When I was in middle school, I had a friendship journal that I’d pass around to my friends and they’d write a message in it to me. They could write about anything that they wanted to, but mostly it was about school, friends, and various crushes on boys. At the end of each message, I asked each of my friends to write their “Happy Song.”

happy song | ˈhapē sô ng | noun

A song that whenever you hear it, your not-so-good mood gets lifted. You start feeling all happy and hyper, and just for that moment when the song is played, you feel as if nothing can arm you in any way.

– as defined by thirteen-year-old Laura

Ever since then, I’ve been mildly obsessed with having a “happy song” or a personal theme song. Usually it’s in the form of whatever song I’m currently obsessed with that’s on constant rotation inside my head. That one that I can queue at any given moment and all the sudden I’m ready to rock, roll, and conquer the world.

Happy songs can also be theme songs to help you start your day. It’s also been said that if you’re a freelancer, self-employed, or work from home, it’s a good idea to have a theme song that you listen to help cue the beginning to your day. Pick a song, blast the music, and rock out for three-and-a-half to five minutes solid, then start your day.

Poll: What’s your theme song?

Which brings me to the point of this curiosity and a quick poll:

And if you do, what is your theme song? Leave the name of it and/or a link in the comments below.

What’s mine? Currently it’s Flo Rida’s Good Feeling.

Photo credit: sicoactiva

I am quickly becoming obsessed with making goals and am flirting with the danger-zone of over-planning and not getting anything done. But it is the second day of the New Year, so I’m still in the safe zone, right?

Today was New Year’s Day observed, which meant I had the day off work and since Johnny was working from home, that meant the day was all for me.

I slept in (yay!), had a home cooked breakfast with the man, ran off to meet another friend for coffee and to talk about our year ahead, had lunch with one of my truest, most amazing friends, made it to CrossFit (deadlifts, hang snatches, and overhead squats, oh my!), and am now enjoying some writing time. This year rocks already.

Put Your Goals Somewhere That You Can See Them

In following my track record of making goals and achieving them, the sure-fire way for me to fall flat on my face and not get something done is to write out a set of goals and then hide them. Sure, this works really well when cleaning my desk and I find my goals stacked between that book I didn’t finish and that notebook that has pages left unfilled (surprise!). And even though when it happens, I’m usually surprised by how many of those goals I actually accomplished. And while it’s been proven that the very act of writing down goals increases your likelihood of achieving them, it’s hard to be unintentionally intentional.

So this afternoon I went through my goals for the year and picked three things that I want to make sure I carry with me through the year. They are my goals, mantras, and things that could be roadblocks between achieving my goals this year.

From there, I wrote down five or six things for each category on index cards and literally pasted them to the wall of my office.

I used the red light/green light approach to organizing these three categories:

• Goals on green cards, as that’s where I want to go.
• Mantras on yellow cards, as I’ll probably be stalled when I need to remember them.
• Roadblocks go on pink cards, as those are things I need to stop doing.

Test the Red Light/Green Light Approach to Goals

Green Light Goals

I have three main goals for the year and two things that I need to do more of.

Goals:

1. Give 100% to building my day job (kick ass in my position at a startup)
2. CrossFit three times a week (build strength)
3. Write every day (blog)

Do more of:

1. Get a full night’s sleep
2. See friends and family (socially)

Yellow Light Mantras

Mantras, sayings, and expressions to keep you centered. These are my favorite and I’m putting them on my wall to keep myself accountable and remember what’s important to me. I’ll probably add more as the year goes on (or not).

Mantras or things to help ground me throughout the year:

1. Value myself, my time, my skills
2. Kick ass every day
3. Trust my gut
4. If things aren’t right, change it
5. Speak less of my plans – do more
6. Do one thing every day that scares me

I’ve actually started writing down the thing I do each day that scares me as another way to keep myself accountable, and because I’m curious to see what that says about me a year later. Doing one thing that scares me every day is not about going skydiving, but something like going to a networking event, alone, where I don’t know anyone and introducing myself. Would you do that on a normal day? If the answer is, “no,” then that could be your one-thing.

Red Light Potential Roadblocks

These are things that I recognize might prevent me from meeting my goals. Since I’ll be looking at these cards every single day, I didn’t want to write, “Don’t say yes” or “don’t be fearless” when I need to have a list of things that I should do to prevent the roadblocks. If that doesn’t make sense, read this blog post by Jeff Baumgarten, 30 Things…To Do (Riff).

Potential Roadblocks:

1. Say, “No.”
2. Don’t make excuses
3. Don’t commit to projects that aren’t my own
4. Be fearless
5. The Mayans are wrong

Fearing the end of the world is no reason to keep me from meeting my goals.

