The way of the resolutions...

Like many New Year’s resolutions, mine haven’t really managed to last until the end of January, let alone the year. My resolution to eat more fruit and veg hasn’t stopped me having pizza for dinner two days in a row (although if I have vegetable toppings, does that make it healthy?) As for exercise, well I cycled to the station once and got a little freaked out by a couple of passing lorries that were a little too close for comfort and haven’t felt inclined to try again. Maybe when the weather is better. Although that won’t stop the lorries...

In need of social interaction

One of the things I find I have been missing about my old job is the weekly team meetings. Working on-call, going out and doing visits on your own can be quite lonely sometimes and it was always good to be able to catch up with the other midwives each week. Those of us that are still working together do meet up of course, but not as often as we did before. Plus now that I no longer work in the office, I also miss the social interaction there. Something tells me I need to get out more and socialise!

Date night

With Michael so busy at work at the moment, it doesn’t seem as though I get to see very much of him so it was really good to finally be able to spend some time together and go out on a “date night” to the cinema. We went to see The Kings Speech, which we had heard was a good film (although the fact that Colin Firth as in it was enough to tempt me!) It definitely lived up to expectations – really good acting, very funny in places and one of the best films I have seen for a while.

Paperback pluses

I heard on today’s news that e-book sales have overtaken paperback sales on Amazon’s US website. For the last couple of years, Michael has kept asking me in the run-up to Christmas or my birthday whether I want an e-book reader. So far the answer is no, and I still can’t see me changing my mind. I do read some (free) books on the iPad but it’s not the same. I also resent paying the same for an e-book as a paperback that I can always keep reading even if technologies change. And using the local library costs me nothing.

Procrastination

I started off this week with good intentions. There are so many things around the house that I intended to do and my diary hadn’t seemed all that full so there seemed to be plenty of time for me to be productive. And here is Thursday already and somehow all I have managed to do is keep up with the normal day-to-day things that need doing and have hardly managed to do any of the other things I intended to do. Somehow, other things have provided distractions – books that I’ve gotten absorbed in or an afternoon spent playing the piano.

Church craft club

We now have a regular craft group meeting at the church twice a month. The current plan is that one session per month will be spent focusing on a particular craft technique (various card-making techniques, appliqué, glass painting and hardanger embroidery are amongst the current suggestions) and making something for ourselves and then the other session will be focusing on a longer-term project to make something for the church. Today’s session has focused on using silk and paper flowers in card-making and then in two weeks’ time, we are going to start making a new banner for inside the church.

Back to tap

Back to tap tonight after a bit of an extended Christmas break – lessons actually started back two weeks ago but I didn’t realise this until last week! After a six week break from classes, it was quite surprising how many steps have actually stayed in my brain – I had a few blank moments but on the whole it wasn’t too bad. Which is just as well really, as it is looking fairly likely that the next tap exam will be sometime in March. There’s still a lot of work needed between now and then but hopefully I will get there!

Flat for sale

Our old flat is up for sale and it made me feel a little bit sad looking through photos of it on the rightmove website. It is described as “immaculate” and “in excellent decorative order” (we must have done a reasonable job on the repainting!) and the photos look really good – I almost want to move back (although I know the lack of space would drive me insane!) I love our new house, it’s just that we haven’t had time to build up many memories here yet and we have so many lovely memories from our time in the flat.

Too well hidden

I’m usually fairly good at hiding things, like presents, around the house so that Michael won’t find them (apart from one time when I hid something on the top shelf of a cupboard before I realised that whilst I couldn’t see it, it was almost at eye level for Michael!) In the run-up to Christmas last year, I was obviously a bit better at it than usual because I’ve now found two more presents for Michael that I hid and then must have forgotten about. Maybe I should save them for his birthday but I’ll probably forget about them again!

Aladdin

Had a lovely trip home to see my sister, niece and nephew performing in the local panto, Aladdin. It seemed most of my family had also decided to come to see the same performance so we took up most of the back row. Unfortunately, the sound wasn’t great and whilst we could hear the principals, we couldn’t hear a word of any of the chorus’ songs. It was a shame as we could see everyone was putting lots of effort in – if only there had been a few float mics on the stage, it would have been so much better!