Archive for January 2010

2009 – a personal review

02 Jan Family No comment

2009 was made possible, or made more fun, with help from the following:

  • Monty the dog, keeping us active and giving Martha someone to ‘mother’
  • the Michael Wells and Tom Mumford dog-sitting services, for when we had to be away
  • Apple’s wonderful laptops: well worth the extra dosh for the easier and more efficient way you can work with them
  • Apple’s equally wonderful iPod Touch, which makes clothes shopping with Martha bearable for Jonathan, as he always has a ready supply of blogs and news to catch up on, or a short game to play
  • disappointingly, there were no new great musical finds this year, but Abdullah Ibrahim gets an honourable mention for Senzo
  • 25 or so books, with Only Say the Word by Niall Williams and The Reader by Bernard Schlink being the best novels for Martha, The Noticer the best Christian book, and Sons of Thunder for Jonathan
  • 11 gigs/concerts/shows, highlights being the visuals, staging and audience participation at U2’s Cardiff gig, An Inspector Calls by the Kneehigh Theatre Company, and the marvellous two-hander Sign of the Times, starring Steven Tompkinson.
  • 75 or so films, led by The Time Traveller’s Wife for Martha. Many of them had harrowing elements, such as The Reader, Revolutionary Road, The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Slumdog Millionaire, and No Country for Old Men. We enjoyed the thrillers such as State of Play, Michael Clayton and The State Within, and continued mourning the end of The West Wing.
  • Michael McIntyre made us laugh all the time, and Bill Bailey and the QI team most of the time. Should see more of Eddie Izzard, too.

    • And, for the record, some numbers:

    • 16,500 miles in the car, fuelled by CoffeeNation and Werthers Originals (for the drivers!)
    • 1,100 miles walking Monty the dog (almost all by Martha)
    • 110 miles running (Jonathan), helped by Nike+, and music from the iPod
    • Jonathan was reading 120 different blogs that averaged 1,500 posts a month between them.
    • Jonathan wrote 85 posts on this blog, and a similar number on his work blog with a much larger readership :)

    Aiming for 2010

    02 Jan Family No comment
    Happy New Year 2010 (photo credit: ayeb at deviantart)

    Happy New Year 2010 (photo credit: ayeb at deviantart)

    “Aim at nothing, and you’re sure to hit it.”

    With that quote in mind, we’ve been thinking about what we want to be working towards in 2010. We thought we’d write them down to help make us more aware of them. And why not share them here, too?

    Martha’s aims are

    • read 50 books (not counting books of the Bible!)
    • lose 3 stone in weight
    • establish Parish Nursing in the Whadoon/Priors/Lynworth parts of Cheltenham
    • arrange a Reunion for the nurses she trained with
    • become more creative in her Card-Making
    • walk 10,000 steps a day
    • rejoin the library and stop buying so many novels
    • start doing some Running again (perhaps!).

    Jonathan’s aims are

    • spend more time praying
    • be more creative: doing more design work for voluntary organisations, or learning some metalwork
    • continue his running, and take part in another race or two
    • cycle to work much more
    • bring down his cholesterol level, which is way too high, despite exercise
    • play the piano a lot more this year, particularly working on jazz
    • find at least 10 geocaches
    • get back to doing some more preaching in the next academic year
    • read all of the New Testament, most of the Old Testament, plus at least 6 secular fiction and 6 non-fiction books (easy to do if I finish all the books I have started in the last few years, ahem)

    Together we want to continue seeing more of the family, reorganise our study/office space at home, do some decoration in the house, and continue laughing more.

    We’ll post again to see how we did at the end of the year …

    Welcome to my blog site -- here to help me work out what I think. Feel free to join in, and start a debate. Cheers -- Jonathan.

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