Will this work?

To be honest, I don’t know. But I’m going to try it. I also have some friends who have signed up to help me stay accountable.

How do you make sure you meet your New Year goals?

There are two kinds of end of the year/New Year blog posts to write. The first is a reflection of the previous year – everything you did, everything you didn’t, what you’re proud of, and what you’re not. And the second is a laundry list of “do’s” and “don’ts” for how to make the next year rock much harder than the last.

And then there’s a third, which doesn’t reveal anything about the writer but gives you, the reader, a map of how you can stick to your resolutions for the first time ever.

Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work Out

New Year’s Resolutions are like plans – you write them for how you’re feeling (usually fat) at that time (post-holidays) for the future (that has yet to be written) – and they never work out. They look great on paper, but horrible in execution because they all lack one thing – foresight and the understanding that you have to sacrifice something to accomplish what you need (and the ability to adjust to continue the momentum).

Instead of resolutions or plans, I make goals. I did this unknowingly as I entered 2010 and consciously as I entered 2011. I met the three goals I set in 2010 but not all of the goals I set for myself in 2011. While all of this past year’s goals looked great in December 2010, by mid-2011, an imbalance between work and life happened and parts of those goals were prioritized while others were not. Plus I set too many goals.

I don’t feel like 2011 was a failure, but just plain weird. In the Christmas letter John and I sent to our family, I summarized the year as one of “change,” and by God, if that isn’t true.

2011 started with a lot of oomph, passion, and excitement as things were set in place that I had been working hard towards achieving in the previous year and a half. But I got burnt out early, outgrew that opportunity faster than I imagined, and a new opportunity revealed itself and I jumped on it. If 2011 was a shape it would look like a giant “U” with a big, deep dip in the middle.

A New Template for Plotting World Domination in 2012

Earlier this week, my husband and I spent the evening working through Benny Hsu of Get Busy Living’s 2011 Year in Review Worksheet. What I like about his template is it focuses on how the previous year ended so you can reflect on what you’re proud of, what you accomplished, what you learned, what didn’t work, and where you’d like to see yourself in the future.

Benny’s worksheet helps you see where you want to go by reviewing where you came. It’s similar to racing a car – they say that you should look at where you want the car to go, not at the wall that you don’t want to run into.

Goals, plans, and strategies are the same way – look at where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go.

2011 was the U-shaped Year of Imbalance, Burnout & Change

And because I am who I am, there are many times where I bent the template and added a few extra items.

10 greatest things that happened in the past year:

1. Getting a new job (Jolkona) and off unemployment
2. Attending SXSW
3. Investing in my blog, especially during November
4. Quitting my job, getting a new one (Scrappy Face)
5. Finding a treatment that worked on my shoulder (I’ve been trying to rehab bursitis and tendonitis in my right shoulder since injuring it in July 2010)
6. Vacation to Iowa to visit extended family and anniversary trip to Victoria, B.C.
7. Publishing my first article on Mashable
8. Big, awesome, amazing year for networking
9. Building an incredible, strong team while at Jolkona (and kicked ass at that job)
10. Date night with John every Friday night
11. Seeing how happy my husband is since he started drawing again 

I am most proud of these three accomplishments last year:

1. My writing and my blog
2. Getting recruited out of my last job to join my current one
3. Making a name for myself
4. Reluctant patience with my shoulder (it’s really hard to treat an injury when you don’t know what really went wrong…)

Three great lessons I learned from last year are:

Listen to my gut, because:

1. If something is wrong, change it – don’t wait for it to fix itself; it won’t
2. Do what’s best for me and my family
3. If I can’t make it through a CrossFit workout due to lack of focus, than something is probably wrong outside of CrossFit.

Three personal developments I have made in the past year are:

1. Knowing that I’m really a writer
2. Trusting that my background, experience, and skills are valuable
3. Learning how to manage people and a team

If I could do things again last year, I would do these three things differently:

1. Quit my previous job sooner
2. Prioritize my writing earlier in the year (and continuously throughout the year)
3. Be more aggressive about finding the right treatment for my shoulder

Three things I need to do less of next year are:

1. Making excuses for what I really want (or don’t want) to do
2. Saying “yes”
3. Committing, volunteering, and helping out with too many projects that aren’t my own

Three things I need to do more of in the next year are:

1. Get a full night’s sleep
2. Write!
3. Go to CrossFit
4. See my friends and family

Three things I need to stop doing completely next year are:

