photo via thewhitepepper

Hey there and welcome to Weekly Wishes, where I talk about the goals or challenges I want to achieve this week and also let you share your own through the link-up below. I’d love for you to join me and add a link to your own goal-oriented post! It’s a great way to make new friends from around the world and gain some motivation to achieve your weekly aspirations.

Hello m’dears! Happy March!!!!! How was your week? Mine was spent working, mainly. I got SO MUCH DONE. I changed part of my daily routine (details on that later) and it really amped my productivity.

I also spent some of the week worrying about Monja. He had a little limp, so we went to the vet, but couldn’t find any real problems, so he prescribed us some medication that totally did the trick! So, naturally I found something new to worry about… 😉 Last night I took Monja outside to potty and a neighbor I’d never met said ominously, “the coyotes are out right now.” That’s it, that’s all he said. I spent the whole evening analyzing his words. “The coyotes,” as in, they’re a known group that scouts out our neighborhood? “Right now,” as in, you just saw one prancing by? WHERE ARE THE COYOTES AND WILL THEY EAT MY SMALL FURRY CHILD? My new apartment is literally steps away from a nature reserve, so I figured they might live nearby, but that guy really freaked me out haha. I saw him again tonight and asked him about the coyotes and he said he’d heard of places not too far from our community where coyotes would snatch dogs off of leashes! AHH. The horror! I just bought an air horn off of Amazon so that I could scare a coyote away if it ever approached my dog. I’m that crazy lady. I am probably overreacting as per usual, but I cannot imagine anything happening to Monja. On a sidenote, I spent 20 minutes crying this weekend after reading about two Instagram-ers whose dogs died. Instagram-ers I’ve never met, don’t even follow, and whose dogs didn’t die from anything remotely similar to a coyote attack. But, you know, dogs + death = Melyssa ugly crying. It’s science, people.

Last Month’s Wishes

1. Host the OC Blogger Brunch. Did it!! Recap of the festivities coming soon. 🙂 For now, here are a couple lovely recaps from Jess and Nicole.
2. Make something I’m proud of in my pottery class. I definitely made some progress this month! I’m slowly getting the hang of the wheel and I’ve started glazing my pieces. Next week will be the first week I get back a completely finished piece — can’t wait to see what it looks like!
3. Pay my taxes. Done! Such a weight off my shoulders.
4. Move into my new apartment! Done! Woohoo!
5. FInish Monja’s behavioral training series. We ended up not finishing the series…yet. The classes are very expensive and I wanted to spend some more time with Monja to practice. We’re going to go back to group training classes starting tomorrow, but we might do private lessons again if we need them.
6. Work diligently on my new shop’s product line and aim for a March launch date. I made SO much progress that I’m stoked about! But I feel like I’ll never feel fully finished. I’m going to aim to launch it by the end of this month, even if it doesn’t feel totally done — because, will it ever? I can always add more items when the time is right. 🙂
7. Reach 100,000+ monthly pageviews. We did it!! Woohoo! 🙂
   
8. Take less baths. Y’all, I did so good on this one. You might think this is a weird goal, but I was taking a bath every single night before and wanted to cut back. It literally felt like an addiction!
9. Read a book. Well….I started a book. 😉

This Month’s Wishes

1. Open my shop!! This will be the last peep you hear out of me about this ol’ shop. I know it’s probably getting redundant! But I’m just a little excited. 🙂 I’m really pushing for an end-of-March launch date. I seriously can’t tell you HOW MUCH work goes into opening an online shop. Major props to everyone who’s already doing it!
2. Get a table for my dining room area. Last week, one of my goals was to research how to build a dining table, which I did! It honestly doesn’t seem that hard. 2013 Melyssa would probably scoff at that statement, but I bought a drill in January and have suddenly grown an outlandish desire to build ALL THE THINGS.
3. Stay on budget. I downloaded the Mint app the other night (anyone else use it?) and I am so infatuated with it! It basically tracks all of your accounts — checking, credit card, etc — and knows what you spend and what you spend it on. It showed me how much money I’ve spent in recent months and what I’ve been buying. February might have been the most expensive month of my LIFE. A lot of that was due to moving and taxes, but there was tons of miscellaneous spending too. I created budgets for all of the typical things I spend money on, so I’m hoping to stick to these and even lower them over time.
4. Take a new Skillshare class. That also happens to be the theme of the upcoming Creative Collective prompt (this Wednesday!). I’ve been wish-listing way too many classes that I’m interested in, so narrowing it down might be a leeetle bit difficult. Have you ever taken a Skillshare class?
5. Sign up for a new community art class. My ten-week pottery class will be ending this month (or early April…I forget!). But I want to sign up for a class for the next term because I’ve been enjoying it so much! I am really digging ceramics and might stick with it, or I might dabble in something new. We’ll see!
6. Go to 3+ group training classes with Monja. Basically, we miss them. It was such a fun weekly routine for us and Monja LOVED the classes we were taking. Unfortunately, our old training center is now 30+ minutes from our new apartment (before it was like 10-15), but we’re going to try and stick with them because we love those people so much!
7. Build my bookshelf. I bought a cheapy bookshelf from IKEA and spray-painted it, not realizing that it needs a freakin’ WRENCH to put it together. I’ll need to go buy myself a wrench to get this puppy built!

 WEEKLY WISHES LINKUP RULES

1. Share your posts about your goals, challenges, or wishes for the week, month, year, decade, whatever! Entries completely unrelated to the theme or linked to your homepage will be deleted. 

2. Link back to this site so others can get their goal-setting on, too! You can use the button below if you’d like!

<div align="center"><a href="https://melyssagriffin.com/tags/weekly-wishes/" title="The Nectar Collective" target="_blank"><img src="https://melyssagriffin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/weekly-wishes-button.jpg" alt="The Nectar Collective" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

3. You can link up your posts on any day of the week, but the most common day to do so is Monday. 🙂

4. THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE OF ALL! You MUST visit the person’s blog who linked up directly before you and leave them a motivating comment. This is such an important part of this linkup! We are each here to encourage each other and build a community of determined women and friends. 🙂 If you do not do this, your post will be deleted from the link-up.

p.s. “Budget Lover” ads are buy-one, get-one-free this week! I may be retiring this ad spot in the near future, so this may be your last chance to get your purdy face into that spot. There’s no promo code, just buy the ad as usual and I will adjust it so that it will run for 60, rather than 30 days. You can buy that right hurrrr. 🙂

p.p.s. I totally heard your suggestions last week about what I should do with the Weekly Wishes featured photos. Still deciding what to do, but thank you for sharing your ideas — there were some awesome ones that are helping me shape something fun and new for us! 🙂