Friday 31 December 2010

18. Make more friends - I keep losing mine to motherhood :(

This is a really hard one. I used to have some fabulous, close friends but they live abroad, so while we have a blast when we see each other, I don't feel that we can call on each other to bare our souls or share our deepest secrets with each other in the way we used to. I also had a few friends in this country who have all become mothers, which is fine, but every conversation is about children's sleeping, children's eating, children's clothes, babies' nappies. Again, that's fine, but most of my friends can't reel off all of this stuff without telling me that my life is empty without children. "Oh you wouldn't understand", and "you're running out of time" are the two most common comments, and the most recent (and hurtful) one was "are you celebrating Christmas? Isn't that pointless without a child in the house?".
However, I have made two new friends during the course of the 101 in 1001 challenge. One is 76 and an amazing, worldly woman. The other is 29 and sees the world very much in the same way I do. I miss having a best friend, but am going to tick this item off the list!!

Thursday 30 December 2010

32. Make chutney or marmalade – from homegrown or hedgerow supplies.

I only remembered that I'd actually done this when I had to put half a jar of chutney on the compost heap yesterday! We tried to grow our own produce in the garden and had an extremely successful glut of tomatoes in the summer. The only problem was that these tomatoes were green. Cue Hugh F-W's River Cottage book and a massive pot of chutney was made and most of it eaten. Unfortunately, we had a power cut while we were away over Christmas and everything in the fridge - including my chutney - died. There's almost next year - let's hope my tomatoes stay green!

Wednesday 29 December 2010

58. Develop charity challenge

I have been thinking about this idea and have decided to do something small for different charities every day of the year throughout 2011. Examples will include donating my wedding dress to charity, volunteering as a marshal at events, taking part in 5Ks, cycling races, swimming events, baking cakes and so on. I'll try to find 365 different charities but suspect I will return to the same ones here and there. Any ideas or charity names are very welcome!
I'll be charting my progress here:
http://www.charity365.blogspot.com/

Sunday 12 December 2010

42. Get rid of some of the rubbish in the house and replace it with flowers!

This is another one that's a bit lame that I must have dreamt up when I was struggling to get to 101 items on my list!
My house is tiny and I actually don't have a lot of stuff, but for boring and weird reasons, I have a lot of my mum's stuff in boxes, so I can't really get rid of it. (I took it upon myself to throw away the box of old luggage tags that she'd kept, and was not at all popular afterwards, so you can imagine the reaction if I threw away anything else!). However, I've done my best to send her stuff to her and hide some of it in the outside cupboard, but please don't look under the bed or under that table with the very long tablecloth! Bless her, she did have a look through some of it and a couple of binbags were filled and taken to an Alzheimer's Society fundraising coffee morning that I volunteered at.

43. Healthy breakfast before I leave the house, smoothie, porridge

This is a boring one. But I have been very good about this as I now work from home, so no need to rush in the mornings! Think it has been good for the waistline too as my trousers definitely seem to want to fall down quite a lot!

Friday 10 December 2010

71. Ride a camel

Nearly!
I recently had a ride on an elephant so I am going to tick this item off the list! Mr PBR and I tied the knot last month and headed off to India on our honeymoon. Towards the end of our all-too-short holiday, we went to the wonderful city of Jaipur where we had an elephant ride up to the Amber Fort, which gave us fabulous views. The elephant was called Champa (a flower's name, I think) and sitting on him was brilliant fun, rolling around at a leisurely pace. However, the mahout was carrying a metal spike to control the elephant and I couldn't help but notice a tear on the elephant's ear which made me very uncomfortable. The other thing that made me uncomfortable was the mahout's talking about money and his tip all the way up the hill, coupled with hawkers constantly trying to sell you quilts, paintings and guide books while you're actually on the move on the top of an elephant is quite surreal.

Thursday 9 December 2010

98. Fix my iPod

The end of 2010 has been quite busy with weddings (mine and a friend's), babies (more than 20 born to my friends, including NINE in November - one of whom was my first nephew!), work and trips abroad, so I have neglected my 101 in list. I was horrified to notice that time is running out, so the first one in my little recent push was to sort out my iPod. I recycled my broken one (and five months on am still waiting for my payout from a certain recycling company), bought a new one and have put all of my CDs onto my i-Tunes which was very revealing. It appears that my taste in music has shifted quite dramatically from dance music to acoustic and folk. I recommend listening to every CD you have. Music is the closest thing we have to magic on this planet and it's incredible to relive some of the moments and emotions that come flooding back simply by listening to a song that meant a lot during your teenage years. I was also able to sell quite a few of my old classics too!