1. Making excuses
2. Volunteering for projects that aren’t my own
3. Under-valuing myself

Three reasons I didn’t achieve my goals in the past year are:

1. I set too many goals
2. Life happened, priorities changed
3. I didn’t have as much control over my schedule as I thought I did due to work and not setting boundaries

Three goals I want to achieve next year are:

1. I want my blog (or my writing) to be a destination
2. I want to have a national speaking engagement
3. I want to lead the Scrappy Face movement
4. I want to be able to do a strict pull-up

Three reasons why I want to achieve these goals are:

1. I’ve been writing since I was 8 and I’m damn good at it
2. I want to achieve these goals and I know I can
3. I’ve been wanting to lead a movement since winter of 2009, before I worked in social media
4. It’s time to be strong again

Smartest decision I made last year:

I quit my last job.

Biggest risk I took last year:

I accepted a new job and a new startup.

One sentence that sums up this past year:

2011 was harder than it should have been.

One year from right now, I want my ideal day to look like this:

Wake up with John and have a home-cooked breakfast (meaning not eating on the bus or on-the-go). Head to the park and ride and take the bus downtown. The first half of my day will be dedicated to writing, blogging, working on the movement or other marketing projects for the Scrappy Face brand. I will never eat alone. Afternoon will be dedicated to client work. After work, I’ll head to CrossFit then head home to have dinner with John at the table and not in front of the TV. After dinner I’ll write for an hour or two before heading to bed.

The weekends will be mine. I will not work on the weekends but play. Sundays I’ll write.

2012 is the Year of Kicking Ass, Writing & Building Strength

And there you have it, my year in review. That last question was so hard for me to write because it asked me to look so far into the future (a year, I know!) and imagine what might be. Up until that question, this template was my best friend.

2011 had a few themes: work, burnout, and battling an injury. 2012 will have three themes as well: kicking ass at my current job (I am helping build this company and studying for how I will build my own), writing, and getting stronger at CrossFit.

That’s it.

There will be awesome details that will create an amazing rollercoaster across the year, but those three things are what I’m focusing on: my work, my passion, and my body.

That’s it.

Hey, 2012, I’m ready to kick ass with you.

Two questions for you:

1. Fill out Get Busy Living’s Year In Review template. Did it reveal anything to you?
2. If you didn’t, what’s one goal that you’re planning to achieve in 2012? What are you planning to make happen?

Thank you, Benny Hsu, for this awesome worksheet, and Alexander the Great for introducing me to it.

Photo Credit: ayeshamus

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and made it to the nice list

Much love,
Laura, John, and Strong Santa

Original artwork illustrated by John Kimball

There’s a cat on my desk and she’s growling at the cat on my floor that is sniffing around and has been worried about her all day. He, the cat on the floor, is about to be attacked by the cat on my desk.

I am in the middle of the battlefield trying to write my third-to-last blog post for National Blog Posting Month and I am dangerously close to turning this blog into a diary.

Damnit.

It’s funny. Again, I’m staring at my content calendar that has been telling me to write a post about the etymology of certain words and I really don’t want to write it. I don’t want to write it because I don’t have my point of view on that post fully thought out. I don’t want to write it because I have another blog post to write that has a more time sensitive publication date that I am (apparently) way more interested in than the deadline of this post that is midnight o’clock.

Isn’t it funny how the thing we want to do is never the thing that we want to be doing?

And Minnie, the cat on my desk, just chased Vito, the cat who is not on my desk. She has chased him because he is in her space – the space formerly known of as my office.

I guess I should be thrilled by this attack. Not because she attacked the Vito but because she’s sick. In case you were wondering, the worst way to start off a post-holiday week is in the veterinary’s office; the same office that put down the first cat that you and your husband and you owned together in your adult life nine months prior. And you’re there, alone, with your new kitty who just this last weekend you convinced your husband that you would like to keep.

No wonder I felt really wonky day today.

Minnie’s an Alpha. She came to us after being abandoned by her previous owners who moved out and literally left her in the house, telling no one. Her human grandma found her. And John found Minnie through a friend-of-a-friend’s Facebook. He saw per big blue eyes and her Siamese mix face and he fell in love.

We didn’t even ask if she got along with other cats before we made the appointment to meet her. That’s when I knew that as soon as we saw her, she’d be ours.

Old Man, may he rest in peace, passed away in April. We still haven’t opened his box of ashes that are sitting on my shelf, three feet from this computer.

Losing a pet opens a wound that never closes.

