Happy happy 2013 everybody! I hope you had a great night and you are just as excited for the year ahead as me.

Oooh, it’s that time of the year! I love wintertime as a time for introspection. Cosying up inside with a big pot of tea and taking stock of the busy time that lies behind you is one of my most favorite things to do between Christmas and new year’s. We actually even have a fireplace up here in the mountain house – soo cool!

At first I will always just leisurely look back: Flicking through my diaries, my blog, my picture folders, or my phone pictures and really allowing all the memories to be relived once again. You know the times when you want to clean up your room and you always have to fight the urge to look at all the things you take in your hands and relish in the memories they bring – because you know that if you start doing this, you will never finish your intial task. It can be very enjoyable to actually schedule time every now and again to do exactly that: Allowing yourself to get lost in memories and old stories, maybe even write to some old friends that you realise you haven’t kept contact with without really knowing why.

It’s no secret that I love organising, so of course I still set myself a goal for that process: I’ll pick a picture for each month that will go in a picture-review of the year. And also, I pick my ten favorite pictures of the year.

Then I’ll make a list of all the things that went well that year, the goals I accomplished and the new things I learned. I also register on what didn’t go so well and things that I wanted to do but didn’t, but I’ll leave them by the side until I get to planning the year ahead. No  need to get depressed about what you missed when there’s so much that you had fun with in the past 12months!

So for the beginning, here is my list of resolutions from the beginning of this year:

- To read at least one book a month

I read 14 books from my List of must read Classics this year. That’s even a bit more than I intended. I was a bit afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up the habit when I started working again in summer, but I turned my train journey to and from work into my sacred reading time, which amounts to pretty much an hour a day of reading without any ‘loss’ of time. It’s an ideal solution for me. The last book I read was Oliver Twist. You can read reviews on a couple of the books that I’ve read so far here.

- To try at least one new activity/hobby

I started playing rollerderby this summer. It was supercool to take a leap of faith and try a completely weird and new niche sport that nobody even knew about. I passed my minimum skills test this November, so I’m officially allowed on a team now, but I’ll have to train a lot more to actually be any good at derbying. I’m not taking any new resolutions there, I want to keep this sport purely fun and pleasure-oriented. The rest of my fitness regime is structured enough.

- Have my initiation ritual

I did that very early in the year and it was one of the best things I have ever done in my life. Now that I think back and remember the doubts I had about it, I can only smile and feel very grateful that I got off my ass and organised it, and of course very thankful for all the wonderful people who helped turning it into the perfect party that it was.

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- Visit at least five new places

When I stayed in France I visited Andouze, Sète, St.Guilhem-le-Desert and Narbonne, which were all places I hadn’t been to before.

That makes four places, but none of the initial list I had made at the beginning of the year. I just realised that I wanted to place my priorities in terms of time and money elsewhere. It felt ok like that. I do miss taking city trips though and I hope there will be more of this again in the years ahead.

ps: Trev just pointed out that I also visited Edinburgh for the first time this year, so I actually made the five. Yay!

- Go to Australia

That one definitely didn’t happen. We had neither the time nor the money for a big trip. Currently, we are planning on spending next Christmas down under, but that is still a very hazy concept that will very much depend on Trev’s work schedule.

- Blog remake

I switched from blogger to wordpress and Trev’s own server quite early in the year and I am still super happy with the site like this. I loved organising new content for the blog, designing everything and finding out how to make everything work. Now that it does (it does, right??!) though, I am very happy with just getting to use something that is efficient, pretty and reliable.

That makes 4 out of 6 goals that I achieved which I am super happy with, given that I had a lot of side projects as well and moved halfway across Europe a couple of times during that period.

It was very much a year of refining goals and projects, dabbling in more and more specific areas to find out exactly what makes me tick and feeling like I’m getting closer and closer to finding a way of life that feels coherent and purposeful for me.

Which makes me really excited for next year!