Happy New Year

I don’t know what I was doing this time last year so I am struggling to write a post that reflects on my year and how what I am doing today is different from what I was doing on 30^th December 2011. I am also struggling to write, two days before the start of 2013, about whether I achieved any of those new year’s resolutions people keep banging on about from 2012. If I am honest I don’t think I made any.

Because I can’t remember anything of any importance I would like to suggest you partake in a quick quiz. If you get all the answers right you get a prize. So here goes:-

Home

In February my partner and I moved in together, but who was I living with in 2011?

a)      Angry lesbian

      b)      Drunken slutty nurse

c)      Patronising housemate with a severe weight problem

d)     All of the above

Work

Whilst working on a massive project at work , I felt so stressed that I felt I could have vomited where?

a)      In the waste bin

      b)      On the printer
      c)      On my colleagues

d)     All of the above

Holiday

In September my partner and I went on holiday to Hawaii. What happened?

a)      We had a fantastic time

b)      I got sun burnt in stupid places

c)      No romantic proposal

d)     All of the above

Children

During 2012 I got asked:-

a)      Why I didn’t have children yet

b)      When was I going to have children

c)      Do I not have children because I don’t like them

d)     All of the above

Finances

I got nowhere saving money for what?

a)      Masters degree

b)      House deposit

c)      Eye surgery

d)     All of the above

Friendships

This year was made more wonderful because of whom?

a)      Some of my wonderful work colleagues

b)      All of my fantastic friends

c)      My long suffering partner

d)     All of the above

I have actually had quite a good (albeit busy) year; I have learnt a lot and gained a lot more. I personally feel that even if you haven’t ticked everything off your to-do lists or even if life has thrown curve balls your way than it is still a good year if you believe it to be.

I have a mental list of what I would like to achieve for 2013 (learn to drive, go on holiday, write more fiction, start my masters, get eye surgery etc) but I am aware that I may not be able to achieve them all (or any depending on how things go!) but I like to have a project list on the go just to make myself feel that I am working towards something.

Time will only tell if I achieve these things by the end of 2013 but if I don’t as long as I feel like I have had a good year than that is all that matters.

This is my last post of 2012, I hope you all have a fantastic start to 2013 and enjoy whatever it is you are doing for New Year’s Eve.

There is a saying that one picture is worth 1000 words. I struggled to find one picture that summed up my year so I chose a few pictures from a massive selection and have included them below as a collage.

Wishing you all happiness and health!

P.S. If you answered all of the above to the quiz then you are right. Well done. I bet that was so difficult.

Merry Christmas!!

This post does what it says on the tin...wishes you a Merry Christmas!

I've had a week off from work and am prepping myself for next week which I also have off so it's not been much of a bad life for me. I may need to add some elastic to my jeans mind as 6 lunches this week have definitley taken their toll on my waistline but I've refrained from eaten all the chocolates which is nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

I won't be writing much more but would like to impart on you to have a Merry Christmas with all your loved ones; that you drink, eat, laugh and be happy and healthy.

Please also enjoy the Christmas Guinea Pig, nature's most adorable rodent looking festive. Not my own piggie unfortunately as Wilbur would never sit still enough for you to place baubles around her in a decorative way. If I could it would be considered the biggest Christmas miracle.

If music be the food of love, play on

In and around December a man called Daniel Kim (not to be confused with Daniel Dae Kim who played razor-cheekboned Jin in Lost) spends on average 500 hours pouring over all the songs that were released during the year and merges them into a 50+ song mash-up.

This year's effort 'Pop Danthology 2012' has gone online and I just cannot stop listening to it.

The premise is I suppose that all pop and R&B songs sound so similar that with the effort and time you can easily merge them all into one. Well that's what the cynical & multitudes of Youtube commenters say. The cynical may well be right due to the '4 chord' belief but I've been rocking my jollies on this pop fiesta anyways.

I enjoy music. I don't pretend to be an expert because my foray into the world of keyboard playing when I was ten didn't exactly go fantastically well but then when was music played only for the experts?

Personally speaking (though I think many would agree) I like the way music makes me feel. I genuinely don't care whether my favourite song sounds anything like my second favourite song or my third favourite song. They could all be mini-song clones for all I notice, but maybe one has a different beat or a certain lyric and that's what resonates.

Other people listen to music that I hate, in fact the mash up above contains at least 5 songs that I just cannot stand. In return I listen to music that other people hate. When I play certain Regina Spektor songs, especially the ones where she makes strange noises with her lips, I come over all goosepimply while my boyfriend would probably choose death by falling speaker to kill both himself and the music. Doesn't mean she's not good, just that she's not good for him. Doesn't mean (oh this pains me to say) One Direction aren't good. They just aren't good for me.

