newyear

Happy New Year!

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Welcome to 2026! I hope you are having a good new year.

As in previous years, we didn’t stay up until midnight to see in the new year. However, our reason for an early night this time is that Christine is working today. So, we had what would have been our New Year’s Day meal yesterday. Christine pressure-cooked a gammon joint with pineapple juice (here’s a recipe that’s a close match) and we had the namesake trifle from Robert Owen Brown’s Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle book (also available on Amazon via this affiliate link, but for about 10 times the price so buy it from the publisher).

2026 holidays

We have a couple of trips away already planned for 2026. As usual, we’re going to Sci-Fi Weekender in Great Yarmouth in March, and having enjoyed last year’s holiday in North Wales, we’re going back there this year. There were lots of places that we wanted to go to, but couldn’t fit into the week, so we already have several ideas of places to visit.

I’m not expecting any other trips away, although we may be in London at some point. Christine is starting her studies for another qualification at one of the London universities, and whilst it’s primarily a distance learning course, there are some in-person teaching events. Depending on when they are, it may be that we can go down as a family. As it was, I didn’t get to visit London last year; Christine did, but only for work-related reasons.

New tech

As Christine will be starting a new course, we’re using it as an excuse to replace the laptop that we share at home. We currently have a Lenovo Ideapad 320S, which was bought in 2018 when Christine started a previous course, so it’s eight years old now and positively ancient in laptop terms. I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB in 2022 (previously it had just 4 GB), which goes some way to explain its longevity, but it can’t be (easily) upgraded to Windows 11. And as Windows 10 is literally on borrowed time, it’s about time for an update. I’ll write more once we’ve got it.

Home renovation

We’ve owned our house for 10 years (11 this summer). We bought it with the intention of renovating it, and before we moved in we renovated most of the downstairs. At the end of 2020, we had our (then) four-year-old’s bedroom renovated, followed by our kitchen in 2022.

The next big project is the bathroom. We’d planned to start looking at this in 2026-27, but for various reasons we’re probably going to bring this forward to the first half of 2026.

So that’s some of the things that I expect we’ll get up to this year. There will always be things that happen that I never expect – like last year’s work trip to Athens – but it looks to be a busy, and hopefully productive year.

Playlist of the month: New Year

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A screenshot of the New Year's Day playlist on Spotify

So it’s time for a playlist of the month for December. I did my best Christmas songs last year, and whilst I considered doing a ‘worst Christmas songs’ playlist this time, I decided that no-one really wants that. Anyway, as it’s a new year in a few days’ time, here’s a New Year’s Day playlist. I cannot confirm or deny that these are the first 10 songs that I liked when searching for ‘new year’ on Spotify.

  • New Year’s Day by U2. I know this better as the 2003 remix, New Year’s Dub, but here’s the 1983 original. Yes, you’re old.
  • Happy New Year by Abba. I’m not a big Abba fan, and this was released before I was born. It’s a typical Abba song.
  • No Tears for New Years by Katy Perry. After a couple of older songs, here’s a brand new one from Perry’s latest album.
  • New Year’s Day by Taylor Swift. This is actually the first time I’ve included a Taylor Swift song in my playlists of the month. It’s from her sixth album Reputation, so, at the time of writing, there’s no (Taylor’s version).
  • New Year by Sugababes. The second single from their first album, and was released before any of their numerous line-up changes. I suppose you can consider it both a Christmas and New Year song.
  • New Year’s Revolution by NOFX. Start the new year with a bit of pop punk. Although “Next year is gonna be bad, The next one even worse” maybe isn’t the most upbeat way.
  • Is It New Year’s Yet? by Sabrina Carpenter. Another relatively new song, having been released last year.
  • New Year’s Resolution by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas. And now for a much, much older song; this one is from 1967. A bit of a slow jam this one.
  • What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? by Ella Fitzgerald. Staying in the 1960s, Ella Fitzgerald is well known for her classic versions of Frosty the Snowman and Sleigh Ride, but she also did this New Year’s song too.
  • New Year’s Day by Rob Thomas. You may know Rob Thomas as the lead singer of Matchbox Twenty, or the guest vocalist on Carlos Santana’s song ‘Smooth’. This is another slow piano track.

New Year’s Resolutions for 2018

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Happy New Year! As usual, I’m making a handful of resolutions that I’ll aim to achieve in 2018. I don’t always blog about them (as a quick search of my old posts suggests), but here’s an overview and the rationale.

  1. Try to get at least 10,000 steps on an many days as possible. I’ve been a Fitbit wearer for almost two and a half years now. 2017 brought some good streaks where I managed 10,000 steps on consecutive days, including 100 days from July through to October. I would like to have more streaks in 2018. I think 10,000 steps every day for 365 days is out of the question, especially as I’m writing this shortly before lunchtime on the 1st January and I haven’t even hit 1000 steps, never mind 10,000. But I think it’s having a positive effect on my fitness, requires a relatively small commitment each day and it’s achievable.
  2. Become a PRINCE2-certified project manager. I’m booked onto a week-long intensive PRINCE2 course in March, with funding from my trade union. The funding was awarded from a ballot, and the course would normally cost a four-figure sum, so this really is an opportunity that I can’t afford to lose, both morally and financially. So I need to make sure that I put in adequate preparation beforehand, allowing me to make the most of it and pass the exams.
  3. Move forward with house renovations. We did some more work on our house in 2017, but not as much as in previous years. Two rooms downstairs are almost finished, so this year I need to get on and complete those jobs. We also need to start on our two-year-old’s bedroom, which will be a major project including re-plastering and probably some electrical work.
  4. More child-free evenings out. Christine and I managed two child-free evenings out in 2017, which were the first ones since the end of 2015 when our two-year-old was born. We’ve had several offers from potential babysitters and need to do more to take up these offers, so that we can have some more quality time with each other.
  5. Write more blog posts. My blogging basically fell of a cliff at the end of last year. I’m going to aim to write two new blog posts each week, and re-start my answers to Richard Herring’s Emergency Questions.
  6. Clear out our spare room and have more guests staying over. We have a spare bed, but it hasn’t been used since May 2016 because we’ve had too much stuff piled up in our spare room. We should now have enough storage space to put all that stuff away properly, so that we can actually use our spare room and have more guests staying over.

Let’s see how many I managed to stick with.