Two things happened to me yesterday, firstly I got a couple of messages on pbase from kind and sweet guests wishing me well, one on my pooing caterpillar and one on a posting I’d done at the end of 2003 – it was talking about my hopes and ambitions for the future. When I looked back at what I’d written, I was rather proud (and yes, I know it comes before a fall) of where I’ve come from then.

Also, I was talking to my little sis’s two little boys last night, wishing them ‘Happy New Year’ and asking them if they’d made any resolutions. The oldest said he had indeed made some resolutions and they were:

1. To stop biting his nails
2. To stop picking his nose

He did then say that in fact he’d made the same resolutions last year and had continued to do both things all year!

His Mum (Jan) then came on to tell me that there was in fact a third – that was to stop eating bogeys……hmmmmmm. As if all of that was not enough, young man piped up at this point with ‘well, if I stop picking my nose there won’t be any bogeys to eat will there?’

There is, of course, a rather good logic to his last point, though I also feel that for a child-less person such as myself, the whole exchange may have been ‘too much information’, though Jan tells me that all little boys are like that.

Anyway, the point of these ramblings are firstly to give you a rather lurid laugh and secondly to say that I got to thinking I’d planned to write down mine earlier in the day but had not got around to it.

When I started to think about what my nephew had said, alongside the usual round of ‘drink less’, ‘stop smoking’, ‘diet’ etc etc that is the fodder of most NY resolutions, then thought about my own, mine were conspicuous by their difference to the usual:

1. Get a couple (or three) point-of-lay hens to rebuild my tiny flock, after a loss last year and an inevitable loss in the coming weeks.
2. Make sure I contact those feature editors with my feature idea that’s been on my mind.
3. Ring the builder’s yard to find out the price of scaffolding planks – I need them for the beds in my new, expanded veggie garden.
4. Pull up the heather and plant suppressant in the bed on the ‘main’ lawn and plant it full of roses and lavender.
5. Get out and about with my precious babies and see more of this amazing place that we live in.

Really this list is just for starters, there are dozens of other things to add to it but I’ll be here all day!

What I’m trying to say is that what I’m hoping for are ‘ambitions’ rather than ‘stopping things’ if you see what I mean. I am going for my ‘better life’ purposefully.

So, this morning, we started the day with a plan – walk the dogs, get onto a hilltop and see what weather was lurking on the other side of it so we could decide whether we’d get a clear run at erecting the new shed. Here is Arch, on the hilltop, looking very pleased with himself and on the other side of him the weather looks benign enough doesn’t it? Well, we were wrong – it was certainly NOT benign and so we abandoned plan a and went for plan b instead – a 250 mile round trip to IKEA to get some new office furniture….for our better life of course!!!

I think it's only right to feature one of my precious family members on the first day of the new year......last year, it was a self-portrait!