Blogmas 2014 Round Up

After my 31st post of the month goes up tomorrow, I will have completed Blogmas 2014! My first official Blogmas challenge and success and my second successful attempt at blogging every day for a month (my first attempt was October of this year).

Hello December

Can you believe that it is December already? In only 23 days it will be Christmas and then not long afterwards it will be 2015... Crazy!

Recently I decided to change up my monthly goal posts a bit and do more of a 'things I hope to accomplish' post combined with a 'things I accomplished last month' post, thus giving birth to my Hello posts.

Without further ado, here is my first Hello post: Hello December

Starting off with what I accomplished last month, in November, I:

1. Participated and won NaNo: this is a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which I won by writing 50,176. It was tough and I fell behind by 9000 words at one point so I am super proud to have completed the challenge!
2. Continued with my blog: I am not too happy with how infrequently I have been posting recently and while I am hoping to change that, I am glad that I didn't completely ignore my blog!
3. Ate no McDonald's or KFC's: before November, my boyfriend and I were eating two-three a week which is pretty awful! However, neither of us ate either of these, despite my sister offering me some nuggets in the final days of November!
4. Continued with 100 Days Happiness: although my 51-60 day post was late, I have continued with the Resolution and am determined to see it through to the end.
5. Did a hefty amount of the birth sampler: I mentioned that I wanted to complete a cross-stitch for my nephew to record his birth and I managed to get quite a chunk of it done this month.

However, I didn't...

1. Complete the birth sampler
2. Continue to learn Spanish (I want to turn this around though)
3. Read as much as I wanted to

Overall, I am pretty happy with how November went, especially since I had a pretty intense work schedule for about two weeks. However, my December work schedule is great so I have a few ambitious goals I would like to achieve this month:

1. Complete the birth sampler
2. Read a lot - I'll admit that I am going to cheat slightly on this as I have a few short Christmas books to read but I definitely want to read more this month.
3. Finish writing the book I started for NaNo
4. Go back through and edit my NaNo book so that I feel comfortable allowing others to read it.
5. Overhaul my blog: I really need to give my blog some TLC so I would love to be able to do that this month!
6. Blogmas? I would love to do Blogmas - and I'm not doing too bad at the minute, but can I keep it up?

What do you hope to accomplish this month?

- Taisie ♥ | Bloglovin ♥ Twitter ♥ Tumblr ♥ Pinterest ♥ Instagram

Get to Know Me in 21 Questions!

I simply love tags... They are quick and easy but reveal a lot about the writer and since I love learning about people, I thought I would do the 21 Questions tag so you can all learn a little more about me!

News for Taisie Odele: The Blog!

As I mentioned in my September Goals post a few days ago, it is one of my goals this month to become more consistent with my blog posts. I haven't been so great at writing recently, leaving up to four days between blog posts. I know that's not awful, but when I have found a blogger or YouTuber that I love, I want them to post daily!

My lack of posts isn't due to a lack of ideas but rather a lack of structure so I set about devising a plan so I know exactly what to write on each day.

If all goes to plan, I will be posting on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, plus any other one-off random posts that I want to write. That sounds like quite a log (and maybe I am horrifically underestimating the workload involved in blogging 5 days a week!) but some of the ideas of posts I have stored up in my post bank should be quite quick and easy to do... I hope!

Keep your eyes peeled for the themes appearing over the following weeks of blog posts!

September 2014 Goals

Last year I set myself the challenge of eating no McDonald's for the month of June. June passed, as did July and then August. Having that challenge made it fairly easy for me to forgo the chicken nuggets and McFlurrys so I transferred that onto other aspects of my life.
Pretty soon, life got in the way and I ended up forgetting all about the monthly goals. Recently, however, I have been feeling unsatisfied with life. I feel as though I waste a lot of my time and having so many things I wish to do with my life, I don't want to waste any more precious seconds of my life so I have decided to bring back my monthly goals.

Working hard for what you've already got

A lot of people might think that once they have achieved or won something, they can keep it without having to try. Now that is true for certain incidences, such as winning a toy at a fete or achieving a set of great exam results. However there are plenty of different scenarios in life for when this isn't true and keeping something you have already worked hard for can be as hard as achieving it in the first place.