This post will be a wrap up of the 12 challenges that I set myself for 2005. Sadly I didn't manage all 12. Excuses are below!
1: LIGHT
At the start of the year, I had no lightshades in the flat. None at all. How on Earth could I resolve this nightmarish situation? It was truly intractable... until I went to the British Home Stores lighting department and purchased six lightshades. Job done. I have four uplighters and two downlighters - one of these is mounted slightly strangely to avoid it being smacked every time I use the front door.
2: BED
My second bedroom had no bed. It was not useful for sleeping guests in. It didn't even provide me with a place to kip should I have had a fight with myself and made me go and sleep in a separate bed for a night. As bedrooms go, it was not pulling its weight. So I bought a bed from the internet. As of now, nobody has actually used the bed for sleeping (or anything else for that matter) but one day I could have some friends stay over. It could happen!
3: DATE
I wanted to go on a date. Well, thanks to a friend putting me in touch with somebody, this happened back in early February. A very pleasant dinner in a York-based restaurant, and we subsequently saw each other several times afterwards. Didn't really work out as a long term thing, but I'd like to think we've remained friends (though I probably should call or write more often that I do!). And also she's probably reading this so I should be nice - though I would be nice anyway. So, thanks for a great time, you, I enjoyed the whisky :-)
4: COUNTRY
Next up was to visit a previously unvisited country. Sadly my main holiday for the year was to the USA which I'd already been to a few years earlier. Instead I went for a weekend in Denmark. Partly this was to annoy Bert since he'd failed to go to Denmark a few months earlier. Whilst I enjoyed myself, I'm not sure I really like the travelling completely alone aspect. Dinnertimes especially were a bit lonely.
5: PROMOTE
In order to get a promotion at work I went for the radical option of applying for a job at a higher grade. I got it. Because I poisoned all the other applicants with DeadRat.
6: SKILL
I wanted to learn to do something new. So I took up ballroom/latin dancing. We've been going most Monday nights since early in the year and have now learnt many many dances. I won't list them here, but I could summarise which ones by saying "All of them". Yes, I can now do every dance ever invented Really Really Well. I am the Lord Of The Dance. I also have a tendency to exaggerate. As well as the dancing, later in the year I started to do running, but I'm not sure that this counts as a skill as such. I suppose there is a degree of skill in being able to move faster than walking pace without falling over.
7: RADIO
And here we come to my first failure. All I had to do was get my name on national radio. Should have been relatively easy, but the thing I fell down on was laziness. During the year, my efforts comprised of one email to Mark Radcliffe, one email to Scott Mills and a couple of text messages. Poor attempt, I know. You could think I wasn't taking these things seriously.
8: PUB
York has many pubs within its city walls. I decided to visit all of them and get photos. I finished this a couple of days ago. Particular thanks here to the guys and gals from my team at work for helping with the last few. You're all stars.
9: COOK
This was my second failure. I was to cook for someone I hadn't met at the start 2005. I made some progress towards this goal - I bought dining chairs so that we could sit and eat the cooked food. I also met some people that I hadn't met before that I could potentially cook for. But the actual arranging and cooking part never happened. There is a possibility that I might have made some toast for someone once but if I did I clearly didn't think it counted at the time and so can't change that decision now. Darn. Stupid food.
10: SOBER
Drinking is fun, but sometimes it's good to have a break from it. So break I did. I went for 8 whole days without a drink, beating my target of a week by a whopping whole day. I don't think it was a very exciting 8 days though.
11: EBAY
eBay is fun. You can sell shit on it. I arbitrarily chose £200 as a target and then tried to make this amount by selling stuff lying around the flat - old CDs and computer games etc. I beat the target by five english pounds. I could have got higher, as I still have tons of stuff to get rid off. The best bit about this challenge was that I actually made a decent amount of cash out of it - more than enough to pay for all the dancing lessons. Though not for the dancing lessons plus the trip to Denmark's Copenhagen.
12: SONGS
And the final challenge was to write ten new songs. I finished and wrote about this yesterday so won't go into further details here.
So overall, did I pass or fail? 10/12 would be a pretty good score in most tests. I say... PASS PASS PASSSSSSSSS! I rock.
And finally, here's a picture of yesterday's lunch:
No comments:
Post a Comment