2012, the year when absolutely nothing happened?

It wasn't a bad year, but it wasn't a sparkling year either.   From my point of view, no massive life-changing events, no change in status from the end of last year to the beginning of this one, not one event where I can look back and say "Look!  this is what we did in 2012."

I spent a lot of time worrying - by nature, I'm a terrible worrier - and I seem to have spent a lot of 2012 wanting to achieve things but ending up by not achieving much at all. I had great plans last year for doing something that would bring some cash in, but the things I did attempt weren't particularly successful.  I'm a great one for having ideas and then failing to put them into practice, or having an idea and then expecting someone else (Doug, usually) to help make it a reality.  I suppose if I were to make a New Year's Resolution, it would be to try to be more proactive, to actually make things happen instead of doing nothing or being over-reliant on someone else.

However, I did have a good conversation with Doug in December where he made it perfectly clear that me not working suits him down to the ground - no need to check in with me about whether he can go to London for a business meeting, or be away for a night or two, no worries about finding childcare for random inset days or spending all his weekend ferrying kids to and from the activities they can do after school because I am free to do so during the week.  And he is right that it's better for the kids.  I should revel in it, rather than feeling guilty about it and embrace the freedom that I have while I have it.

Unusually for us, we didn't have a big family holiday this year.  We had great plans to do lots of camping in this country; these were put to the sword by the joy that is the British Weather and we only managed a paltry three trips away.  We also discovered that our tent is simply too big to be erected and dismantled for just two nights away, especially as the awful weather has meant I've had to re-erect it in our garden on our return to dry out.  Most of our plans for this next year seem to involve caravans and hotels rather than canvas, either that or buying a smaller tent.

I say that nothing much has happened, but life goes on - the kids have grown a bit more, moved up another year in school and generally progressed as children are wont to do.  I recently found a photo of Jacob taken about 18 months ago and was struck by how much he has changed.  Here he is in July 2011:-

And here is again, back in September 2012, looking about 13:-

I know the glasses make a difference, but I'm still shocked at how much older he looks.  My little baby boy is growing up fast :)  (Sam, on the other hand, looks exactly the same in photos taken in July 2011 as he does in ones I took last week!)

One thing that has happened this year, and it's quite a biggie, is a startling change in lifestyle for both myself and Doug.  Starting on the day that the kids went back to school in September, we both went on a diet, and in Doug's case, exercise regime.  As of just before Christmas, he had lost 3 1/2 stones and I'd lost 2.  Obviously we've lapsed over the Christmas and New Year period, but it's back on the straight and narrow now that all the turkey and chocolate has gone, back to food diaries and calorie counting, but we're both looking forward to it now that we know we can do it.  Both of us feel so much healthier, we're sleeping brilliantly and are fitting into clothes that we haven't graced for several years.

 Naturally, I am deeply jealous of how Doug has managed to get running with the C25K programme, but can't bring myself to go running, no matter what.  So, starting once the kids have gone back to school, I'm going to be heading off to the pool a couple of times a week and will be working on the swimming version of C25K - a couch to a mile programme.  Coupled with the 90 minutes of walking a day I do with the dog, I'm hopeful this will make all the difference to the dieting process.  We shall see.  Having had a late night last night, I'm not feeling particularly disposed to make good on my idea of going for a family walk today, so not the best of (re) starts!

The dieting has also led me to be rather more proactive in other ares of life - I've done the last bits of decorating that the house really needed and have been annoying me for nearly six years, since we moved in (two rooms completely repainted and finishing touches added around the house).  I've collated all my half-started and half-hearted craft projects that have been cluttering up the house.  I've finished one of them already (socks!) and have re-versioned another for starting later today.

But one thing that definitely didn't happen in 2012 is that I didn't write on this damn blog quite as much as I should have!  Maybe this will be another thing that I get round to in 2013.....

Opening Ceremony

I was a bit worried, to be honest.  I've been to an opening ceremony put on by Britain for a sporting event (Euro 96) and it made It's a Knockout look classy and expensive.  We couldn't match Beijing for sheer scale, so how to follow it?

With creativity, invention and humour, that's how.  And how.

It was fantastic.  I loved it.  The kids loved it (and they stayed up right to the start of the athletes' parade at 10.30pm before going to bed); they didn't get a lot of the cultural references, but they loved James Bond and the Queen, Mr Bean and all the villains from childrens' literature.  And the music!  a soundtrack with some absolutely belting tunes, and even here there was some humour injected (the athletes of Fiji walking round the track to the Bee Gees!).

