Holy 2012, Batman!

So I swore to myself that I would come back to Sydney and make productive use of my remaining few days of holiday...do the washing, clean the apartment, work on the thesis, go for a bike ride or two, etc... Instead today I have watched several episodes of Mad Men (I finally cracked and bought seasons 3 and 4 yesterday), had bad mall lunch and coffee (lunch so bad that I had to return some of it due to mouldiness..'TASTY!'), read Amanda Palmer's blog about her wedding to Neil Gaiman (interesting reading if you are a Palmer fan, a Gaiman fan or a fan of unconventional weddings...all three in my case...check it out at http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/15120706154/the-wedding-blog ) and will later watch more Mad Men and read some more of The Maltese Falcon. Productive, right? OK not remotely but heat and Clare mix not well so staying inside and moving as little as possible seems a wise option in my books....

In order to lend a mildly less lazy air to my day, I've decided to blog some resolutions for the new year as yikes it's 2012 already!

I'm not big with the resolutions but I do have a good track record of keeping them. I made one back on 2001, "Stop watching daytime television" (I was in the gap between school and uni at the time and was watching quite the insane amount of it) and I kept it BUT I had never made one before that and haven't since. So blog people, you have to keep me honest on these.


Resolutiony type things

- Buy a sports coat

One of my favourite Christmas presents this year was my gift from my brother and his girlfriend who bought me, among over things, season 2 of Bored to Death on DVD. In one episode of that season, Jonathan makes three impossible goals for himself and they are that he will become a successful writer, lecturer and detective. He declares that one of the best things about this is that all three professions wear sports coats and he look good in a sports coat.

Now I have no desire to become a detective (though I do often feel the urge to describe people and situations in Hammett/Chandler hard boiled private detective way) and my writing, such as it is, would probably never be of a quality that I would attempt to publish it, but one day I may be a lecturer and to do so I may actual require more than a sports coat (especially since I don't look so good in them and don't really want one). For the resolution may say "Buy a sports coat" but the meat of it is that I resolve to actually working on my thesis. My poor neglected thesis has seen minimal love in the last six months (I think I may have added less than 5000 words - most of them probably useless- in that period) and if I plan to finish the thing by end of 2013, committing to more work will be key. So in a more tangible sense, I resolve to spend at least one evening/night a week in the library working on the thesis and to give it some attention on weekends. Hold me to it, people.....

- Be more like Joan

Overloading on Mad Men over the last day or so has once more reinforced my admiration of the character of Joan...sure she isn't perfect and she married quite the repellent man (whoops spoilers for those stuck back in season 2 or earlier, or not yet wise enough to look into its brilliance) but she is confident even in an extreme crisis and, my goodness, her clothes! Ultimately the resolution is not be more like but more dress more like or just be mildly more stylish.... I mean look at these outfits:

Back before Mad Men, I had impossible style icons. Try as I might I will never be able to dress like Grace Kelly or Katherine Hepburn (I have completely the wrong body type) but still a girl can dream, right? Then along came Mad Men and the most stylishly dressed non-stick figure woman on television, and I thought wait a second here is a style I can rationally aspire to have. Also I now have a job that isn't quite as cool with the wearing of jeans and t-shirts to work on days that don't start with "Fri-", so the wardrobe needs a revamp in any case.

This will actually mean two resolutions....clear out wardrobe especially discarding of clothes that have not been worn for over a year (yes people of the blog world I own that many clothes) and updating to a more stylish band of clothes (or at least appearance of more style...I mean if you can make something from K-Mart look good and last well, why bother with something that is ten times the cost elsewhere). If people of the blog world have suggestions of places to get clothes with more vintage aesthetic especially cheaply and/or based in Australia, I'm happy to hear them as currently much as I love their clothes, my credit card is not liking the shipping charges from ModCloth.

- Became a fitness freak... or whatever the Clare version of that is.....

Those of you who know me in reality will no doubt have heard my exercise is bad for you theory but being as I turn the big 3-0 later this year it might be time to bite the bullet and embrace the exercise in a bigger way.... The plan was to do it last year after changing jobs by making use of the stairs to my 7th floor office but as it turns out there aren't stairs for regular use just for fire related use so there goes that plan.

