t say for sure that a container of baking powder sparks joy necessarily, but I know it’s useful. The not-a-museum principle is particularly helpful when I’m confronting things like a frog-shaped perfume bottle that I loved when I was little and have been hanging onto without considering whether I care about it now. (I don’t.) I’ve gotten rid of a lot of clothing and shoes too. I’m not officially doing Project 333 or a capsule wardrobe, but that’s the direction I’m leaning.

We’re likely going to move out of the city within the next two years, maybe sooner, and I’d like to jettison as much as possible before then. Plus, we have a pretty great apartment and we’ll enjoy the rest of our time in it a lot more if it’s filled only with things we love. It can be hard though. Things can develop so much emotional weight that it can be really hard to shift them. I love Rachael’s thoughts about what to do with gifts; there’s a lot of stuff in our place that falls into the category of Items Given With Love That I/We Do Not Love.

But the core is not a hollow space and my focus on it is not all about less. I’m focusing just as much on making room for more in some areas: seeing friends more (I have brunch plans this weekend with a friend I haven’t seen in a year), learning more (tonight is the first in a planned series of weekly dinner-and-Photoshop-tutorial get-togethers with another friend I haven’t seen much lately; figuring out how to use the loom that’s, uh, looming over my bedroom; getting more comfortable with bookkeeping), traveling more (we’re headed to Florida for a long weekend next month to visit Rob’s dad and stepmother and to Los Angeles for a week in March to kick around the city—ideas welcomed!—and spend a couple of days hiking and hanging out at the Ace Hotel pool in Palm Springs), putting more thoughtful energy into my full-time job, and physically moving more (packing those breakfasts and lunches has already saved me enough money for weekly yoga and dance classes).

It’s going to be a good year, guys.

Our original honeymoon plan had been Scandinavia: Sweden, most likely, with a stop in Iceland. But when we figured out that we’d be going in February, that was less appealing (for one of us, at any rate — long nights, hot saunas, and the chance to see the Northern Lights all sounded pretty good to me, but I’ll go another winter) and we started looking into tropical and Southern Hemisphere destinations. We picked Hawaii for a number of reasons: neither of us had ever been there, it’s far enough away that it’s unlikely we’d go another time,  and, as my friend Karen pointed out, no one ever comes back feeling lukewarm about Hawaii. One of Rob’s old friends, an indie musician whose tastes run pretty counter to the sort of cheesy resort experiences I wanted to avoid, had told us that he loves it so much he’d live there if he didn’t have family obligations keeping him in their hometown. Additionally, Rob had just finished rereading The Dirt when we were tossing around destination ideas, and he pointed out that the Mötley Crüe guys were always running off to Hawaii to chill out when rock-star life got to be too much. So we figured that any place beloved by people as different from each other as this indie guy, Mötley Crüe, and my Aunt Yolanda had to be a slam dunk.

And it was.

We spent a week on the Big Island with a few days in Waikiki on either side. I approached the planning with an eye to having a few different kinds of experiences: the remote-natural-splendor kind, classic-Hawaii-tourist kind, the read-a-book-a-day-while-sipping-umbrella-drinks-by-the-pool kind, and the eating-things-I-don’t-have-regular-access-to kind. We got started on the classic-Hawaii-tourist kind immediately, having beachside mai tais our first night…

Then jumped into the eating-things-I-don’t-have-regular-access-to kind the next day, taking a Hole-in-the-Wall food tour of Honolulu. It was a solid half day of being driven around town and eating things (maybe 15-20 different items, all told) from places I feel pretty confident we never would have gone to otherwise, and it was great.

It started with mana pua, which are sort of like a meat doughnut with char siu or roast pork or whatever else inside a sweetish dough. They’re baked, so they’re not greasy at all, and I think it’s insane that we don’t have them in New York. Call the place Meat Doughnut, don’t sell anything else, and you’re golden. Bonus for me: if you’re savvy about marketing, I bet you could siphon away all the cronut business from Dominique Ansel and then I could finally start getting breakfast there a couple times a week again. I miss the croissants, but not enough to wait in those lines. Man, this idea just keeps getting brillianter.

We had bakery items, like these chocolate-filled “cocoa puffs,” from Liliha Bakery:

And visited a rice noodle factory in Chinatown where everything is still done by hand and almost entirely without electricity; the lights and those fans are the only powered items, the noodles themselves are steamed.

Here, one of the guides, Bill, is handing out samples of some of the rice noodles above (plain, with bits of shrimp, and with bits of char siu), along with some pan-fried noodles and Korean bbq chicken:

A number of the items were dim sim style. These buns use the same chicken filling in both a steamed rice bun and a flaky pastry crust:

Roast pork and crispy pork belly:

Some kind of smoothie:

Spam musubi and poke (in the container). I know Spam takes a lot of flak, but I grew up eating it occasionally and don’t have an issue with it. These rice, Spam, and seaweed creations were surprisingly tasty. Later in the trip, we took Spam musubi on hiking trips a couple of times for a quick, filling, protein-rich snack. I don’t think I’ll seek it out here, but it was the right food at the right time. Poke is seasoned, cubed raw fish. It was available inexpensively almost everywhere, it ranged from great to transcendent, and I really wish it was more widespread here.

