nine to five

January has passed by in a blur! I'm looking back at my aims for the month to see how I feel about them. 

I didn't drink alcohol very often anyway, so I haven't missed that at all. The only time I've thought about it is when I think about the habitual drinking - bit early for the football, we could go to the fanzone, it's my birthday, I could have a drink to celebrate etc. It's been a good lesson to think about that. 

As the temperature has dropped I have eaten less salad but I'll get back to eating that today as I'm a bit souped out. Plus, winter salads are amazing. 

Positivity - hmmm, that's a tough one, being more positive has just made me realise how much negativity I encounter each day, that's not going to chance so I think a lot of smiling and nodding is in my future. 

Letting go of things at the shop is getting easier, in fact I'm becoming more detached from it with each shift, not that I don't get anything from it, just that I'm …

I don't know if it was the universe talking or if I'm just thinking more about myself these days, but I ended up having a pretty perfect Friday. Over the past few months I've taken to meeting a friend in town every other Friday to go to the supermarket. It has been something that works well for me, until I thought about it and realised that sometimes it doesn't work for me all that much. 

Shopping on a Friday is great as I like to pick up salad and some crisps for the weekend, so meeting my friend and pushing her trolley around Aldi is fine. Until this week when I thought about all the other things I needed to do in town and thinking to myself that I'd better go early because my friend just wouldn't go to shops that she didn't need to visit, even if I needed to. That doesn't bother me at all, it just made me think that I can be flexible, but in my own way. On that day being flexible was doing what I needed to do and just meeting up when they were ready -…

Today marks the end of the fourth week of the new regime. I've started to look forward to the first alarm, in part because it's actually waking me up, which means i'm sleeping for longer, but also I'm looking forward to having a positive start to the day, which creates an air of productivity for the rest of the day.

At the moment there just seems lots of time to do things rather than just going by the amount of daylight, something I would normally do. I'm also not feeling quite as down as usually would at this time of year, maybe that's because I'm doing more around the house before the sun appears, or maybe my spend 20 minutes outside every day during the summer worked and I'm well topped up with vitamin D. The only downside is that my skin has dried out a bit, due to showering every day, I have remedied this by reducing the amount of product I use.

The tray on the coffee table is still working, obviously it's working as a tray, but it's working …

Of course I went on my exercise bike on Friday, you see I've made a pact with myself, if I miss a day for a reason other than emergency or illness then I have to do double the next day. As the next day was Saturday and I don't exercise at the weekend, instead I like to stay in bed a bit longer listening to the World Service I thought I'd better get on with it. 


We removed a ton of stuff from the house last year, this year I'd prefer to not do that but to make use of things that are still loitering. I'm currently looking for a way to arrange my accidental stamp collection that doesn't look old and fusty. The other thing I'm doing is something I said I wasn't going to do, I'm making a scrappy quilt. I have a bag full of bits and bobs so I'm just stitching them all together and seeing how it goes. I know I'll complain, but it is always worth it.

This week I'm adding something else to my resolutions. The main resolutions are the cycling and wh…

Yesterday I said I like to speak too soon, well I did and I am a ball of quite-crossness that needs to calm down, reading this you may well all think I am well out of order, over reacting and frankly a bit odd, you would almost certainly be correct. Dan moved my cheese, and it went sour (is cheese sour already?). It started with someone trying to help and ended with fire.



It is safe to say I am prone to melodrama, a little Lucille Bluth.

The paper in the fire pit is my diary. I've been tracking everything since the last week of October - food, spending, word a day journalling, exercise, pretty much everything I've done, and for me things balance so delicately the act of moving my cheese, or in my case my exercise bike has seen it go up in smoke. 



I've probably said before that I am a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin, and according to her Four Tendencies framework I am a Rebel, although I didn't need to do the test you can do it here to know that. This Rebel phrase sums me up pe…

I've never really made new year resolutions, I think I've given lip service to them but have never intended to stick with them because I've always been the kind of person who thinks any day can be like New Year. This year I've done the opposite and used it as a bit of a push to get me going.

And it has.

For the past three days I've been up before the alarm ready to start exercising which means instead of doing the 10 minutes on the bike I promised to do I'm doing more. Last week I decided to increase the time by 2 minutes, 12 minutes a day adds up to an hour a week (I rest at the weekend). Getting up earlier this week means I'm now doing 20 minutes a day, which is ideal. The best part of it is that exercising, taking a shower and getting dressed sees me ready for bird feeding and breakfast at the same time I used to stumble downstairs in my pyjamas!

My real confession though is that I've used the negative energy of those around me to spur me on. I was invo…

Starting with a shockingly obvious statement, I like nice things. I love things that are well made, beautiful, unusual, classic, bespoke and all those things. I'm just not all that bothered about having them for myself, it's enough just to know they exist and people get enjoyment from them. 
I'm a Basic Bish, no debate about that.
There have been a couple of things recently that have just been too expensive and I'm just not prepared to spend/waste my money on them. My new bathroom started me down this road. When we had the bathroom refitted in our old house we spent a lot of money on it and I did like it, and I don't regret it but now I am in the camp of form following function. This time round we've gone plain, it's so plain, I very much doubt it could be less exciting and that's what I like about it. 
A couple of years ago we watched an old film of the architect who designed our house, he was most upset looking at an estate he designed where people had p…

Killing it, crushing it, slaying it (bit extreme for a basic person like me) making my future self thankful, putting my big girl pants on, being stronger than my excuses, or being "goals". 

I joined an online group because my friend, who is the founder, needed numbers, and it is an eye opener. The language - you'd think we were all planning to compete in the Olympics not be slightly fitter so the doctor doesn't tell us off, or so that we can manage to bend down without making a funny noise. 

I'm just getting up twenty minutes early to do some exercise and not eating as much Vego spread, this morning I didn't even keep my eyes shut for the first five minutes, I mark that down as progress. I think I'll just have resign myself to the fact that I'm not an inspirational person and try to get on with life.