Half-hearted, Undefined New Year's Resolutions

As we look forward to the New Year starting tomorrow (gulp), I realize that I have made a lot of undefined, half-hearted resolutions over the past week, but I have yet to figure out how I will fully carry any of them out in the new year.

Half-hearted, undefined resolutions:

1) follow sugar detox plan to cut most sugar out of Husband's and my diet (in reference to what I have read about excessive sugar consumption's connection to polycystic ovary syndrome)

2) start to make most of our food from scratch, buying as little processed food items as possible

3) start charting my cycles using the thermometer method (to see whether my body actually does have cycles, despite what it would lead me to believe)

4) eliminate most, if not all, chemical cleaning and hygiene products from our house and replace with homemade non-toxic cleaners

See? Not very defined. And at this point, whether I (and Husband, since much of this includes him) will be able to act on these resolutions is questionable.

For example, we have a flat-topped stove in our house. I love that stove. It is so easy to clean.

Plus, because it's flat, it doubles as work space for us when we are already using our two other limited counters for cooking. Not really a good idea. When one turns a burner off and takes a pot off of that burner, there is no reminder that a burner is still hot except for one tiny pale red light on the face of the stove above the burners. One of us (I won't say which) doesn't usually have trouble remembering not to set combustible items on hot burners, but one of us has forgotten on several occasions, resulting in charred oven mitts and, most recently, a melted tortilla bag.

The blackened brittle oven mitts were a slight inconvenience but quickly replaced. The melted tortilla bag was more irritating. Most of the plastic pulled easily from the stove, after it had cooled, but it was still obvious, to any eye, that something very red had been on that burner that shouldn't have been.

When I was younger, and silly putty and play-dough were in vogue, I used to like to press newspaper into one or the other, in order to see a perfect imprint of the picture. Colored comic strips from the paper were best for this purpose. What was left on our stove reminded me of that childhood pastime. There was no dimension to the plastic that was left, almost as if it had been painted on the burner, and I thought I could almost read the words from the tortilla bag, painted backwards onto the burner.

We tried to scrape the picture off with a spatula. And then with spoons, but to no avail.

Finally, Husband suggested we get out the Goo Gone to see if that would do the trick.

Husband was hanging a cork board on the wall for me when I got out the Goo Gone to try my luck again on the pasticky stain.

It came off easily under the chemical influence of the Goo Gone.

"Ahh... It worked!" I called to Husband in the other room.

"Good!" I heard. And then, "Do you think there's a non-toxic homemade cleaner that will replace Goo Gone?"

Alas.

Obviously, whether Husband and I can commit to my resolution fantasies is yet to be seen.