...in which it's another new year.
It appears there's no way of stopping new years arriving, It also appears that even though I know it's entirely a fictional construct and that if you really want to change you don't need a new year to do it, I'm incapable of not using them as an excuse to make resolutions, some of which I even manage to keep.
Now that the house has been de-Christmassed, the children's birthdays are all over (2 of our children have birthdays very close to Christmas - one just before, one just after), and we've stopped eating chocolate for breakfast and drinking wine for lunch (mostly) I thought maybe I should start writing blogs again, since it seems I barely bothered last year.
I've only been within my Slimming World target for one week in the last year; most of the time I've been a fair bit above it (although I am still about 3 stone lighter than when I started). Now that the inevitable gorge-fest that is Christmas is over my first resolution is to get back into my target range by the end of February; that means losing about 2lb a week, which ought to be doable.
I have managed to keep up with my running at least, and I can still do 10 miles or more on a Sunday without too much trouble, so my second resolution is to do another marathon and half marathon this year; I'm likely to do Shrewsbury half marathon (hopefully they'll actually make sure it's a full 13.1 miles this year after last year's "oops, we went you the wrong way" mess that chopped 0.5 miles off the course). I think I'll do Chester Marathon as that's in October which gives me more time to train than most others, as I'd really like to aim for a faster time than I got in Manchester last year (plus it's cheaper).
Other resolutions...well, I bought myself a new acoustic guitar and amplifier over Christmas (I did trade in a couple of older guitars), which are both very nice; the amplifier has 2 channels which can be used concurrently, so I can also plug a microphone into it, although amplifying my voice isn't necessarily the best idea in the world (reverb and an EQ does help a bit though). I'd like to do more with music...resolutions should be measurable though, so I think I'll commit to learning at least 1 new scale per month in every position on the neck and recording at least one song per month.
Finally, I will attempt to write at least one blog post a week, mainly about how I'm doing with the other resolutions. Hopefully that will motivate me to actually stick to them, but we shall see...
Oh, here's a picture of the new guitar and amp:
Oh, here's a picture of the new guitar and amp:
