The World According To Me

10 days of officially not working (hurrah!). I am now feeling somewhat rested and having had adequate time to bore myself stupid, I feel ready to take on 2007. Also, according to A Current Affair's special horoscope report the other night (don't ask why I was watching it), this is Gemini's year for lurrrve. I'm excited. Hey, it was on ACA, how could it not be true?

Friday before Christmas was the last day our office was open, thankfully Christmas was on a Monday as my firm are known to close only on Christmas eve even, if say, Christmas falls on a Tuesday. Who on earth needs lawyers on Christmas eve? (You'd be surprised). The good thing is that we pretty much shut up shop at lunchtime then sit around drinking champagne and eating seafood (or in my case, spitting out mouthfuls of sushi after being promised that it didn't contain shellfish, to which I am quite allergic, and then finding part of a prawn in the remaining half of my sushi roll). We all hit the pub after we'd drank the office dry and I seem to remember doing a lot of G.O.B chicken impersonations at the bar. It's a current obsession. There were loads of people who I hadn't seen in ages and it felt nice to be social again.

Christmas day was spent with my mother and my two sisters. We drank champagne and I made hummus and tzatziki and we ate cold meat and salads for lunch followed by pecan pie (made at my request) and trifle and chocolate ripple cake for dessert. Any more reminders of the 1980's and I would have had to get a spiral perm. I rolled home on Christmas night after getting the shits on a bit with my mother who kept saying "It just doesn't feel like Christmas. Sigh" and "It's just not Christmas. Sigh" etc, because we hadn't spent the day with the entire family pretending we're interested in who Aunty Pam is cross with today or avoiding Uncle Graham's leering gaze. (Actually I quite like Aunty Pam, she is unapologetic, offensive, prickly and perennially cranky but she always has a twinkle in her eye and I am quietly confident that I will be much like her when I get to 75). My line of thinking was that it was lovely just to have the four of us for Christmas day and I was delighted that we didn't have to make a fuss over roasting whole animals to feed the troops and pretending to be nice to everyone but we don't all think the same way I guess.

Boxing Day saw the lovely but jetlagged Jen come over for cans and cricket. We were doing so well until she went to the loo and I went to find more water crackers when Warnie got his 700th wicket and we missed it and got sad. So then we got quite bent to commiserate and she fell asleep on my loungeroom floor by 7pm. It is so nice to have her back in the country, albeit for a relatively short time.

And that's about the time when I started to run out of things to amuse myself with.

So I took some photo's. However, Blogger seems to want to prevent me from uploading them to show you, which make me angry. And sad.

I got a wonderful Christmas present from my boss, whom I adore and am going to miss (and his lady) terribly when they move away (I am not sure exactly when it is because I am trying to pretend it's not happening, but safe to say within 8 weeks I am going to be a sad little girl).

It is a massive 4 burner BBQ which came in a flat-pack box, but it only took an hour and a half, a lot of swearing and a semi-tanty, two monkey wrenches and a Phillip's head screwdriver to be turned into a mean animal-product cooking machine. Not only am I chuffed that to receive such an excellent gift, I am so very proud of myself for assembling it all by myself and only having one rogue bolt leftover. I have 'seasoned' the hotplates, (lingo, eh?!) and am just waiting for the right time to actually use it. It just doesn't seem right to cook two lonely snaggers on such a huge BBQ so I will soon have a gathering and make a boy wear an apron with fake boobs to cook lots of meat.

Then, with my one set task completed, I got bored.

I did do other things over the break, went to a couple of parties/barbies which were quite nice, but mostly I spent time with myself and the dog and cats, who truly are enough to entertain me.

New Years Eve was a bit of a disaster. I had plans to go away for a night of drunken debauchery with some lovely ladies, until my 'play money' got caught up in some sort of computer glitch rendering it not in my account and I wasn't able to go at the last minute. This made me quite sad and so I bought a packet of tim tams, rolled and smoked too many joints and spent NYE on my couch watching DVD's and being quite grumpy about the situation. I was asleep well before the new year rolled in, however woke up hangover-free and with a surprisingly clear head.

I made some New Years Resolutions which I have either not yet implemented or broken already. Mainly;

Give up smoking - A recurring resolution, this little gem appears every time I think about what I want to change in my life. I've decided not to beat myself up over it too much, although I would like to, at some stage, not necessarily immediately, at least have a good hard crack at giving up. I've convinced myself that when I'm not a slave to the Malboro Lights anymore this will have a flow-on effect to lots of other things I'd like to address.

Save some goddamn money - This one is slightly difficult as I love to go shopping and can always think of things that I absolutely need. And I have lots of bills. Plus I do like to socialise which is taxing on the purse especially when I am a single mum of three adoring animals and earn a reasonably shitty salary.

Moisturise religiously - I was chatting with a girlfriend about this recently. I moisturise my face every day without fail, it's just that rest of me that I mostly neglect due to time/effort constraints. My friend told me she moisturises every single day, twice, all over, without fail. I thought this was taking it a bit far but then she's 34 and has the skin of a newborn, so maybe there's something in it. I'm sticking to once a day though, that way there is less likelihood of me breaking the resolution. I've been doing it for three days now and my skin feels great. Big tick.

And the other one is that I'm not going to be scared to follow my gut feelings this year. If it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, run away screaming and don't be worried about offending other people. I'm going to be listening very intently to what my gut says this year (usually it's quite unintelligible and sounds like it's asking for chocolate. Maybe I won't listen to that part so much given yesterday morning's efforts).