New Year Part 2: Welcome to 2014! (Plans for the year)

Well, here it is, the now very late New Year post dedicated to 2014. As I said in my previous post, I have high expectations for this year to be a good one.

I’ve already decided I’m not going to have the general kind of New Year’s resolutions I have the last couple of years because that just doesn’t work for me. That said, let’s look at the ones I made last year:

Get fit – Yeah… no. Well, I made a start. I did cut back on unhealthy snacks (because I couldn’t afford them) and I did start exercising again and managed to keep it up for a couple of weeks (until Christmas came along).

Keep improving work – Okay, this one seems to have been achieved, in that the results I got last year were better than the year before, but this isn’t a good goal for a January-December year because I don’t even know yet what kind of grades my work from last semester got.

Write every day – Done, but not in the way I wanted.

Seriously, this doesn’t work for me, but that’s about to change.

I have three specific goals for this year, and there are other things I plan to do at certain points. Let’s take a look at the big three first.

1. Graduate from university – This is going to happen no matter what, honestly there’s no reason for it to turn up on the goals list. Well, I guess everything could go horrifically wrong at the last minute.

2. Get a job – What are the odds of getting a job straight out of university? I don’t know about recently, but the last I heard it wasn’t good. Considering I’ve never been able to get an actual job before, that will definitely work against me. I’m free from uni after April, graduate in July. Let’s see if I can manage to pull this off before December.
It will become very important. After uni I won’t have student finance to feed me. I don’t want my parents to have to worry about that and I want to contribute to the rent as well as keep my hobbies alive. That’s right, I’m coming straight back here after uni, I have nowhere else to go and honestly I’m happy with that. I’ve worked too hard on fixing up my room this last year to just give it up. Plus I really, really just want a job.

3. I’m going to go ahead and bring back the fitness goal, as I have the next few months pretty well planned out for that. I’m going to be trying to eat more healthy food – I’ve looked up a lot of recipes so I can make more stuff rather than just throw something in the oven – and I’m attempting the ‘eat six smaller meals rather than three big ones’ thing.

I’ve also found a pretty good exercise routine that seems to fit with what I’m capable of doing right now, providing a challenge without it being impossible for me to do right.

To keep myself as productive as possible, I've decided to try to set a number of goals each month to complete, both to progress with my bigger goals and to achieve the smaller goals I have for the year. There are things I want to see and do in Liverpool before I leave it. I want to finish my cosplays in time for the conventions I’m actually making them for. I want to see if I can do anything with the short story I got a first on last year, maybe enter it into a competition or see if I can get it published. There are a lot of plans I have with friends as well. It’s going to be a busy year, but a fun one. 

My plans for January include starting with the new diet and exercise routine, developing a complete draft for each of this semester's assignments -aside from the one that doesn't work like that, in which I should still make significant progress- and write up a new CV draft, as well as see if there's anything I can do to add to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, have a good year.

New Year Part 1: 2013 Review

Well, I’m a little late, but it’s time for the whole New Year thing. Before I go on to talk about the year ahead, I wanted to take some time to talk about the previous one. 2013 was a great year for me, maybe one of the best so far.

There were some downsides. I couldn’t go to MCM Expo in October and there were some other financial problems. Christmas didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted either, but that’s really all I can think of on the negative side.

On the positive side, there were a lot of great times with friends and family. I went to Alcon for the first time and it was amazing. I also gave blood for the first time, something I sadly haven’t been able to do since but am definitely looking forward to doing again this year.

If not in general, 2013 at least saw the start of my best year in university so far. 2012 was bad for accommodation and the beginning of 2013 saw it getting better, but since September I’ve been in a really great flat with two amazing flatmates and we’ve had a lot of great times together. I’ve had a lot more of a social life, continuing to go to Anime Society but also joining the new English Society and starting to talk to a group of people in my class more regularly. The classes themselves have been getting better as well.

2013 brought some great seasons of some of my favourite programmes, and sadly some that weren’t as good, not to mention the awesome Doctor Who 50^th anniversary special. I also discovered some amazing musicians and games that I hadn’t known about previously.

I was going to go into details and talk about specific things, but I think leaving this post as a summary is a nice idea. Overall, 2013 was a year full of great memories, and I have high expectations for this year to be even better.