Old Man left behind a brother, Vito, named after the Godfather but has the personality closer to a teddy bear, likes to cuddle. He’s not an Alpha, though after bringing Minnie into the house, I keep hoping that he will be. As I said, he’s a teddy bear. Non-territorial, likes to show you his belly, and has the largest big green eyes of innocence that I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Minnie, who was five-and-a-half pounds of fury when we adopted her in June and I’m so Goddamned proud that she’s up to eight-and-a-half pounds today. Cats come to our house to get fattened up.

And Minnie is eating again while Vito watches her from a chair. Which means she has her appetite back. Which means we’ve made progress if she doesn’t get sick overnight.

Tomorrow the vet will call me with results from her blood work. If anything comes back positive, that means that something is really wrong. If it comes back negative than that means that we don’t know why she is sick, but just was.

As soon as Minnie decides she’s finished with her bland, wet food, Vito jumps in to lick her bowl clean, like every good brother should.

Why do we always need to search for the ‘why’?

This year, like every year, has been one filled with ups and downs, events that went down as planned and events that went awry, things that happened for a reason and surprises that revealed themselves at the most opportune times.

Today was perhaps the most perfect Thanksgiving ever. It started by John and I going out last night to the 10pm showing of The Muppets and coming home to finish making Pumpkin Whoopie Pies (thanks to a delicious recipe from Bill the Butcher). Then this morning started by going to CrossFit and doing a team WOD with two of my best CrossFit friends. Participating in today’s WOD was a big deal since I’ve been doing solo workouts and rehabbing my shoulder due to tendonitis and bursitis that I’ve had for a year and a half.

For Thanksgiving dinner, we went to my in-laws’ house. They were the hosts and we dined with them, my sister-in-law, her fiancé, John, my parents, and a family friend. The feast was complimented by laughter and now I’m home on the couch, blogging, while John and I are watching Harry Potter, which is kind of a tradition in this house.

It was the perfect Thanksgiving Day.

Thirty Reasons to be Thankful

In the tradition of last year, here is what I am thankful for this year:

• John – my support, my rock, my heart
• Building strength, physical and psychological
• New friends
• Old friends
• Friends who have moved from professional to personal friends
• Twitter BFFs and blogging buddies
• You, my reader
• My blog
• My new job
• My old job
• Mentors
• My family – my parents, my in-laws, my sisters, my brothers, my nephew
• Going to celebrate my nephew’s first birthday next week.
• Having control over my own schedule
• CrossFit
• My acupuncturist and my chiropractor
• Celebrating hump day
• Being a writer
• Mustaches
• Hipsters and the hipster-way-of-life
• Dancing, just because we can
• Cooking and baking at home
• Cuddling (even though my husband has dropped 50 pounds in the past year thanks to CrossFit, his hipbones are still fun to cuddle with)
• Listening to my gut
• Putting things in motion
• Not settling
• The ability, drive, and ambition to fix things that aren’t right
• Big ideas, implemented
• Do-ers
• Being comfortable in my own skin and appreciating who I am.

That last one is probably the biggest way to summarize all that has happened so far this year. 2011 has been a “building” year – personally, professionally, physically, and psychologically.

Thank you – for reading and being here; lamiki.com would not be what it is without you.

Thank you.

Now, I’m going to do what I told you not to do yesterday and log off to spend time with the first item on this list.

Apparently I missed the memo that Thanksgiving weekend is National Unplug and Spend Time with Your Family weekend (as reported by multiple bloggers). I’ve written about unplugging before, and it’s definitely something that we all need in this day of electronic calendars, push notifications, and Siri, is that we need people to tell us to unplug.

Well, here’s me, the girl who will be offline and online over the next five days due to her commitment to blogging once a day saying, don’t.

Don’t unplug. Don’t get offline. Don’t respect your friends and family that you only see once a year for the holidays by abandoning Facebook, Twitter, and (gasp!) Google+.

Be that annoying grandkid who texts throughout dinner. Channel that angst that you got over when you graduated from high school and sulk. Check in, obnoxiously, from your mother’s kitchen, the kiddie table, and your grandmother’s punch bowl. Claim the mayorship of Second Thanksgiving. And – for the love of the Internet – tweet.

And when you’re done with your third helping of mashed potatoes and have reached the point of no return after your second dose of pie, poke someone on Facebook.

Now go get that turkey coma on.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. Since you’re online, here’s some Thanksgiving fin from The Oatmeal: Thanksgiving as a kid VS Thanksgiving as an adult. Enjoy ☺

Photo Credit: Pam’s Pics-

Last night I went to a show to see one of my favorite bands play. We Were Promised Jetpacks just released their sophomore album and last night was the final stop on their U.S. tour and the first time they were the headliner. Last night was also the third time I saw them play and each time they get better and better.