Problem is that I've come across this 'art snobbery' before. I love Sci-fi and Fantasy. Reading it, writing it, fantasising that I'm a world famous author of some of it. I sat next to an English professor from Santa Barbara on a flight to the States and she said that The Hunger Games was one of the best pieces of fiction she had ever read but because it's not considered 'literature' it will never get taught in any English classes which she considers an awful injustice.

It even happens quite close to home. I'm not involved in the theatre industry but many people I now know are and one person in particular that I have met believes that theatre is only truly theatre if people are gasping, weeping and dying on stage. Anything less is cheap. She speaks passionately about plays where people are dressed in black and say nothing for 40 minutes whereas I quite enjoy the idea of The Lion King.

The average punter (of which I am) with their busy and stressful lives tend to want to take their hard earned money and go do something which makes them happy. So whether that means I want to watch Shakespeare, read Game of Thrones or listen to Flo Rida then so be it. Those things might not necessarily be good for everyone but they sure are good for me.

Except Whistle.

So enjoy (or don't) the Pop Danthology video I have chosen to share this week because I am going to enjoy having it on loud, drinking my Baileys and jumping around singing about having a good time.

Sudden Happy Realisation

So I was standing in my kitchen commiting the rather exciting act of boiling water for my pasta when suddenly a spark of a memory whizzed through my brain and I went 'dear god I have a blog'.

As you can probably tell from the date of my last post it has been a very long time since I have written on this site, two years and four months long in fact, and the reasons I can give for this shocking delay are:-

1) I forgot I had a blog
2) I got absolutely shockingly shite at updating this blog
3) I was unbelievably epically busy with such exciting stuff that I had no time to update this blog I wasn't doing anything of any remote interest that anyone other than myself would be bothered to read about

Ah but I may have lied on that last one. I think I have been epically busy with thrilling life events because in two years and four months I can't still be standing in the same place as I was in August 2010 and if I were I would be entering a state of panic.

In fact it's quite nice to re-discover this again and to refresh myself on what I was doing once upon a time and to re-cap on what I have been up to in the interim. So poor dear reader I am going to re-cap to you two years worth of life but try to do it in the most painless way possible.

Here it goes...

Work. Same company. Different role. Two different roles. Human resources. Challenges. People hate HR. Go figure. At risk of redundancy. Project work. So stressed I think I'm going to be sick in the bin. Change management delivery. Live in Poland. Come back from Poland. Interview. Got new role. Say goodbye to friends & colleagues. Cry. Alphabet Challenge. Being Robin Hood. Miss Polly Rae's bottom. Pretty good with a shotgun. Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Won't ever forget it. Floatation tank really not for me. Gone Ape. Trotting along on Shane. Watching face cheeks flap around in Indoor skydiving. The Mayfair to Plymouth. Human hamster rolling down a hill. Over half way. Several births. Laugh. A few deaths. Cry. Lose friends. Gain friends. Comprehend the true meaning of friendship. Travel to Machynlleth. Bath. Bristol. Poznan. Torun. Pila. Glasgow. Barcelona. Hawaii. Start something that will last. Move house. Once. Twice. Discover Mary Berry. Comes to terms with the fact I will never be a domesticated woman. Never attempt chilli con carne again. Felt sad. Felt confused. Felt lost. Felt lonely. Felt angry. Felt bitter. Felt hopeful. Felt relaxed. Felt content. Felt happy. Remembered a blog. Wrote it all down.

Obviously life stuff is going to happen in two years but summing it up in less than 200 hundred words is pretty comprehensive and painless no?

This is my New Year's Resolution come early...I will be updating this regularly. I have a filofax now (I'm still holding on to the 80's, ipads pfsssh) and so any thing that gets added into my 'projects' list gets completed and I assure you this will be going on my list.

On that note I best take the pasta off the shove before it boils ov...oh never mind. Did I mention I came to terms with the fact I'll never be a domesticated woman??

Oh How Crap Am I

What the title says. Except it should say 'Oh How Crap I Am.' It's been a while since I've written but thats because I have genuinely 100% absolutely been 120% completely busy. I promise.

What's nice is that I've been too busy living life that I haven't had much time to write about it. However what's the point of doing 'stuff' and having a blog if you're not going to brag over the internet about it. Though I suppose thats what Facebook is for.

This isn't going to be long because I have to gather full steam to write what I want to write but I've been too busy (of course) skivving off the work sports day to write and the guilt is making me tired.

I won't forget you, I'll try and do less stuff and think less and sit still and do nothing and then I can write crap all day long rather than write crap for 30 seconds before posting it.

So here I go posting it, I will be better next time. That's another promise.



P.S. I do want to say hullo, not hello, but hullo to my one and only follower 'The Fuzzy Duck.' I am smiling at you daily even if you do not see me.

