Categories: phd, teaching, nursing, diet, christianity, family
Tags: New Year
Date: 05 January 2010 21:44:09
Rather than do either a. a scary list of things I aim to do this year which then make me feel inadequate because I will fail to live up to them or b. a long rambling screed of streams of consciousness over why I want to achieve the unachievable anyway, I'm just going to put up here, for my reference as much as anything else (so it won't be the great writing you've come to expect from this blog ;) ), a kind of combination of the two which hopefully will be neither scary nor rambling, but more a kind of wish-list or stuff I'd like to see happen but not stuff I'll get too obsessive about. We'll see.
To get the elephant (or in my case perhaps more accurately hippo) in the room out of the way first, I'll at least mention weight loss. I'm aiming for about 1lb a week, which will hopefully see me lose about a stone by Easter. There are a few reasons why I want to lose weight, none of which I particularly want to go into here, but I want to end the year feeling better physically, and feeling better about myself physically, than I have started it.
I want my PhD to be over and done with this year. And get back to writing for the fun of it (yes academic writing can be fun).
I'd love to have cleared my debts this year. I should have one card cleared in the next couple of months; the other one will take longer but I have just increased my payment so hopefully I'll start making a dent in that soon and get onto the parental debts too. That would be good.
I don't really want to end the year in health visiting if I can help it. Though at the moment that's a bit out of my hands - while I'm paying off debts and HD is in temporary work I'm not going to give up permanent work. Whether or not I'm still in health visiting, by the time I finish the PhD (hopefully in the summer) I want to be starting a course which will get me qualified in the area of nursing I want to go into (more of which later if it actually happens). If I do manage to leave this current job, maybe I'll try and do some more OU tutoring if I can.
I want to get back more into my faith, and what it means for my life. I was very challenged by conversations with HD's sister and brother-in-law over the holidays, and although their vision is not mine particularly, their heart and commitment is something to which I aspire (and from which I'm still a long way away).
I want to be a better wife. HD says he's happy with the one he's got (he's very lovely like that), and I don't mean total personality transplant or anything, but I think I can aim to be less selfish and more loving without causing him too much consternation :)
Creatively, I'd like to get to know my shiny new camera better and maybe start another photo project as I think my Glasgow blog is running out of steam a bit and the Sibiu blog is running out of photos! And I'd like to draw a couple of pictures at some point as well, it's been ages (over a year) since I last drew anything.
There's other stuff as well, like wanting to know where we'll be living and for HD to have a permanent job and for us to be together all the time and all that sort of thing, but at the moment that's all a bit out of our hands. I can start to do some of the stuff above though.
I feel pretty good about 2010, all told :)