Nearing the end

Well here we are... It's nearly the end of 2008. Now is the time I should probably reflect on the year.

I guess it hasn't been a totally sucky year. Wait, that is still pretty negative. It's been a pretty good year, in many (but not all) aspects. There, that's as positive as I get!

Well it has been pretty good. I managed to get to France, Spain, Alaska and Canada, which is awesome. And I doubt I'll be able to afford a single holiday in 2009, or even for a few years now, so it's probably good that I managed to get out of England a bit this year.

Top three awesome things that happened this year:

1) Finishing my A-levels and getting into Sussex (even if I'd have liked to get one more A...)

2) Two months in Alaska... cold but amazingly, stunningly beautiful. I miss the mountains :-(

3) Leaving home and starting uni! I know I chose the wrong course... but it has still been awesome and I also have the best next-door neighbour ever.

Not worthy of a list, non-awesome things that happened this year include my gran and aunt's car accident, being really poor all the time, and not getting out of a horrible relationship sooner.

But next year there's plenty to look forward to! (When you ignore the whole being-totally-poor thing)

1) Lost Season 5. Okay, so you make think I'm lame for having this as a priority. But I can't help it, I'm addicted, and it's so close now!

2) Starting a new course - yeah Philosophy is not gonna be easy, especially after missing a term, but I'm looking forward to studying something I'm actually interested in again.

3) Later on in the year, getting a flat in Brighton! Woo! (If I manage find someone who actually wants to share with me *sob*)

4) ....Hmm, I've run out. Maybe I'm not in such an optimistic mood today. Usually I have tonnes to look forward to.

Oh well, that just leaves me with my favourite list, which is New Year's Resolutions! They're fun because they make you feel like you've made a conscious effort to improve yourself, while later in the year you can look back and laugh at how naive you were! No really, I do actually enjoy making new years resolutions. Making being the key word...not the keeping.

So here it is, in no particular order apart from what comes into my head:

Bekah's amazing New Year's Resolutions for 2009!

1) Keep my room tidy - this one is the same every year. But this time I really mean it!

2) Study harder at uni - try not to get below 60% in assignments, and don't miss classes.

3) Don't spend money on crap (this should be easy since you now have NO money anyway)

4) Get a job and try and save for some kind of holiday in 2009

5) Try and be more slightly more friendly and outgoing instead of enigmatic and weird out of sheer laziness

6) Grow my hair (and possibly try and keep it one colour for a while)

7) Keep practicing guitar, , which comes under being more creative in general.

8) Don't stay up past midnight if I have lectures the next day

9) Don't stay in bed past 12pm

10) And at number 10, the bonus resolution for 2009 - suggested by Leigh - is to cuddle Leigh. (Well I had to have one easy one on here!)

Mainly though, I thought I should at least match the amount of effort I put in at uni to the huge amount of money it's costing me...

And that's my resolutions 09. If I think of any more important ones I've forgotten, I'll add later.

Goodbye 2008. You were okay at first but you gradually got crap Like, what's with all the economical downturn shit? I mean, apart from the whole Obama becoming president thing, you haven't given the world much to look forward to in 2009 - the last year of the "noughties". But lets just see what happens, shall we? Who knows, we might even reverse global warming or halt world poverty. But I doubt it.

See you on the other side, everyone!

Home

It feels odd to call this place home now, when really university is more like my real home these days. I guess I do have stronger connections with the friends I have back here, as well as my family, but the lifestyle is very different to what I have become used to on campus.

It's initally pretty nice to be back. I missed my dogs a lot, it's cool having them around again, even if one of them is violently opposed to and frightened of my guitar (already lost one guitar pick to her ravenous, all-consuming jaws. Seriously, that dog will eat anything, she even tried to eat a razor blade the other week). And it's been cool hanging out with my stepbrother for a bit too. But things suddenly went weird when at approximately 10pm, everyone went to bed.

I mean, WTF? I'd completely forgotten how early parents go to bed. What the hell is that about? 10pm, in the holiday, and no-one to hang out with, nothing to do... I've got plans for the weekend but it was weird stepping back into reality and realising that its not normal to still be hanging out and thinking of making dinner at 1am.

Also, there is a whole fridge full of food. But wait, this is the weird thing. Instead of having a fridge full, yet with only a mouldy tomato and an airtight container of leftover baked beans actually belonging to me, the fridge is actually full of food that is technically mine :-) Yay! Having lived on almost exclusively toast for the past week, I nommed through the rest of a leftover tuna pasta bake I found in there, only to realise later it had probably been there a few days, and was probably meant for the dogs...

I've discovered my crappy, crappy guitar playing is enough to impress a nine year old boy. Although after trying to teach him the Smoke on the water riff for about an hour while watching the poor dude helplessly grapple left-handedly with a guitar twice his size I handed in my teaching cap. It was a fun way of totally freaking the dog out for a while though :-)

I'm missing Brighthelm and my boy-next-door already! And I'm bored, its too late at night to do anything, since any of my favourite activities inevitably involve making lots of noise (Yes, ALL of my favourite activities - heh).

A very important observation on life.

Okay, I know I was gonna follow up on the whole stupid idea thing, but it was a stupid idea, so forget it, because I have just made a weird observation which MUST be written down before I forget about this amazing development in culinary philosophy.

You know when you're about to finish a packet of crisps or a biscuit, and when you go to eat the last bit, you realise you already ate it? And you get that weird empty feeling because you were expecting more?

Well it happens nearly every single time I absent mindedly eat a jaffa cake. Weird. Perhaps it's because they're so deliciously light, or because they only contain one gram of fat (that is why they are recommended by sports nutritionists!), but every time I eat one, I start looking around for the other half of it. It's kind of like when you get a leg amputated and then you feel a phantom leg for years afterwards.

I feel like I have a load of phantom jaffa cake halves haunting me. What's with that? Am I the only one that gets this problem? Also, it's so easy to eat a whole pack in one go without realising!

My final observation is that while I have been spending hours and hours struggling over what to write in an essay before writing only a hundred or so words - I can somehow write 200 words about jaffa cakes in less than two minutes. Writers block can therefore be cured by jaffa cakes (but only if you want to write about snack food).

Maybe I should be a junk food critic!