Wishing you JOY

I know I am a bit late but Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Christmas preparations were a bit harried this year as I tried to deal with year-end deadlines at work, a shortened holiday prep season thanks to Thanksgiving falling so late, and, did I mention that both Mark and Sal came down with a virus a few days apart which had them each laid up with a high fever. Of course this meant extra laundry and bathroom cleaning as I hoped to keep Melissa and myself healthy for Christmas. Needles to say, with all of that going on, the old blog went neglected. But I am back with renewed vigor to give this blog some regular attention this year. After all, my One Little Word is FOCUS. That means in 2014 I will:

• Focus on eating better.
• Focus on exercising more. 
• Focus on crafting more. 
• Focus on blogging regularly -- at least once a week.
• Focus on finishing unfinished projects.
• Focus on trying new recipes.
• Focus on sticking to more regular work hours even though that is sometimes hard since I work from home.
• Focus on reading at least one book a month.
• Focus on pinning less and doing more.
• Focus on organization.
• Focus on deleting old e-mails so that my inbox never gets up to 1,500+ again.
• Focus on using more of my scrappy stash and buying less.
• Focus on mailing cards days early instead of days late.
• And, most importantly, focus on the people I love most -- my family. 

While I don't make New Year's resolutions, that is my intent for 2014. Wish me luck!

I will leave you with the Christmas card I made this year. After staying up until all hours of the night in years past, I kept it simple. I adhered a 4x6 photo to the front of a kraft card base and added the Papertrey Ink die cut. I let the Stampin' Up! glimmer paper shine all on its own.  Here it is:

Thanks for reading! Happy New Year!