2014

Welcome to 2014, the International Year of Family Farming as well as the Chinese Year of the Horse (from February onwards anyway).

I definitely had an atypical New Years Eve last night... I pretty much broke all of my self imposed NYE rules/customs/traditions bar two... and I didn't even stay up until midnight.

Normally the the bed is made with fresh linen, clean towels go up in the bathroom, the bins are emptied the sink is cleared of dishes, the old calendars come down and the house is made all tidy and ship-shape for the start of the new year. But other than taking down the old calendars and my usual movie watching, I didn't do any of that.

Instead I packed some boxes early in the day before it got too hot (including buying three copies of the newspaper just so that I could add layers of protective crumpled newspaper to the packing boxes), made a jelly using blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and flavoured with Bickford's Lemon Lime and Bitters cordial, kept continually refilling bottles with water to put in the fridge in an attempt to keep myself cool/hydrated and dumped my bedside cabinet outside with the rest of the junk that's been released into the wild as other residents leave the building (I've already had a tiny bookcase and a chest of drawers that I put out be taken by other people, so in essence it's a kind of passive recycling).

Once the evening rolled around I made myself a big bowl of random dinner salad (this time featuring tuna, noodles, tomato, prosciutto, haloumi, tomato, a few green beans and some lettuce) and sat down to watch the first of my two movie choices for the evening, Rise of the Guardians. It's so weird that even though it's set in March/April it just feels like a Christmas movie... I know it's got Santa and Jack Frost, but even so, weird. I then followed that up with some berry jelly and Skyfall. I have to say that I wasn't as excited about this as I was when I originally saw it, the villain is still really, really stupid, and I did start to get sleepy towards the end.

In fact, I got so sleepy that at the end of the movie I decided that even though it was only just over half an hour to go before the big countdown, I was actually too damn tired, too damn hot and just over it... so I packed up and went to bed. I suppose it isn't really too different from what I might have done on any other NYE, except that I didn't stop to listed to the fireworks.

It also meant that I woke up at the regular time this morning and took myself off for the first walk of 2014.

My route was pretty much deserted, although there were a couple of examples of a NYE either well spent or badly spent depending on your point of view... the first was a quite cute shirtless guy laying next to/under the bus stop bench across from Carclew... he also had half of his perky underwear clad butt hanging out of his pants, but the fact that he was passed out/asleep kind of took some of the attraction away... and the other one was on the final leg, as I walked past some of the houses, there was another quite cute young guy who may have been on the porch all night long... he was sitting up in a chair, with his feet propped on a second chair, but he also seemed pretty much dead to the world.

Oh and there was a large floating barge in the middle of the Torrens down near Jolly's Boathouse which didn't make a damn bit of sense... I guess it could have been used for NYE somehow, it just wasn't obvious how and I'm pretty sure it wasn't there yesterday morning.

And I'll be spending the rest of New Years Day packing boxes, getting rid of a bunch of stuff I no longer need and attempting to make the cool change come inside my apartment once it arrives around midday.

But, even so, I'm optimistic about 2014, it's going to be a good year, I can just feel it.

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