New Year's Resolutions

As the Boy Wonder languishes through his second week of lurgy and we contemplate a quiet new year's eve together, naturally my thoughts have turned to what I hope to achieve in the next year. It's going to be pretty tricky to be honest, as we have had a totally awesome 2010 what with our extended sojourn in the States, the arrival of our niece and the implementation of our plans for self-employment, so it's going to be pretty hard to top. However, I have managed to scrape together a few ambitions to attempt over the next year, and in case I've forgotten what they were by the end of January I might as well record them for posterity:

1. Channel the slightly compulsive tendencies I have into something useful - rather than obsessing over whether the bottles in the cupboard are all facing forwards, I will try to spend that time achieving a basic level of cleanliness about the house. Living in a giant dust bunny, however beautifully aligned the condiments may be, suggests a substantial flaw in my ability to prioritise, which I intend to correct.

2. Make some inroads into our long term plans to try and live a dual life between here and New Orleans.

3. Write something which has the potential to be published i.e complete any writing project to my satisfaction.

4. Spend less time buggering about on the internet and more time getting gigs for the Boy Wonder.

5. Move the bloody fence to where it's supposed to be after all the stupid admin work that needed doing, paperwork, solicitors and faff the fence will be moved to its correct position!

I think that's about it - hopefully there's nothing on there which will prove insurmountable, but you never know, now that we have cider shelves a lot of things seem more challenging...

One of my biggest fears

I worry that on a night like this, when posting under the influence of a small amount of alcohol, I will post my innermost thoughts on the blog I manage for the company for whom I work. I imagine this is the technological era's equivalent of dreaming about taking an exam in the nude.

The best days of your life...

The only way in which my school days were the best of my life is in the opportunity they afforded me for purchasing, storing and using stationery. I now have to feed this habit by obsessively dividing things into plastic folders and secretly dreaming of owning a filing cabinet.

Curiouser and curiouser

Well, on checking the oil today (which by the way, our car doesn't actually seem to use, but that's another matter), the Boy Wonder found a banana skin and a prawn cracker on top of the car battery. We have come up with several possible theories on how this could have happened, but basically none of them make sense except the idea that someone with access to the car and keys popped the bonnet and put them there, presumably for a prank.

We know it wasn't left there when it was shipped as we had to jump start it three times to get it out of the port, and it couldn't have been done without popping the bonnet from the inside as the clip isn't broken. But, if you had access to the keys (which several people would have done) and wanted to play a prank, why make it something so obscure and such a rubbish prank? Why a banana skin and a prawn cracker? Why leave them in the engine where they are quite unlikely to be found? And another few 'whys' just for good measure because everything about this is weird.

So, until we can find out what happened, this will be consigned to the 'inexplicably mystery' files, along with the unfeasibly massive bird poo we once found on the windscreen, the unexpected turning up on TV of two friends who we didn't know even knew each other and the time we met someone the Boy Wonder knew from childhood in a laundry room in Canada.  Let's hope that the quest for answers turns up something so we can close this case before it drives me mad.