Iesus Non Amat Me

New year, new theme! Christmas may be over but it's still winter so this snowman theme is totally appropriate.

This year has been all right so far. I gave blood a couple of weeks ago and it all went smoothly, so that was good. Work has been a little rougher with various people falling ill. And because one of my colleagues has just tested positive for Covid I now have to do Lateral Flow tests every day for a week. Such fun!

My friends and I have got into Wordle and we compare our results every day over WhatsApp, which I'm really enjoying. I'm currently stuck in a 4/6 rut though and it's getting a bit ridiculous now! My aim for the year is to score 2/6. Or even the hallowed 1/6, although that is more a case of really, really good luck more than anything else!

Speaking of aims for the year, it's time to look back at my New Year's Goals for 2021 and see how I fared:

1. Walk more. (I'm never going to like formal exercise, but I do enjoy walking around places. Especially if it's a good place for photography. Hopefully it won't be long before I can travel again too.) I would call this one a success. Now we have Tormund walks are a regular thing and I'm definitely doing a lot more exercise than I had been! I've also been taking photographs, although mostly of the same woods. I had hoped that I'd be able to venture a bit further afield, but that's a separate issue to the specific goal of walking more.

2. Post all of my 2019 365 photos before the end of 2021. (I'm not giving up on this just because it's two years ago now.) Fail. I did make a bit of progress in choosing what photos I plan to post but then... never got round to doing it.

3. Get back into reading books and finish all the ones I've got on the go right now. (I do love fics and I'm not going to stop reading them, but I should try and branch out a little. Get a bit more variety in my reading habits.) Yeah, well, ahem. So, I did read a bit more of the books I've got on the go but I didn't end up finishing any of them. So, also fail.

4. Post the fanfictions that I'm currently working on Oh, god, total fail. I want to. I really do. But I'm so worried that they're shit. And as much as I tell myself that you have to start somewhere and improve from there, my anxiety hates the idea of posting something bad.

Right, well, to misquote Meat Loaf (RIP), one out of four ain't bad.

So, what are my goals for this year going to be?

1. Post more of my 2019 photos. It doesn't have to be all of them, just make some progress. Any progress. Please.

2. Finish the damn books you're currently reading. Yes, including that one you haven't looked at since 2018. You can remember the plot, right?

3. POST YOUR FIC. It has been literal years. Just post it and stop worrying that everyone is judging you.

4. Score 2/6 on Wordle.

And there you have it. Will I actually accomplish any of these things this year? Only time will tell!

Well, so far the first day of 2021 is going pretty well. Work was fairly quiet with no problems or horrible customers. Possibly because most people assume we'll be closed New Year's Day. Which, to be honest, I think we could be. It would make us all a lot happier too.

This is the point where I look back at the resolutions specific goals I made for myself this time last year and have to admit that I have failed every single one of them in every single way.

1. Find a form of exercise that I don't hate. I'm sorry, I just hate exercise. I could say I was hampered by the gyms having to close, but if I'm honest with myself I'd have been too scared to go anyway.

2. Post all of my 2019 365 photos before the end of 2020. Did I post a single 365 photo last year? No. No, I did not. I don't know why I keep procrastinating this so much. Possibly because most days I took quite a few pics and I'll have to choose which ones to use and, as we all know, I am forever paralysed by indecision.

3. Finish reading all the books I've got on the go right now (Furiously Happy, Wild Magic, The President is Missing, A Dance With Dragons: Dreams and Dust) before the end of 2020. I did not finish a single one of those books. But I did read bucketloads of fanfic. Of which I also have multiple stories on the go at any one time cos I keep starting a new one before I've finished the old.

4. Post the fanfiction that I'm currently working on. It is still not posted. It is also still not finished and, as with everything else on this list, I have made little to no progress on it in the last twelve months. I did start writing three other fics though, which is not at all helpful for this particular goal.

So there we have it. Total fail. I feel like I should be able to blame 2020 for this. Everything about that year was just crazy and I don't think it should count.

Actually, yeah, that's what I'm going to do. 2020 doesn't count and I'm trying again. Here are my New Year's Goals for 2021:

1. Walk more. (I'm never going to like formal exercise, but I do enjoy walking around places. Especially if it's a good place for photography. Hopefully it won't be long before I can travel again too.)

2. Post all of my 2019 365 photos before the end of 2021. (I'm not giving up on this just because it's two years ago now.)

3. Get back into reading books and finish all the ones I've got on the go right now. (I do love fics and I'm not going to stop reading them, but I should try and branch out a little. Get a bit more variety in my reading habits.)

4. Post the fanfictions that I'm currently working on. (Yes, all of them. Probably won't happen but I can try. I need to make myself sit down and actually focus on writing though, which has been difficult lately.)

So there we have it. My goals for this year. Hopefully I will do a better job of achieving them this time around!

Happy New Decade!

I don't think I'm going to make any resolutions this year, but this seems like a good time to have a look back at how successful I was with the ones I made last time:

1. Take up running. I did it for a while and I successfully completed the 7k run in May, but after that I just... stopped. Turns out running is actually really boring. I'm proud of myself for completing the 7k though.

