That's it, I'm finally jumping on this blogging bandwagon!

For more than four years, I have intended to start a blog. I made a few initial efforts that went nowhere, mostly because I felt I had no time – and zero energy – left after work for personal development or hobbies or volunteering or...most anything else, actually. However, recently I decided to address my work–life imbalance by scaling-back at work to 60% of full-time from January 2 until the end of April, 2013. I'm calling this period a time to catch my breath.  For the next four months, I'm making the time and finding the energy to cultivate the skills and experiences that have sat on my sadly neglected, dust-covered 'to-do' list for far too long.
I think my first official post (the next one, this is just a warm-up) will be to outline my concrete goals for what I want to achieve while I 'catch my breath'. To kick it all off, this warm-up post will cover my specific for this blog, which are as follows:

Overall Goals for this Blog:

• To document the experiences and events that matter to me. Even if no one reads these posts, I still gain from the time spent in self-reflection.

• To practice the skills needed to create interesting and compelling blog entries, including: writing, photo editing, and the ability to network using online social media tools like facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and blogger.

• To overcome (or at least, lessen) my fear of being criticized, which often leads me to perpetually delay sharing anything I create because it isn’t yet ‘perfect’.

• To publicly express my opinion on different issues both large and small.

Specific Content Goals:

• To journal my experiences over the next four months as I take a break from full-time work to explore other interests.

• To share with my teaching colleagues around the world some of the pedagogical knowledge and best teaching practices I'm learning about during my as a Science Teaching and Learning Fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

How Often I Will Post:

• I will make a post once a week for (at least) the first two months. Hopefully, this will get me into the habit of generating posts regularly.