John and I had an awesome spot on the balcony along the rail and the perfect view of the stage and all of the band members. As we waited for the lights to dim after they cleared the stage and set up the equipment for We Were Promised Jetpacks, I noticed that the stage was very clear and there were five guitars laid out. We Were Promised Jetpacks only has four members. I don’t remember them switching guitars at previous shows like some of the heavy alternative rock shows I went to in high school, but whatever, the lights were dimming and they were coming out.

The drummer, the lead guitarist, the lead singer, and the bass player all came out on stage.

And then came two more.

They started playing – the four men of We Were Promised Jetpacks who I had seen before and two more. They played their radio hit from their second album and then rolled into the song that made them famous (at least in my book) – with five guitars.

Want to know how to impress your customers and turn them into lifelong fans?

Surprise them with what they’re least expecting.

Turns out the additional members came from the opening band, Bear Hands. We only caught the tail end of their set, so we didn’t recognize them. But, man, the whole time they were playing – and again during the finale – it just blew me away.

Whenever I hear their music in the car or on the radio, I feel warm and amazed by their sound. But last night, they just increased my utter respect for them. I have no idea if this was an icing-on-the-cake, only time that these two bands performed together or if they did that set at every show, but I don’t care. The energy that flew out of those guys during that performance started their show off with the right level of bang and exploded into one of the most amazing concerts I’ve attended in awhile.

Was I impressed before? Yes.

Am I even more hooked on them – their music, their product? Absolutely.

And now you are too.

I’ve had a very big week. So this weekend I’m doing something I don’t normally do, I’m taking it ‘easy’ and appreciating things like spending time with good friends, making butter chicken with John, and going to the movies. And this afternoon, I bought two dozen roses for myself. Just because.

As my grandma once said, “Nothing beats (red) roses.”

Last night I cheated, twice. This first was by not posting a blog when I’m participating in National Blog Posting Month (and at this time I’m trying to figure out if I’m going to back-date this post or just make up for it later). The second was I ate non-paleo food and drinks.

But I have a good reason why – John and I spent the evening at a friends house helping them choose their signature cocktail for their wedding this spring.

And while I could have chosen a paleo-friendly drink recipe, what good would my taste buds have been if I didn’t taste all the other cocktails and vote for my favorite? And then, what kind of friend would I have been?

That’s right, I cheated last night because I was being a good friend. And when we came home past the stroke of midnight, I was in no place to be blogging.

Mojito Mixology

Earlier this year, I decided to make homemade mojitos for the annual BBQ we host for our CrossFit friends. What I didn’t know was how impressive this skill would be until I posted a photo from the ‘dress rehearsal’ on Facebook and received a ton of comments about how hard it was to make a mojito at home and awe that I took on such a challenge.

I’ll let you in on a little secret – all I did was crack open a bar book that I received as a gift for my 21st birthday and choose the mojito recipe that was the easiest to make. I bought key lime and mint from the corner produce market, a gallon of Bicardi Rum at the liquor store, and everything else at the grocery store. Turns out that the key limes were key in making the drink sweet and not sour (which would have been the case if I used regular limes).

The recipe (parenthetic commentary are my own)…

Mojito

1 ounce fresh lime juice (fresh squeezed from key limes is best)
1 tablespoon superfine sugar
6 to 8 fresh mint leaves (roll each mint leaf in your fingers before dropping into the glass)
2 ounces light rum
3 to 4 ounces chilled club soda
Fresh mint sprig

Shaken, not stirred – Shake the lime juice, sugar, mint leaves, and rum vigorously with ice. Without straining, pour the entire contents of the shaker into a highball glass flamingo glass, and top with club soda. Garnish with the mint sprig. Complete with a straw.

Other than the mint sprigs, measure out each of the ingredients to keep the ratio (and taste) perfect.

Recipe adapted from the The Ultimate Bar Book: The Comprehensive Guide to Over 1,000 Cocktails (link to recipe).

The Secret to Impressing Your Friends

The thing that surprised me the most about serving about a gallon’s worth of mojitos at my party was how much people are in awe of special skills like cooking or following a recipe. I experience this whenever I bring a homemade pie to a dinner party.

From what some of my friends tell me, it’s like this – people who can follow a recipe usually can because someone showed them how to at one point in their life. And as I’ve learned from making pies and now cocktails from scratch, if you want to learn how to do something, all you need to do is find the directions and learn how to do it.

Violà! Instant party trick!

What’s the best cocktail you’ve mixed at home? And what’s the recipe?