Tuesday 3 January 2012

Plans for 2012

I hope everyone had a wonderful, relaxing and happy Christmas and New Year period. For once mine was indeed chilled out, lacking in any kind of tension and blissfully illness free. I have enjoyed it enormously.

Strangely, despite the fact it is now bleak January and today was the first day back to work I do not feel too depressed. Probably because 2012 promises to be a pretty exciting year for us and because I have a lot to look forward to. First of all we are off to Carcassonne 3 weeks on Friday which was a present for my 33rd birthday on New Year's eve.


Carcassonne, France

I have wanted to visit Carcassonne for some years now after reading a lot about the history of the region and the siege of the Cathars in medieval times. It is also fairly close to Toulouse so we will probably also visit there during our long weekend. I am thinking good food, good wine and good company with a great dose of culture, it ticks all the boxes for me.

Between now and then I shall be taking milk thistle supplement every day, trying to do zumba at least 3 times a week and getting properly back into healthy eating - although that said I have not been too overindulgent over the christmas period. We had a tin of Roses and a massive bag of peanuts in our house, neither of which I had a single morsel out of. I only ate 3 mince pies in the whole 10 day break and I had no christmas pudding at all.

Although I have had a drink pretty much every day since about the 23rd December I have not either had a hangover, a drunken accident or got completely trolleyed this year. At the grand old age of 33 I am finally learning to pace myself and stop when I have had enough. One of my new year's resolutions is to continue this trend throughout 2012.

I am, however, taking the milk thistle just to revive my liver a bit as it feels like a sensible thing to do. A very good friend pointed me to this article this morning which reinforced the belief that going entirely sober for January is a bad idea and also unecessary. Milk thistle is a good thing though.

Weirdly we bought a crate of beer and two boxes of wine before Christmas, as of 2nd January we still have half a crate of beer and probably a few glasses left in one of the wine boxes. And in some kind of strange occurance we now have a wine rack featuring 2 bottles of champagne/cava and 12 bottles of wine. All of these were presents for Christmas and my birthday....I must have some kind of reputation as a wino....surely not?

Anyway, that means we do not need to buy any more booze until at least next week......I jest, that should see us through the next few months. Which is good because this year is our AUSTERITY YEAR. But I refuse to see that as a negative.

I am absolutely determined to make some inroads into old debts this year and this means that for once we will not be swanning off on 5 or 6 mega holidays this year...we are going to have to make do with 1 or 2. Or maybe 3. And a weekend away to London in April does not count.....

We are going to London because Stu is running the marathon (this is the 3rd time he will have done London and he has also run them all over Europe). So we managed to get a cheap hotel (Easyhotel - fabulous) for the Friday and the Saturday, for Christmas Stu bought tickets for us to go to the Comedy Store on the Friday night and we have arranged to meet friends for dinner on the Saturday night, the only thing remaining to buy is train tickets so this should be a fairly cheap weekend away.

So, despite the austerity and the lack of big holidays I am actually pretty excited and positive about this year. These are my actual new year's resolutions:

1) Blog more - and finish the Quorn experiment.
2) Pay off at least two debts entirely by the end of the year.
3) Keep up the zumba and get back to target weight.
4) Learn to say 'NO' to things.

I think all of these are acheivable so let's see how it goes. Happy new year to you all.