Well it’s February 5th already and I’ve only posted twice so far this year.
I haven’t really been in the mood for blogging but that’s not because anything is wrong in particular, just the usual hassles of life that I will go into in more detail later.

So! how has life been so far this year?

Not too bad really.
The new job is going really well and I am settling into a routine. My new team is taking shape and beginning to look at our actual role within the rest of the service. It won’t be long now before 9-5 will be a thing of the past and we will be doing our anticipated shifts over 7 days to make sure there is support for the clients that need it.

I now have a sparkly new PC!!
The old one was exactly that… too old to continue updating and using old packages on.
I even had to update my version of Corel Draw because the copy I had was so old it wouldn’t run on the up to date Microsoft system.
I was getting the blue screen of death every 5 minutes and it was driving me nuts!!

The diet has successfully started!!
After several false starts, the diet is now under way and is going pretty well.
I am currently 4.5kg down and I am beginning the feel the benefits. Only 36.5kg left go…urgh!!
The only way I have ever succeeded in losing weight in the past is by healthier eating, calorie counting and more exercise. However, I am currently unable to do the amount of exercise I used to do because of my knee issues, so I am being very careful about what I eat and drink.
I have cut out unhealthy snacks completely. I have seriously cut down on my alcohol intake and I am using Fitbit to help me keep track of my calories which I am limiting to make sure I am in a slight deficit each day.
I still do some exercise though as I get on an exercise bike each evening and do around 8 – 10 km. Just enough to get my heart pumping for a while and hopefully strengthen up the muscles around my knee. I’ll do this for a few months and then hopefully up the exercise a little bit more.
I am finding that planning my food for each day is a huge help because I am not just grabbing things when I am tired and hungry and I think I am now at a point where it is working nicely.
I have a planned breakfast, lunch and dinner. It leaves me with the ability to have a couple of small snacks throughout the day if I want them and I am slowly and steadily losing weight.
My aim for this year will be to get back to where I was for my brothers wedding in 2017 and get all of my lovely tops out of cupboard to wear again!!
I then need to keep it going for a little bit longer to aim for my daughter’s wedding which she is hoping to have next year if finances allow.

The house remains COVID free!!
We’ve been really lucky. Not that the winter cold hasn’t attacked us. Marjorie and Dharma have both been suffering with a bit of a cold this last week but they remain COVID negative, so all is good.

There have been few ups and down over the last few weeks.
Sadly , I attended the funeral of a friend we lost just before Xmas.
He was a friend of my daughter Murron and I would regularly see him on some of our nights out together.
I will always remember him staying in the garage one evening, when the garage was used as a den by Murron.
By the time we all got up the next day he’d tidied the garage up! He was rewarded with bacon sandwich.
I will always remember him as happy, cheeky and mischeivious and nights out on the town will never be quite the same.

To lighten things back up again, I was invited to my friends, daughter’s hen do a few weeks ago.
We started the day at Ballie Ballerson in shoreditch, with bottomless prosecco cocktails and pizza for 2 hours and several dips into the adult sized ball pits!!
It was incredible fun and I hope to go back there later in the year for either Marjorie’s birthday or Murron’s hen do….. maybe even both!!
It’s another reason to get a bit fitter in myself as I couldn’t fully enjoy the ball pits. If I had fallen over, they would have needed a crane to get me out!!

We chilled for a while at Box Park before heading over to Bar Elba in Waterloo.
This is an amazing rooftop bar with fantastic views of London and we had a private party pod for a few hours where we again had more food and drink.

The only downside to this bar is that it is situated at the top of what felt like 20 flights of stairs!!
Obviously a bar for the young and fit. I made it though, but I nearly died trying!!

Anyway, that’s all the major stuff so far.
I could go on about the situation with Ian medically but that is a whole blog on it’s own and I’m really not in the mood to discuss that one today. I’m just getting more and more angry with the whole situation.
So, I’m going to get a bit of housework done before my friend Mick comes over to catch up on The Book of Boba fett and the new series of Resident Alien.