new year stuff

I have a few things in my head I've been meaning to put down here, lets give it a shake and see what falls out...

firstly I wanted to share the pleasing coincidence from yesterday: I've been gearing up to some over-due clearing out and tidying up about the place, spurred on by a November/December when I spent far too much time rootling in boxes and cupboards muttering "but I know I have X somewhere" where X is any one of a number of things, most of which I never found. Anyway I haven't really started doing it but I have started planning it which has made me more aware of all the places there are in my house for things to hide, the relevance of which will become clear toward the end of the next paragraph.

I don't do 'resolutions' since the whole idea seems to be astructure for us all feeling bad about ourselves, with New Year's resolutions what happens is that we all pick something that bugged us anbout last year, make it into an unreasonable goal for ourselves and then struggle hard to fail at it before about Burns' Night so that we can all reassure ourselves how useless and inadequate we are. Like I said i don't do it, what I did start doing a few years back though was writing a short list of five attainable goals for the year. 'nite and I both did this for 2002 and it worked really well - in both our cases the lists got mentally checked off and we each felt good about achieving what we achieved... the only trouble was that come 2003 the little book we'd put the lists in was stil AWOL in the post-move chaos... this is where my rediscovered awareness of the hiding places for things in my house comes in because yesterday, the 31st, I was in my room doing something completely unrelated when I stumbled over the self-same little book! great timing eh?

'nite and I each double-checked our old lists and each found that (for the most part) we'd done everything, of my five only one is still undone and that's because in the intervening time I decided it's a much longer term goal... anyway to see out 2003 we each wrote new lists and put the book 'somewhere safe' which hopefully on this occasion doesn't mean 'an obscure corner I'll forget in 12 months time'!

hm, that went on longer than expected - the only other thing really is that I'm in a really optimistic and happy head-space about this year generally... it seems like all the little niggling failures and mistakes from last year which I'd got inexplicably fixated with in December are done with and I'm ready to go out and make a whole new year's worth of new ones ;)

(posted retrospectively)