Happy New Era

Our new view

No-one in their right mind does New Year's resolutions anymore. They generally don't work out anyway, or the opposite thing happens, or worst of all, you realise it was a stupid idea in the first place, a wild promise made under duress at 11pm on the 31st, leaving you looking and feeling a right donkey by January 14th. I gave NYRs up ages ago (Clause B, Resolution #3, New Year's Eve 2005) and never looked back. Instead I do Old Year's resolutions. You make an OYR in November and get straight on with it, the idea being that if it's still going strong by the New Year you're off to a flying start; if it isn't, well, no-one in their right mind, etc. - dignity saved.

Normally I wouldn't confess the failed resolutions but just this once, by way of illustration, I'll list them all out.

1. Stop editing Wikipedia: this one had been looming for a while and was partly aimed at reclaiming the countless hours spent not actually writing and editing (that pretty much stopped last year) but squabbling about policy with self-righteous, self-serving, absurdly pompous dickheads like me. Our house move provided the opportunity, following which a fourtunate instance of having the last word allowed me to fully disengage over the xmas break. Result: Success

2. Stop being snappy with the kids: one of the hazards of working from home is the constant interruptions which, in the main, I've learned to deal with in a calm and rational way. Broken concentration can be mended, and with practice it can be limited to fractures, but the key is patience. Right, that's the theory... in practice you just end up being Grumpy Dad, harbouring a permanent low-level antipathy for all other lifeforms. Nonetheless I was doing well with this resolution until the house move swapped my upstairs sanctuary for a downstairs hallway annexe. This was prong one of a three-pronged assault on my resolve: the imposition of a 30-minute TV curfew was another and the killer blow came with the school holidays. After a rocky start with lots of fighting over toys and lashings of Daddy, Oscar looked at me like this! (pulling a ridiculous face) during which I completely lost the plot on several occasions, I've managed to claw back some semblance of patience. However this isn't down to some superhuman effort on my part, it's the fact that the kids are just fab now, play nicely 90% of the time and genuinely seem to have turned over a major good leaf. The full marks go to them, and I have to concede at least partial Failure on this one.

3. Get some bloody work in: as mentioned in blogs past, Niki's finally found a job she loves, working with SEN kids in a well-respected and successful Christchurch school, but it pays so badly it makes peanuts look like a banker's bonus. On the back of me getting a contract to do photographic work from a big real estate agency, I persuaded her to stay rather than find better-paid mainstream school work. When the contract turned out to be more of a vague promise of something in the new year it was a bit of a worry, to say the least. Kind of a combination of good timing and wild panic led to other work being found to fill the gap, including an editorial shoot for the Mail on Sunday's magazine, You. A nice lady I was doing some other work for turned out to be a published author whose new book has just been released, needed a local photographer for the article, one thing led to another and I got the job. It'll be in the Mail on 31st January, so dash out and grab a copy! Along with a bunch of other good local projects (I've even scored some work on our own place) I think it's fairly safe to call this one a tentative Success.

4. Get fit for the Festival of Cycling: We moved house, I caught a chesty cold, the dog ate my shoe, etc.. Failure. Next!

5. Get fit anyway: partial Success. More my mate Matt's resolution this, as he'd vowed to lose his I-work-in-IT belly, decided on cycling as the best way to do it, and I offered to take him out. He's possessed with a yearning to ride the toughest hills in the area (and they're pretty tough round here) but is – how shall I put this? – a little short of the fitness levels required... so we're out once a week on our old mountain bikes on the scary road climbs and offroad mountaintop trails of the Port Hills. As we live on opposite sides of the mountain, he rides up one side and I ride up the other, we meet at the top and ride the roads and some of the best single-track MTB trails in the country, or more accurately, I ride them and Matt pushes his bike along them... it could be a slightly faster pace for me but at least the rides are 3-4 hours long and owld lard-arse is not only getting better every week, he's talking about getting a road bike. And – AND – Niki's been out on the bike too, not just pootling along the quay either, up the Evans Pass no less. I'm incredibly proud of her. In fact we'll all do the Festival this year... how's that for an early resolution?

6. Do some gardening: we knew this would be an issue due to the move and were determined to get down & dirty like committed gardeners. The veggies are doing alright, thanks to a flurry of activity when we first moved in: Niki got posh new garden handtools for her birthday and does regular weeding, we have salad leaves, sort of, the herbs and strawberries we liberated from Voelas have taken root and seem ok, but everything else has pretty much failed to happen. I blame that Pete and Lois, uprooting everything in late spring means no potatoes, weedy lettuce and dead chillies and tomatoes. The lawn is a bed of dried clover and despite some enthusiastic shrub pruning and weeding the other weekend, the garden looks like it would if a bunch of students had moved in. We are in shame :( and mark this one a clear failure.

6. Do some basic dog training: Louie's been doing really well all on his own. He's really bright in that way dogs are, where they give you that empty-headed stare that makes you think they're sweet and innocent dullards, while all the time they're hatching a cunning plan to relieve the kids of their breakfast. Which he's done more than once. He can sit and stay and knows exactly what you mean when you tell him to fetch or come, he just decides not to do it. Not only does he know how to escape from the garden, he knows that if he sits in the middle of the road – the main road to Governor's Bay, not just some side-street – cars will stop and queue up and make that funny honking noise until we come out and get him. I've been meaning to spend a set time every day doing obedience training but work and stuff have got in the way, resulting in a resounding Failure. Proper classes are booked for next week; I'll report back on how that goes.

7. Write the blog more regularly: that's more reliably, not just 'more', I mean 'regular' doesn't necessarily have to mean 'frequent'; if you were trying to cure constipation you'd be aiming for the former, not the latter. And given that I seem to be averaging a blog a month of late I'm claiming Success on this one. As life settles down into some kind of routine it might be more of a note to say there are some pics up on the losNemo gallery than my customary monthly review. We're just not that interesting ;) but there are some new pics, two new albums which have, admittedly, been stuck in the old digital bowels a while, so click here and enjoy! There are a bunch more in the offing, including an update on Louie who'll be getting his own album soon.

So there they are, confessions of an inveterate procrastinator. Let's see how long the new leaf lasts.