And there was supremely nice touches - the bearers of the Olympic flag (Doreen Lawrence, Shami Chakrabarti, Ban Ki Moon et al) and the fact that the lighter of the cauldron was not a famous athlete but athletes of the future.  And that cauldron - beautifully designed.

Well done Danny Boyle and Stephen Daltry, well done all those celebs who pitched up to do their bit and WELL DONE all those volunteers who took part and performed flawlessly.

January Update

At the end of December while I was flush with ideas about how to generate some cash and independence, I promised to write an update at the end of January as to how it was all going. 

I had a crack at doing some work on Mechanical Turk.  It's a bit of a black art finding something that you can do quickly that generates enough cash to at least nudge you over the minimum wage level, but I found a task where you had to write 150 words on a random set of topics; this paid the princely sum of $1, and without any interruptions I could write about 10 an hour.  That's c. £6.50, at the current exchange rate. The good thing about this was that I could sit and write for an hour and then, if I found myself near a computer later on in the day, I could write a few more whilst doing other things (waiting for the kettle to boil, or the kids' tea to be cooked etc). 

Luckily for me, I only did this for a few days.  Otherwise I'd be even more pissed off than I am.  Because, despite saying in their FAQ that you can transfer your earnings to your bank account, once you actually attempt to do this you discover that if you're a UK resident, you can only be paid in Amazon.com gift tokens.  And not even ones you can use somewhere useful like Amazon.co.uk.  I had a brief look at shipping rates on the .com site and they were around the $40 mark; so I'd have to go back to Mechanical Turk and work for another two or three days to earn enough to pay for the shipping on anything I spent my earnings on.  I read somewhere that after the US and India, the UK has the most MT workers - but why, if you can't do anything useful with what you earn?

Anyway, that was a giant pile of poo and a waste of my time.  But I've found some more crowd-sourcing sites that do pay you in real live money, probably because they're not part of some big shopping empire.  So I registered with one (Clickworker.com) and did two of their basic assessment tests - a grammar one (quite long, not particularly easy) and an author one.   The fact that these tests were considerably more rigorous than anything I'd had to do on MT was quite encouraging; I thought the work available might be more of a challenge and better paid.  And then I got the results back from my basic assessment tests - grammar test passed, author test failed due to plagiarism.

God, I was indignant!  I'd had to write a 120 word review of a film, so I wrote one on Rise of the Planet of the Apes which we'd watched the night before.  I'm assuming that they use plagiarism checking software which is, apparently, rubbish, so the fact that I used the film title, phrases like "motion capture" and name-checked a couple of the actors and characters meant that about a third of my 120 words were the same as in any review of said film.  I wrote a vitriolic email to the company pointing out that I have a degree in English and am perfectly capable of writing 120 words on a given topic without having to resort to nicking it off the internet.  But then I deleted it before I sent it and felt much more grown up for having done so.  Doug says that I should write to them nicely and ask them to reconsider, but it's probably easier just to re-register using a different email address and do the tests again.

Because of that, I haven't actually discovered whether the work that Clickworker.com offers is worth my time.  Nor have I got round to investigating the other crowdsourcing sites, although I'm planning to do that this week.  I have, however, found some audio typing agencies that welcome CVs from people who want to work from home, but I'm still reluctant to send off my CV just yet; I've been practicing, but I'm not 100% sure I want to take a typing test just yet.  However, I am drawing up a list of things that would need to be included on an audio typing services website, and then Doug is going to help me produce a little brochurewear site that I can use to offer my services independently of any bureau.  No idea if that will work, but nothing ventured etc.

My conclusions from the month of January are as follows:  it seems to be a lot more difficult than perhaps it should be to earn random bits of money from the internet.  It may be that I need to work at it (and I'll carry on for a bit) but it's been a frustrating experience so far - I just wonder if I'm going to do it for a period of time and then come to conclusion that if you want to earn money, you have to get a proper job.

That Was The Year That Was

And so I haven't blogged for a month.  Not from lack of things to say, just a lack of time to say them.  I've never known such a busy December - pretty much every day there were things in my diary that needed to be done or bought or attended or arranged.  Most of these things were fairly minor, but just the build up of them left me feeling that I was going to collapse under the weight of my ToDo list.  Now we get to New Year's Eve and everything has calmed down considerably - the only thing that *needs* to be done is for the boys to do any homework they've been given and pick up the school readers they've been studiously ignoring for the past fortnight.

