My New Year's Resolutions

In 2023 I will....

• Waste less of my life playing Spider Solitaire and use that time to do ... almost anything else.  Warning: do not start playing Wordle.  It is, as my friend Rose Edmunds said, the gateway drug.  I dipped my toe in the water last year, and found she was right - two months later I was on 10 games of Sudoku a day.  When I got to Super-Duper Grandmaster I tried to quit, but an even bigger challenge beckoned and before I knew it I was right back there, chasing that next level.  

Just Say No, I beg you.

• Stop clicking on trending Twitter hashtags about the Markles and other pointless 'celebs'.  It's too easy to lose a whole hour of precious time browsing down the 'She's both stunning and brave, an inspiration who dared to speak out against The Firm' versus 'She's a Grade A narcissist making a career out of slagging off the Royal Family and if she is so glad to be free of them why does she keep yakking on about them and calling herself a Duchess' arguments.  Few activities are more pointless.
• Remember to thank God on a daily basis for the invention of the Robovac.

• Stop eating biscuits.
• But ... on a date yet to be decided, buy a pack of 4 Morrisons' giant Belgian white chocolate and raspberry cookies and eat them all myself without feeling guilty.  I've been considering this for years, and have vowed that this is the year I will make it happen.  Got to reach for the stars, right?

• Really be in The Walking Dead (I mean actually IN IT, that world, not the TV show), and be in Rick's group.  I know this can be achieved if I set my mind to it, because I've seen all those motivational pictures of sunsets on Twitter saying 'You can do anything you want.  Be anything you want.  Just Breathe', and stuff like that.

• Stop telling people about the Great Reset/vaccine injuries/Klaus Schwab, etc etc, unless they ask me about it.

• ...but, should they give me the slightest hint of an 'in', make sure they know all about the Great Reset, specifically CBDC, the social credit system, transhumanism, mandatory chips, the green energy con, the next pandemic, etc, so that they too understand that our days of joy, freedom and carefree happiness are numbered.  Lol.

• Watch fewer documentaries about the Great Reset, etc, and more episodes of The Mighty Boosh and South Park.

• Clean more stuff.  Generally.  Anything.  Just clean more stuff.
• Ignore emails alerting me to Desigual's latest sale.  I do not need any more clothes.  I DO NOT NEED ANY MORE CLOTHES.  Same goes for lurking around rails in actual real clothes shops on the way to the supermarket.

• Be more careful.  Remember to do a recce of the flat before putting Rasmus to work (Rasmus is the Robovac), so that he doesn't eat wires, rugs, etc.  Do not attempt to move furniture without first removing breakable items placed precariously thereon. 
• Stop engaging in dumb-ass activities like kneeling under my desk and lifting it up with my back (because I wanted to put some coaster things under the legs to raise the back legs slightly).  I spent Christmas Eve in great pain; I am always hurting myself doing stuff like this.  You know when people say, 'I don't know my own strength'?  I'm the opposite.  I think I am much stronger physically than I am.  In fact I don't even think, I just do things.  Like the time I severely sprained/fractured some bones in my foot and assumed it was all better the very next day, shoving it into a high-heeled boot.  That was in 1999, and it never knitted together properly, becoming a lump that shouldn't be there.  This has given me gip ever since, and has now teamed up with arthritis. 

Either that night or one very close to it!!!

• Get one of those time-turner things like they had in Harry Potter so that I can read all the books I want to read, maintain my Walking Dead obsession, go to all the places I want to go to, etc etc.  Without one, I haven't got enough time left.  Which brings me back to the beginning again....

• Stop being judgmental.  People can be, do and say whatever they like, and if they want to be total douchebags, it's no business of mine.
• Say the word 'verisimilitude' without sounding as though I'm jolly pleased with myself for having got it into a sentence.
• Use the word 'verisimilitude' in a novel without sounding as though ditto.
• Finish and publish three books of new series.  Book #1 is at final go-through stage, while Book #2 is 21K words into first draft.  So excuse me while I go and get on with it.  Though I'll just have a quick game of spider solitaire first.  It's not 2023 yet!

Happy New Year!

A heartfelt plea....

....to all friends and relatives who buy us boxes of chocolates for Christmas.

