2010 resolutions

This year, instead of making vague statements, or trying to *not* do things (which is really difficult), I made bunches of little objectives across a number of categories which are important to me: Food, Work, Fun, Nature and Personal. The idea is that all these little tasks added up will hopefully shape life more in the direction I am trying to go.

Food

This year focusses on going back to basics: growing, foraging, killing, cooking and eating.

1. Grow and eat 2 kinds of vegetable or fruit in the garden.
This doesn't sound that hard, but I am a terrible gardener. I only have mint, thyme and chives (almost dead) in my back garden because Dog and I just could not kill them, despite our best efforts using claws, drought, biting, urine and neglect.

2. Forage 3 new wild items and utilise them for food (or chutney, soup etc.)
Two high points of 2009 included picking sloes from inside the M25 and the resulting sloe cachaca, and also an amazing wild blackberry crumble. So more of the same this year.

3. Kill and eat 3 different species of animal.
There is nothing more satisfying than catching your own dinner. I hope to maybe catch/eat a couple of new types sea fish (bass?), or maybe a rabbit.

4. Build 6 new food/drink items from scratch.
Last year I set the wholly unrealistic goal of only eating scratch built things (e.g. no bought ketchup, no coleslaw, etc). This year I will try a few new things like beer, jam, tonic water, jelly or a gala pie.


Work



My theme for work is building things with long term value, and generally being freer - getting more control of my time and more control of what kind of work I do.

1. Abelha
has gone well in our first year so me and Hal are mega-excited about the future. We started with the theory that booze makes people happy, and henceforth the more booze we move, the more we get people to spend time happily chatting, chilling, flirting, dancing and who knows what else. So far we are up to something like 17800 of these man-hours of Abelha-fuelled fun. Our resolution is to further increase the peace around the UK and world.

2. Work freelance less, and more on developing own projects.
(about 1:2 ratio of freelance to own projects)

3. Get the wheels going on one new product or service with long term potential.

4. Do about 165 days of work in 2010.


Fun/Art



This is the easy section. I think it's really important that we try to bring lots of moments of beauty into other people's lives (as well as our own). For me this means craft, sort-of-art, events, and general silliness.

1. Make the Goat Race bigger and better this year.

2. Do another installation piece in a gallery or festival.

3. Develop our multi-touch screen into new useful object.

4. Build a piece of art that has ongoing development/usage potential.

5. Do our jousting party bigger and better this year.

6. Make the DogBox club into a regular self-sustaining thing.

7. Build three hats that I designed ages ago but still haven't made.

8. Make one sustainability-related project.


Nature



I sometimes get an awesome sensation of peace and awe in beautiful natural surroundings - mountains, sunsets, lunar eclipses, etc. I knew when I got Dog that I wanted to spend more time outside, exploring; also, being a bit of a nerd I've always had a keen interest in nature too. I want to spend less time on the Internet too, and just to slow down a little.

1. Observe and sketch the 12 Zodiacal constellations.

2. Observe and sketch 10 Messier objects (e.g. galaxies, star clusters).

3. Pick/sketch/photograph 12 UK wild flowers.

4. Catch a falling leaf.

5. Observe and sketch common cloud types (if I ever have a kid, at some point they will ask about clouds, and I will feel like a bit of a cunt if all I know is that the wispy ones are good and the big grey ones are bad).

6. Mark the equinoxes with some kind of cool sculpture (this is the goal I am least keen on, and to be frank it sounds a bit druidic, but I like the idea of building a modern stonehenge).

Here's to 2010!