I suppose it's traditional on New Year's Eve to gaze upon the year that has just gone and assess it.  This took me all of two seconds; on a personal level, 2011 was a bit of a non-event.  This isn't to say it was a bad year; we had some lovely times as a family - camping in Derbyshire, in Anglesey (with the rest of my family), the Deershed Festival, Lake Garda.  And as a couple - in May Doug and I spent five days visiting Scotland while my lovely in-laws looked after the kids at home.

The kids had good years too - Sam has come on leaps and bounds at school and we're discovering just what a bright little boy he is, whilst he remains as fluff-headed as only my Sam can be.  We were amused when his teacher told us that he has to go to the Year 2 corridor to get his reading books (because he's reading books from the 7-8 age range), but that they then have to send someone else to bring him back because he forgets what he's supposed to be doing :)  My stand-out memories of him this year are as the lead role in the school production of The Gingerbread Man and singing in the school choir in Kirkgate at the Castle Museum.

Jacob has done well - his SATs results at the end of year 2 were very good, but the one I was proudest of was his handwriting being graded as average (2b).  This might not sound particularly good, but at the start of the school year, his writing was probably worse than that of children in Reception; the effort he put in to improving it to the point where it was "average" was fantastic.  And there were other, non-educational milestones met - he learned to ride his bike (finally) and started swimming strongly and confidently for the first time.  Learning to ride his bike has been rewarded with a nice new bike from Santa.



The big thing that happened towards the end of the year was the new addition to the family.  No, not a baby, but a puppy.  After years of talking about getting a dog, we finally got Coco in October and she has been a delight and a pain in the backside in pretty much equal measure.  She's five months old tomorrow and while we still have a fair bit of puppydom and its attendant frustrations to get through, she becomes a little easier every day.  Rather like a baby.

As you've probably noticed, my review of 2011 is all about the other members of the family and not about me.  One of the problems with being a stay-at-home Mum is that it is easy to let your life revolve around your children and to live your life vicariously through them.  Since Sam started school full time in 2010, I have been revelling in the 5 hours a day that are child-free, some time for myself.  Of course, it rarely works out like that; what I get is the opportunity to do housework, shopping and, dog walking without being pestered by the kids. All of these things take up the time I have for myself and it has got to the point where I think it would be impossible for me to ever to go back to work on top of everything else I have to do.

But I've decided to start thinking about ways of generating some income - obviously not up to the limits of what I previously earned, but just a bit of something, a bit of independence regained.  So I'm currently thinking and researching the possible options - from Mechanical Turk to freelance audio transcription to forum moderation to dog walking.  I'm prepared to give things a go and see how they work out; and if they don't work out, it's not the end of the world.

I've also started thinking about personal goals and what I have to do to achieve them.  One of my failings this year has been the inability to finish things; I've always had a tendency to do this (which is ironic, as my BELBIN profile is as a completer-finisher) but this year I've struggled to finish books, to finish little projects or anything much of consequence.  That's one of the reasons I've been viewing 2011 as a bit of a non-event; there's nothing I can point to and say "I did that".

I try not to be too introspective when I'm writing - I always think it sounds self indulgent and wearying, but I'm publishing the last three paragraphs by way of witness i.e. if I've put it in writing for other people to read, then I'll have to do it.  Or at least attempt it.  And rather than say "I'll blog again on NYE 2012 and let you know how I've got on", I'll give myself a tighter deadline.  So I shall blog again on 31st January with a little update as to how I'm getting on.  If I don't, feel free to shout.

An expensive week so far....

On Monday evening, one of the cats (Cosmo) started coughing and retching violently and was generally ill enough to warrant a visit to the vets.  Respiritory illness was originally diagnosed, with a warning that it could also be something stuck in his respiritory system; added to this was the fact that he'd got a hole in one of his teeth.  Anyway, after much worry and faffing, today they put him under and had a root around to see what they could find; what they found was a big blade of grass stuck in his nasal cavity.  They also removed the holey tooth while he was out for the count.

I'm going to collect him later on, but have already been warned that this is going to set us back by £300 to £400.  We have insurance, but that doesn't cover the tooth removal; however, by doing it as part and parcel of the operation to remove the grass, it should make it a whole lot cheaper i.e. we won't be paying for the general anasthetic etc, just the vet's time.