So which will Clare the fitness freak look like? Ultimately it will involve two things, firstly there is a 24 hour gym opening in my suburb which will mean that I can exercise at insane hours of the night which is just every workaholics dream so I will be looking into that, and secondly it will involve Zoë. 

Who is this Zoë you may ask? This is....

Yes I name objects- though Zoë was suggested by and approved by others before the bike got that name.

Bought a few months ago (in October if memory serves), Zoë has been parked in my kitchen for most of that time. The plan is to start riding the bike places but as at today I have taken it out twice- the first time ending in disaster when I discovered the guy at the shop hadn't fitted the seat correctly (I almost fell off the bike onto the luggage rack and/or the road and was lucky that I kept my balance and that I was only a few blocks from home at the time) and the second going quite well except for the woman in a van who tailgated me down a hill and overtook me by a matter of centimetres on a difficult corner (quite scary for someone who hasn't ridden since childhood and never on the road before- except for the seat breaking incident). 

So bike wise the resolution is to buy a lock (still yet to do that), start riding the bike to church and youth group as both are shortish rides from home whilst I get my appalling fitness up to standard, and by March at the latest to start trying to ride the bike the 7 kms to my office (having the double benefit of also saving public transport costs).... Also if anyone with bike in the Inner West zone wants to ride in the Canada Bay area on weekends, let me know and maybe while summer is ongoing, picnics or the like could be had.

- Use the cookbooks

And yes that is tea in those bags/boxes on top of the books....

I have acquired a few cookbooks over the years and I don't really cook especially since my flat has no space for a  full size fridge (I have lived out of bar fridge for the past almost 5 years) and also has a dreadfully ineffectual electric oven. Therefore this resolution is actual quite larger than it first appears. Part one, look for and rent apartment with kitchen that works (and that is better/ larger than current apartment in many ways). Part 2, look for good recipes in books and start using them- it's a pity many of them have a LOT of meat type recipes or maybe I'll just have to cook for more people in my new apartment so I can use more of the recipes.

The other side of this resolution is less take away food, less dairy and finding more good vego recipes. I currently eat take away for dinner at least once a week (twice if it has been a busy week and I'm too tried/lazy to cook) and my aim is to cut that down to once a month by the end of the year. Dairy is the vego animal fat crux and so I'm cut it down (not out...still not treading the vegan path)- cheese will be found in no more than three meals a week and at least three coffees a week will contain soya or no milk (probably the latter as the former makes me gag and is my main reason for not being vegan). Good vego recipes? This question I leave to you....if you know of places/books with good vego and vegan recipes please let me know.

-Books, books, books

Finally and most importantly (OK maybe not more important than the thesis), find more time to read especially non-fiction. I am deeply shamed that I read at most 40 books last year (I counted 35 but I'm sure I read a few more than that and have just forgotten them). Many people would say that isn't a bad haul for someone working full time, studying part time and doing a lot of other things with her week BUT I say yikes people that is less than a book a week and there were weeks last year when I read two or three books in the week so the total should be much higher.  So I resolve to read at least 50 books this year and I'm hoping to up the number of non-fiction books from 5 which was this year's tally. If you have suggestion of books I might like or you read something you think I'll like let me know. Currently I'm starting the year with Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM (Best.Christmas. Present. Ever.....I mean just revel in this description of new Parliament House- "Australia's national parliament is interred in a vast lawn beneath a giant rattling aluminium Hills Hoist of  flagpole on a hill, an elephantine expression of the suburban dream, yet wanting only a few sheep and a Southern Cross windmill on it to also represent the rural rump") and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (started today and no I haven't read it before).

That's all for the resolutions and I know I did promise a more serious end of 2011 blog but I ultimately decided against it- it was to be a bit too death focused for people easing into the new year maybe I'll post it later when the year is a little more mature. 

Thanks to all the people who've been with the blog through 2011 and I hope you stick with me for the fun of 2012.