Gerrypendance Day and Drunk Dodgeball

Guys.

Thanks.

I like to think that you know who you are and I really hope you do because 'thanks' isn't really a good enough word to express anything that needs to be said. If you're reading this and thinking 'is she meaning me?' and I am and you didn't know than that is an epic shortcoming on my part.

But thanks. I very much mean that. Much.

Ahem. So sentiment over here is my lil' blog on the 18th June, aka Gerrypendance Day.

An end came to pass on the 17th June with the tenancy finally over on Flat 10 and my (rather overdue) half of the rent having been paid so that everything managed to get wrapped up and I personally felt a heck of a lot better from it. Ages ago I knew that I would be upset by the 17th, one door closing and all that but I knew that it wasn't the 17th I wanted to remember.

When one door closes another one opens and so on the 18th June I decided that I wanted my nearest and dearest to celebrate Gerrypendance Day with me. The day in which a brand new beginning would start.

After much cajoling we (the ladies) agreed that we would let the boys watch their beloved football game (something about England and the World Cup- I dunno) and so we started off in Old Orleans. When I arrived, fashionably late, Tonto, Bon Bon and The Fuzzy Duck were zoned out like dribbling fools in front of the tv screen. Fuzzy Duck having made the monumental decision to drink for the first time in ten years or so was sat beer in hand. Half a beer in an hour and a half. So far so, well, fail.

The ladies, Heterosexual Life Partner (thereafter known as HLP), Elegant Lady, Iced Gems and Bionica arrived along with Mr. Elegant Lady and so in the words of Pink, we got the party started.

For a while the party did consist of football and drooling but we soon got cracking on the shots and boy did we get cracking. To his credit Fuzzy Duck managed to get a few more beers in him and also a shot or two. Personally no one would have done the weird tabasco shot that was foisted upon him but after one (and another) exceptionally wonderful and pert bribe the shots were gone. Success.

We managed to get down to Divas, the area's local gay bar, without whinging (much). After watching two nubile young lesbians bounce up and down the dance floor we joined in aside from the Fuzzy Duck who by this point was vacantly staring at the ceiling. So far so good. I do believe a few unleashed the inner gay person within and managed to enjoy themselves despite the worry that every single person in that place would crack a move. If only that happened every time we left the house. Sigh.

Getting to the area where we were going to engage in our next monumental task 'Drunk Dodgeball' was more of an effort for me than anyone else I swear it. Fuzzy Duck drunk involves lots of random walking off the pavement into the oncoming traffic, star gazing, drifting over to shop windows when no one is watching to stare at the shop lights and plenty of random farting.

I would just like to point out that he did make it to the final destination intact. Yay me.

Drunk Dodgeball, and finding the exact area to play the game is a skill. Perfectly a dead end road near me was completely empty and we could use the road line as the game divider. On reflection we were pretty lucky we didn't break any of the nice and shiny shop windows I saw the next morning when I walked through.

I honestly couldn't tell you who was on whose team, or who won. What I can tell you is that Fuzzy Duck and Tonto acted like they were Rambo and there is a very strong chance that Iced Gems is in fact Rambo. The woman is like Terminator in the Drunk Dodgeball world. It got to the point where we decided that the best fun was the kind where you try and smack as many balls into the face and body of your loved ones as you can.

We were joined by three randoms, Nameless Chick, Gregg and Lillicrap. I swear the last one is not made up. After hours of the drunken, random and oddy sore fun we swanned our way to the kebab shop and were home in time to hear the morning birds wake.

I'm not successfully conveying it all, but it was a great night.

Here's hoping for another very soon!

The Drunk Dodgeball Team

Drive-By Blog

If this seems like a rather hastily written and short blog thats because it is. Sorry.

I have my book of writing exercises in front of me and the next task is the Handbag Exercise. I am quite sad in that I am rather looking forward to this one-write down a list of six items to be found in a handbag without putting too much effort into what you're writing. Then construct a character, who would own the handbag and why are those things in there?

According to the writer of the task book you can tell a lot by a person by the contents of their bag and so you should be able to make up an entirely new person by what you find. It got me wondering, if I were a fictional character what would my (actual) bag say about me? Removing the rather obvious like phone, keys, purse etc.

So six random items:-

Shoelaces
No less than 4 pens
No less than 3 lip products
Rescue Remedy
Sunglasses
Two packets of painkillers

Oh dear. I've already got a mini-picture of this character and she's looking a bit neurotic if you ask me.

Here's my question then- what six random things do you pull out of your bag? What do they say about the character you're creating? Feel free to tell me and who knows maybe I'll get some inspiration from it.

(I'll update on 'D' soon I promise ;) )