Some sweets: coconut tarts and carmelized bananas.

That night, on the advice of one of the guides, we went to a Hawaiian restaurant, since the food tour had been local foods rather than specifically Hawaiian foods and I thought we should have at least one traditional-ish meal.

I had chicken long rice, which is basically chicken soup with rice noodles, and Rob had some kalua pig. Both of the meals came with lomi salmon, which is a salmon and tomato salad; a sort of beef jerky; coconut custard; and rice or poi. I’ve had poi before (I had a native Hawaiian roommate at one point) and have never been moved to have it again; it’s not terrible, but it’s basically just a bland mush. There are plenty of other bland mushes I like better.

And with this tweet, Kim Werker changed my life.

I FEEL MY LIFE CHANGING. Bullet Journal: An analog note-taking system for the digital age — http://t.co/AVVUbm54Jp via @eunnyjang

— Kim Werker (@kpwerker) January 2, 2014

The bullet journal system is one of those things that’s so simple and so straightforward that you almost can’t believe it hasn’t always existed. As much as I rely on email and Twitter and various other online tools, I also keep a paper calendar, a Moleskine weekly planner with days on the left and a blank page on the right for groceries lists and weekly goals, plus tabbed notes pages in the back that I’ve used for a list of the books I’ve read that year or to keep track of DIY wedding projects. This has generally worked out really well, but I’m also constantly making notes on scrap paper–lists and thoughts, things I’d like to cook, outfits I’d like to wear, schematics for sweaters I’d like to make, plots for books I’d like to write, menus for parties I’d like to throw–that the planner doesn’t have space for. The bullet journal is a way to corral all of it, a flexible structure for keeping all of your written notes in one place. I’m only the tiniest bit abashed to say that it makes me swoon. The video explains it all better than I could:

I’ve been using it for, oh, about four days now, and I’m completely converted. It feels natural and works really well with the way that I think and how I break down tasks. I had already been planning to do monthly goals this year instead of my normal long list of resolutions, and the bullet journal system is ideal for that: at the beginning of each month, I’ll think ahead about what I want to accomplish in the next 28/30/31 days/what would make those days more joyful and go from there, rather than doing that at the beginning of January for the next 365.

At this point, my paper calendar is still in play, since the only drawback of the bullet journal is that because the daily entries vary so much in length and there’s no way to figure out how many other kinds of notes I’ll be adding, it’s hard to use it to plan more than a month ahead. I may switch over to a digital calendar for appointments and the bullet journal for everything else, but I’m not quite there yet.

Also, I finally got around to joining Instagram, ostensibly so I could play along with #yearofmaking, but I can see that I’ll be having a lot of fun with it. I’m stephanieklose on there, should you want to play along.

I might see these ducks in Connecticut.

I went to the eye doctor today at lunch and now I’m sitting at my computer with dilated eyes, trying to knock out a couple of spreadsheets to help out the person who’s taking over my duties here starting next week. Because I got a new job! It’s a nice step up the masthead at a somewhat similar publication and I’m really looking forward to the change. Working at the computer right now is giving me a wicked headache though, and writing this post lets me just touch type and free associate instead of looking closely at some tiny-fonted print material and looking closely again at a tiny-boxed spreadsheet.

I don’t start at the new job until May 7, so have next week off and am going a little berserk planning how to spend the time. My boyfriend has a gig in Providence this weekend, so we’ll be roaming New England for a couple of days after that. Probably New Hampshire, since he’s never been there and I’ve only been to a friend’s family’s camp near Portsmouth and to the Nashua mall during my college-era mall retail management years. Suggestions for good hiking or thrift shops or the RI/NH equivalents of something like the Coon Dog Cemetery or the Belgian carrot museum happily accepted. I prefer my tourist attractions to be creepy or absurd or, ideally, both.

We’ll be back in New York mid-week, I think, maybe with a stop at his mom’s in Connecticut. And I’d really like to look back on my time off as being productive and fun. So I’ve been putting together a list of  “staycation” destinations: somewhere fancy for lunch (maybe Marea?), Ellis Island, Ft. Tilden, Bronx Zoo + Arthur Avenue, Habu… And I’m stockpiling books and thinking about writing projects, both freelance and personal, and planning a couple of sewing projects and some home organization and spring cleaning, plus movies I want to see (Snow White and the Huntsmen, Avengers, Cabin in the Woods, and, to my surprise, The Five-Year Engagement, which sounded asinine but has utterly charming trailers). So, basically, I’m planning for those three or four days as if I have a month or two at my disposal. It should be fun to look back at this post in a couple of weeks and see what I actually did. Watched tv and knit sporadically? Quite possible.

(via Michelle)

At a friend’s wedding this weekend, I got into a conversation about blogging with Vicky, another of the bride’s close friends. I was telling her how much I’d slowed down posting and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with the space, but that I definitely wanted to hang on to the domain, so I had to do something (I am very fun at weddings) and she said something so simple and smart and spot-on that I think it may have broken through my blog-writing block: that the nice thing about blogs is that they’re always there for you to go back to them. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. It doesn’t matter what you’ve written about in the past. You can always start up again and write about whatever you want.

So here I am. And will be, much more frequently.