*feeble whimper* Please don't!

You can buy us boxes of posh biscuits, because I am not really a biscuit person ~ n.b., this excludes M&S All Butter Viennese Selection, which are not so much biscuits as little pieces of heaven in a mouthful ~ you know when you see that phrase 'all butter' that you're in trouble, don't you? 

There are still SOME LEFT in the biscuit tin.  I swear that having to resist them is sending my blood pressure over the top, and I've got one of those 'well woman' (stupid name) health checks next week, at which some kindly nurse practitioner lady will inform me that I need to lose weight, my BP is teetering, I shouldn't still be smoking and I really need to think about coming off these pain killers.  I will then say "I'm sure ten fags a week can't do much harm, if I come off the painkillers I won't be able to walk, and anyway, I've got better skin for my age than you, so there".   (Reminds me of the time 20 years ago when a doctor told my boyfriend that he was overweight, and he said "well, you've got a big nose".)

Actually, I'm going to refuse to be weighed.  They can't make me.  Surely they can just look at me and make an educated guess?  Which brings me back to the point of this post - THE CHOCOLATES.

This year we received a big two layer box of M&S Belgian chocolates, a family sized tub (why aren't they tins anymore?) of Heroes, and two enormous boxes of Thorntons.  The 'Fairground Favourites' are the best.  OMG, as they say.  There's this one in a yellow and green wrapper, it's an apple cream, oh my goodness....

On Christmas Day I told myself "you can eat as many of them as you like, today, but only today".  Of course, this instruction soon slithered gluttonously downwards into you can eat as many as you can.  I had a tummy ache when I went to bed, and I had merely scratched the surface.  A couple of days later a friend emailed me to say that she was stuffing all the Christmas cake so that it would be gone and she wouldn't have to eat it anymore, or words to that effect.  I so understand this.  This morning, instead of the muesli I would normally eat, I ate all the remaining fudges and caramels (the only ones I can't resist) out of the Heroes, so they'd be GONE.  So I won't have to think about or try to resist them ANYMORE.  They probably contained as many calories as the muesli, and I'll be hungry again by ten o'clock.

But the Thorntons problem remains.... I've tried putting little dishes of them on my husband's bedside shelf so that he will eat them all, but, being a man, he just has one or two per evening.  Last year, I found some Christmas chocolates left in his place-into-which-I-cannot-go, in September.  

So this is my heartfelt plea: I'm honestly not being ungrateful, but please, please, next year, if you must give us chocolates, put a gift tag on them saying that they are just for my husband (he is very possessive of his belongings; I will not mention his star sign), or, better still, give us some of these....

...so that I can go to one of these (and I am so bloody old this year that I can almost remember when it was like this!)

...and buy the bubble bath that is absent from all toiletries gift sets these days ~ as moaned about HERE!

In the meantime, I shall just have to rely on willpower.  
That will work, won't it?  Don't all jeer at once....  I WILL drop a dress size by spring, I will, I will.....

Happy New Year!

 

New Year's Resolutions....

Do you still make them?

I don't.  A cold day in January when you might not be at the peak of your energy/positivity levels (to say the least) is not the day to stop doing things you like, or to start to demand great things of yourself.  Also, the giving stuff up type don't work because most people can't deprive themselves of things they love to order; you break bad habits when the time is right for you to do so, not because the calendar's flipped over.  You might suddenly get in the zone for dieting, or capture out of nowhere the willpower to give up smoking, on some random Wednesday in April, not on January 1st.

My thoughts on some popular NYRs:

• Losing weight - well, I first made this one on January 1st 1972, I think, and did so for many more years, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.  Obviously never that successfully or I wouldn't have kept making it for 43 years!
• Giving up smoking - see paragraph above the starfish picture.
• Going to the gym - signing up for a gym in January then not going is such a cliche I'm not even going to mention it (oops...).
• Be a nicer and more tolerant person generally - that will work until something really gets on my nerves, which might be in about two hours' time when I'm in Morrissons.

Happy new year, peoples!  I hope y'all have a good one, and celebrate the evening in whichever way you see fit.  I shall be sitting in bed watching The Walking Dead, and will probably not even notice when the clock strikes midnight!