Happiness is…
February 15th, 2010
It’s amazing how quickly the excitement of a fresh idea can lose it’s lustre after just a few weeks. Take for instance my grand plan to revolutionise New Years Resolutions forever. (Well mine anyway).
The original plan was to, at the end of the month, write a blog post about one experience or event that happened in the past 30 odd days. I thought it was an interesting idea, but when one of the things I want to focus on in 2010 is improving my writing (both in volume and quality), then once a month just isn’t going to cut it. In my notes I’ve only managed to scrounge up 9 events anyway, so I’d already failed before I began.
Getting back to the New Years Resolutions, it seemed like last year I’d just thought up a bunch of things to pass the time without putting any thought into the why. Why was I doing each resolution? What would I get out of them?
I guess this was the other problem I had with ‘the grand plan’.
Then there’s the infamous Things To Do Before I Die list. Realistically is should be a list of things I can only do at certain points in my life. Like punching an octogenarian in the solar plexus without feeling shame. I think I might retire it, or at least take it down from this website.
What to do with this blog then?
I should always be updating it. Whether it’s a link dump, image or a 500 word micro-epic about the joys of CSS3 (and there are many joys to behold). Doesn’t matter as long as the site is kept pumping.
The comic reviews were always popular, so my site statistics say,but I just couldn’t keep churning them out. Not when I wasn’t putting anything back out there for review myself. It just didn’t seem right. Why should I publicly criticise other people’s hard work when I wasn’t willing to bare my own work to the world?
I really don’t like the look of the site and I think thats one reason I’ve stayed away. The design was dated back when it launched and just looks eye-bleedingly horrible now. I’m going to redesign the site with an aim of making it infinitely easier to read. I’ve been immersed in the User Experience field for the last 2 years, so there’s no excuse for why this site still looks and behaves like it does.
I know I keep making promises that I don’t return to for weeks at a time, but this is really important to me. Having said that you probably won’t hear back about the redesign for a few weeks, but rest assured that I’ll keep updating this site regardless.
Seen in a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory*. $395 from DC Direct.
*Starring every late model Generation Xer’s preteen crush Danica McKellar.
And now it’s time for the traditional look back at the year that’s been.
I set seven resolutions for 2009 and forgot half of them just a few weeks later.
Pass.
Call it laziness or fear of the unknown or that I work best under pressure, but I didn’t attempt to make bread until just a few days before the year ended.
I’d been told that making bread without using a machine to knead the dough would be extremely difficult, but I had no problems with that or any part of the process. In a nutshell throw flour, sugar and salt into a bowl, then add a cup of beaten eggs, lukewarm water and yeast. Follow that up with two session of kneading sessions alternating with two rest sessions. Bung it in the oven for 30 minutes and you’ve got one crusty white bread loaf. Too easy.
Fail.
I remembered I had this down as a resolution about two days after mushrooming season finished. Whoops.
Pass.
I was all psyched up to make sausages this year, but then my contacts decided they’d much rather go on a holiday.
To make up for that I took a sausage making class through CAE back in October, so I at least had something of sausage making experience.
Fail.
Another resolution I completely forgot about.
I did attempt NaNoWriMo in November and managed to write just over 19,000 words. So this year wasn’t a complete bust in terms of my writing.
Fail.
I started Script Frenzy. I finished Script Frenzy.
Did I write 100 page? No.
Fail.
Another resolution I completely forgot about. (Are you sensing a theme yet?)
Fail.
I became a full member of my work gym at the start of 2009. I had my first program written up for me in mid-Jan with new iterations every 6 – 8 weeks.
From 14th Jan to 21st Dec I went from 93.3kg to 90.8kg and my body fat percentage dropped from 26.6% to 25.5%. So I only ended up losing 2.5kg in weight. BUT, I lost centimetres off my legs as bi-weekly sessions on the spin cycle began to tighten up my leg and hip muscles. On top of that I’m lifting over twice the weight was was when I first started there. Moving to the “big boy” free weights was probably the highlight of my gym year.
Two Passes, five Fails.
It’s become very clear that New Year Resolutions and I do not mix well. So there will be no resolutions this year. They’re too easy to make and too easy to break.
I have a better idea for 2010. One that I’m really excited about and has the benefit of not needing year long management like New Year goddamn Resolutions. But I’ll save that for another post.
Despite the setback of not having a functioning vegetable garden I was able to meet the Pasta Primavera challenge, as the photo above will attest.
I had a rough, several hundred word post in my head on my adventures in vegetable outsourcing, how I made my own pasta from scratch and only discovered the chosen Primavera recipe a day before I was due to cook it.
But this photo says it all really. I did it.