Still, it won't be tuppence ha'penny.  And added to the fact that my Sat Nav was pinched from my car overnight, it is proving to be a very expensive week.  So much so that Jacob's christmas present bike went from a posh ultra-cool one to one from Tesco that I could get through the Club Card Voucher swap.   Squeezed middle indeed.

School Rules

Jacob's new school is a school of rules; most of these rules start with DO NOT.  Now I know that schools are home to the arbitrary rule - from the narrow strictures of what can be worn as uniform to whether you can whistle in the corridors or take crisps in with your lunch.  At my school, girls were briefly banned from wearing ankle socks on the grounds that it made them look like sluts.

At Jacob's school on Friday he was told he couldn't ride his bike nor Sam scoot his scooter along the largely car-free access road between the Juniors and Infants.   It's possibly the safest road in the area, hardly the M1 on a Monday morning.

My reaction on having this rule explained to me as being "for everyone's safety" (general WTF-age, followed by irritation, derision and truculence) made me think - and not just about the fuckwittery that seems to infect the leadership of Junior School.

If you think about it, the arbitrary rule goes out of your life around the time you leave school.  When you get to Uni, there are deadlines to be met and expectations about your attendance; when you start work, you encounter the seemingly arbitrary rules of our Health & Safety culture, but only rarely are you told that you cannot do something for no good reason.  I guess this is probably because you're an adult, with an adult's reasoning powers - if someone presented you with an arbitrary rule, you could probably defeat them with the sheer power of your contempt.

Doing a training course as a post-grad in a college that also taught 16 year olds, I was ordered out of a lift by a tutor as the rule was that they weren't to be used by students; I told her that I hadn't got an upper second degree in English and Medieval History to be ordered around by someone who was teaching an HND course in hairdressing.  You see?  contempt, arrogance (and considerable pomposity) defeat the arbitrary rule in a Scott Pilgrim-stylee battle where the tutor explodes in a puff of smoke and I get 548 XP (as well as a ride to the 9th floor in the lift).

But then you become a parent and your kids go to school - and once again, sooner or later, you are exposed to the arbitrary rule.  If my reaction on Friday afternoon was anything to go by, there needs to be Family Learning courses available to all parents to enable them to deal with these rules in ways that don't involve being utterly contemptuous of the people responsible for your children's education.

Perhaps I'll suggest it as a future course to the people from the local council.  And in future, on being told that my children have to stand completely still in the playground for the 10 minutes of breaktime, "for everyone's safety", I'll be able to smile brightly and say "right you are!" without blinking an eye.

Chuggers

Chuggers are an absolute pet hate of mine.  I loathe the way that they all seem to be Tigger Incarnate, bouncing up to you with bottoms made out of spring: "Hey miss, why don't you put down those heavy bags and just chill with me for a while?  Because I'm bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy, fun fun fun fun fun!"  If only they were, like Tigger, the only one.

I'm normally fairly adept at avoiding them - don't make eye contact, walk just far enough round them that you're not invading their air space, keep on walking.  But today I 'm operating on a bad night's sleep and not quite enough coffee, and the sign above my head saying "Pester Me" wasn't helping either.  Suddenly, they were descending on me and my death-ray glare was malfunctioning.  The words "No", "Still No", and "Get out of my way, RIGHT NOW" might have been mentioned.

Now when I say I'm adept at avoiding them, I'm not kidding - I've never actually been interviewed by one, but I believe the process is that they ask you a few leading questions about the services provided by their charity and at the end of that, you're given the hard sell to leave your bank account details with them so they can syphon all your cash out of your bank account as well as donating one or both of your kidneys, if the chugger is particularly persuasive.

For me, it's counter productive - it makes me hate the charities that do it.  I don't want to have to spend the time when I'm out in York trying to avoid chuggers, I don't want to be accosted by some overly enthusiastic 20-something who won't take "fuck off" for an answer, and I really really don't want to give my bank account details to some random person with a clipboard. 

And do you know what's even more annoying than chuggers in the street?  the ones who COME TO YOUR HOUSE!  Yes, they knock on your door and ask if you've got a few minutes to talk about something, and I'm standing there with an apron on looking harrassed so of course I've got a few minutes to spare for you.  Come on in, take a pew, here's my debit card, have a kidney.

Of course it's the charities themselves who are to blame for adopting these tactics; but to all would-be chuggers out there, I have two words to say to you:  bar work.