Thoughts to end the year

It’s New Year’s Eve. I don’t really have anything profound to say and am not doing anything out of the ordinary although today I am wearing my singlet on the outside and have some strange idea that I will work like the wind up until midnight to get all those things done on my To Do list that have been lingering for what feels like the last year so as to not carry them forward into the next.

This year has pretty much been more of the same for us, trapped in the routine of long hours at work and feeling too tired to spend time with family and friends or try anything new. Our choice, and one that I’m sure said family and friends don’t understand but apart from often asking ‘when will it be over?’, seem to accept. Same old same old which probably strengthened our resolve to make our move to New York next year – not a permanent one – but 4 of the most looked forward to months of my life. It’s been a strange year of living part of my life even more publicly than this blog with the adoption of Twitter all the while keeping other stuff completely inside. New York will be the welcome shift in life I need as I realise I’m about half way through mine.

I just scanned back through this blog at the last year’s worth of entries, all 35 pages of them. Some classic one-liners, great food, precious family times, unexpected trip to New York and lots of date scones, coffee and orange – reading it made me smile many times and it still intrigues me that I find so much non-work stuff to drivvle about!

God, this post isn’t supposed to be depressing, just a reflection. I was just thinking about the year as I came across the Mayfly Project – where in this culture of brevity we should be conscious that our snippets give us a very full life of lots and lots of things rather than reducing it to something like the tiny bio of the mayfly that only lives for 24 hours … “born, eat, shag, die”. So as part of this project where you reduce your year to 24 words, you actually realise that there’s way more to your life than this as you think of your 24 words. Actually I didn’t think very hard at all – in manner of often hitting exactly 140 characters on Twitter I walked out of the front door of our apartment building this morning and this phrase came into my head. Strangely, right on 24 words!

2009 was long hours for Xero, no salt, New York plans, Blenheim trips, date scones; spiked with MRI, first conference speech and Webby Awards.

Right, I’m off for a walk to meet The Mister and eat our sandwiches outside in the sun somewhere.