Good wishes to everyone and I hope that the new year will be a good one for you.
I stayed up last night, not because I see much significance in the switch to the next year but in the hope of seeing some fireworks. (I'm such a kid at heart.) My perseverance was rewarded with a firework display at the holiday park by Ynyslas. A few miles away but still pretty. Then a few large fireworks were set off at this end of the beach and just as I was heading to bed there were more display type fireworks being set off from a little way down the beach. All worth staying up for even though it was bitterly cold.
I have come up with one resolution for the new year and that is to sleep more and eat less sugar. If I can make just those two changes I suspect I will be a lot healthier.
The weather has turned much colder with heavy showers and strong winds. This morning I wrapped up well and managed half an hour outside (in the dark) before the first rain began.
Later, as we were running low on milk, I went for a beach walk before calling in at the shop. I passed the fewer than half a dozen people heading into the waves for an even more unofficial New Year's Day dip and somehow I wasn't tempted to join them. One cold water swim a winter is enough for me.
I felt it was a good day for soup so thought I'd throw in a few vegetables so we could have soup for supper. It was a bit like the story of 'Stone Soup'. By the time I'd added onions, smoked sausage, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, mushrooms, celery and some of my tomato base stock I had to move everything into a larger saucepan and we now have soup for several meals. I don't mind cooking that much but it would be so nice if once in a while I could sit down and have a meal put in front of me. (I know Pete cooked the Christmas dinner but we came home to uncooked carrots, stuffing balls still in the freezer and gravy that hadn't been thickened all of which I had to deal with.)
Cooking done I turned to my planned task of working on my next project, a photo book of all the work that has been done to the house. This is very much a 'for me' project, I love photos especially before and after shots. I'm also going to include some of the work in progress photos. I keep records of my daily photos but still had to go through many of this year's files. In these rather grey days it was quite surprising to see just how sunny and full of colour the garden was this year. But somehow I never found a photo of the whole garden looking back up at the house to match one of the early photos I took of the completely overgrown garden. I'll have to wait for better weather to take that one.