2. Do a 365 Project where you take a photo a day for the whole year. I was almost entirely successful with this. I know there were a handful of days I forgot, but for the most part I did take a photo a day. Where I failed was finding time to put them online!

3. Finish reading books. Complete failure here. I still have the terrible habit of starting new books while I'm in the middle of old ones. I do exactly the same thing with fanfiction too.

Actually, you know what? I am going to make resolutions this year. Or not resolutions as such, but specific goals related to last year's resolutions:

1. Find a form of exercise that I don't hate.

2. Post all of my 2019 365 photos before the end of 2020.

3. Finish reading all the books I've got on the go right now (Furiously Happy, Wild Magic, The President is Missing, A Dance With Dragons: Dreams and Dust) before the end of 2020.

4. Post the fanfiction that I'm currently working on.

Ok, so that last one isn't related to last year's resolutions but I wanted to put it down as well to motive myself to keep going and not give up when I find myself thinking that it's completely rubbish and nobody will want to read it.

It's a week into the new year so this seems like a good time to check in and see how I'm doing with my resolutions:

1. Take up Running. I'm using the Couch to 5k app and did my first run today which didn't go too badly. I started off pretty well but flagged towards the middle and had to walk for some of the time I was supposed to be running. In my defence I had had a pretty busy time at work beforehand and had already done 10,000 steps before I even started to run so it's not like I was lazing around all day!

I am going to have to invest in better headphones though. I went for a rather cheap wireless pair and as well as sounding horribly tinny they keep cutting out, which isn't ideal when you're relying on an app to tell you when to start and stop runs. Edit: I went back and checked and they weren't as cheap as I thought, so I tried listening to something else with them and they worked perfectly, so maybe it's the app that's at fault. That would be annoying. I'll have to see how it sounds next time.

2. Do a 365 Project. I have been taking a photo every day so far. I haven't put them all online yet, but I will. I've also had to upgrade my Flickr account cos they're limiting free accounts to 1000 photos instead of the 1TB that they originally offered. I could look around for another free service, but I like Flickr and its usability and I feel that £3.99 per month is a reasonable price to pay for it. (See Photobucket, if you'd asked for that instead of the absolutely ridiculous $400 a year that you wanted then you might have been the ones to get my money. But I'm glad you didn't cos Flickr is so much easier to use than Photobucket ever was.)

3. Finish Reading Books. I'm working on it. I'm limiting myself to only reading one book at the moment and hopefully should finish it soon, which will bring my Books On The Go list down to four.

Happy End of the Old Year! I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

My Christmas was good. It was just me, Mum and Rob as usual. I did stockings for us all this year cos I thought that Father Christmas had been neglecting us too long and it's always fun to open stockings in the morning. I also made some crackers (from a kit, but still pretty impressive!) and once again made Mum work for her presents. I'd made her an Advent Calendar at the beginning of December and each day contained a hint or riddle to which the answer was a letter. And then I locked up her main present with a combination lock and a tag that indicated how to use the letters to work out the code needed to open it.

( Photos Under the Cut )

I did hit a low point a couple of days after Christmas Day though. I felt so thoroughly miserable, which I think was probably due to a combination of Christmas Day being over (there's all this excitement in the build up to Christmas and I love it so much that when it's over there's a huge emotional crash) and having to go back to work (especially when I keep seeing all these people on Twitter talking about how the days between Christmas and New Year are this no-man's land where no work gets done and you just watch films on the TV while eating chocolate and leftovers all day, and meanwhile I'm back at work at 7:30am the day after Boxing Day.)

I was also at work at 7:30 this morning, and I have to be there at 8 tomorrow (half an hour lie in! Woo!), so I hope I'm not going to be too tired to see in the New Year tonight. I'm hoping to make it to midnight, watch the fireworks, and then crash. I saw the Sydney ones earlier on the TV in the break room at work and they looked pretty spectacular.

Time for my annual New Year's memes. I'm feeling a bit tipsy at the moment because we didn't finish the champagne last night so I've taken it upon myself to make the sacrifice and drink the rest of it today. I hope my answers still make sense.

( Meme Number One: The Questions )

( Meme Number Two: The Sentences )

Hey, everyone! Time for my New Year's memes. My answers this year are more upbeat than I can ever remember them being previously, which has to be a good thing!

( Meme One: The Questions )

( Meme Two: The Sentences )

Happy New Year everyone. I hope people had fun at midnight. I was at home watching the fireworks on TV and drinking champagne with my parents. Yeah, I'm just that cool.

London's fireworks were very impressive this year though, much more so than they have been previously.

Anyway, on to my traditional New Year memes:

( Meme One: The Questions )

( Meme Two: The Sentences )

I hope everyone had a good New Year's. I certainly did. And now it is time for my traditional yearly memes.

Meme the First:

( The Questions )

And Meme the Second:

( The Sentences )

Happy 2007 everyone.

Time for the other yearly meme, namely the first and last lines of each months entries for the previous year. Funnily enough, a lot of them make sense if read as one thing. (My last exam would have been a lot easier if the answer was just 'yes'...)

( Monthly Meme )

Also, we have the resolution generator:

In the year 2007 I resolve to: Point and laugh more. Get your resolution here.

That was the first one I got, no cheating to find the best answer. I found it spookily appropriate considering what Paul and I talked about yesterday!