My 2020 Vision

-
January always feels like the most boring month of the year. The excitement of the festive period is over, the decorations are down, everyone is going back to work or school. Everything goes back to normal.

I had the most relaxing time off. Christmas Day was spent at my brother's house with my family, including my 2-year-old niece and my 1-month old nephew. It was a lovely day, full of food, drink, cuddles and playing, although I'm quite sure I've seen enough variety of Peppa Pig toys to last me a lifetime!

The days that followed were mostly spent in comfy clothes, and eating all manner of rubbish. I made a point of spending as much time as I could with my mum; I introduced her to the wonders of Netflix by bingeing a show called Frequency (which I highly recommend if you’re a fan of time travel and/or detective shows) and went on a couple of very long shopping trips at Asda with her. One of those trips was until about 1:30am. Yep.
On New Year’s Eve I got rather drunk while watching The Inbetweeners Movie, which Mum loved, and on New Year’s Day we had Christmas 2.0 at home. We exchanged presents and ate even more food, including one of Mum’s mountainous roast dinners, which we shared with the cats, of course. Then came Mum’s birthday on the 2nd, followed by a couple of days spent hibernating in my room, in between doing grown-up things like laundry and tidying.
Before I knew it, though, it was time to come back to work.

The first week back has been a struggle. After so much time off, I expected to return to the office feeling refreshed and raring to go. Instead, I feel sluggish and generally knackered. It probably stems from the anticlimax that always follows a break, but I think it doesn’t help that I’m not exactly in love with what I do. Maybe one day I’ll break free of my comfort zone enough to change that!

I don’t even know what happened to 2019. I know everyone is saying this, but it honestly feels like it went by in such a blur, but it was actually quite a good one. We did some redecorating at home, I had a couple of much needed solitary breaks, I got to witness McFly put on an incredible show at the O2 and of course the biggest highlight was the birth of my nephew.
It’s safe to say, as years go, I’ve definitely had worse ones.

Looking ahead, there are a few things 2020 has in store for me, a couple of which I’m really looking forward to and one potentially a big change, which could be interesting.

One of my resolutions (which I’ve only just decided on while I’m writing this sentence) is to try and finish what I start. Towards the end of October I began using Duolingo for some French lessons, just for fun. Now I find myself on an 84 day streak and I can confidently say things like ‘Je ne suis pas saoul, je suis juste ivre de vous’ or ‘Ta mère est un chien’. Who knows, by the end of this year I could be reading whole books that are written in French - even if they are only children’s ones!

I also started to teach myself how to crochet, with the help of some videos on YouTube. So far I’ve made something that could be classed as a tiny little pouch, a wristband, a wonky scarf and a beanie hat. My current project is hopefully going to resemble a jumper when I’m finished!
Half of my trouble is that I get impatient to get to the finished product. I want to be good at what I’m doing, and I want that to happen now, so I’m always setting the bar too high for myself.
You know that scene in Eddie the Eagle, where he’s successfully jumped that lower slope, then he’s like ‘What a doddle! Right, I think I’m ready for that bigger one’?
That’s what I’m like with crochet, if not with everything.

Well, my goal for this year is to see things through, and not get bored and give up if something isn’t going well quite as quickly as I’d like. Yes, that also applies to all the jigsaw puzzles I’ve yet to complete, including the Where’s Wally one my brother gave me for Christmas.

It seems I’m going to have a lot to keep me occupied, if I stick with it!

All being well, it’s not going to be the quietest of years, but hopefully it’s set to be a positive one, on the whole.

Happy New Year!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

There's 7 Things I Hate About... Jigsaw Puzzles

-
Image
I spent most of my week off working on a jigsaw puzzle. It was a ‘Cat Lover’s Puzzle’ with different breeds of cats depicted on it. It’s worth remembering that, it’s going to be my point of reference throughout this. It was more challenging than I had thought, particularly because of some hiccups I came across on the first day. I was trying to use a cardboard box as my Puzzle Assembly Surface (that’s its actual name) because it was the only free solid surface I had in my room and it seemed more practical than the floor. However, I soon found it was just slightly too short and too narrow which irritated me more than it probably should have done. I didn’t realise it was possible to rage-quit a jigsaw puzzle, but there we are. I started a-fresh the following day – yes, on the floor – and while I was plodding along, I found myself compiling a list in my head of the most frustrating things about doing a jigsaw puzzle. I had originally planned to tweet about it but I didn’t think it would...
Read more

Attached to Temptation.

-
I can't deny that I'm a very emotional person. It's so obvious; it would be pointless even trying to deny it. In school, I was the cry-baby of the class. It really wouldn't take much to set me off, which is quite embarrassing to admit. I was the goody-two-shoes of the class too; I was never really told off properly, so I can't even blame it on that. Although, thinking about it, maybe that would have helped toughen me up a bit. I haven't exactly grown out of being that fuzzball of emotion, but it has adapted and is focused around slightly less trivial things. Thankfully I'm no longer of an age where I go all teary if I'm told I have to eat those spaghetti hoops in my school dinner, whether I like them or not. (Yes. I was that bad.) While I don't burst into tears at the smallest thing like I used to, I do still let things go to heart more than I should. To paraphrase McBusted: I'm just a sensitive girl.
Read more

My Ancestral Quest

-
Image
History has always fascinated me, well, local history more than anything. I mean, it was sort of interesting to learn in school about the Romans and the Battle of Hastings and all those Roundheads, but when it came to the topics about things like the two World Wars, my curiosity would lie with the social aspects of it – what life was like for those on The Home Front and the effect it had on the local areas. Even outside of the classroom, I was always looking for pictures of what the local high street looked like years ago and wondering what the house I grew up in would have looked like when it was first built. As I’ve grown up, that interest has evolved, and of course the internet has helped massively. In recent years I’ve found old maps of where I lived which was positively mesmerising. Afterwards, I would be out walking with friends and then take great pride in pointing out that a particular street we were passing used to be the location of a football ground in the 1890s. It isn’...
Read more