As we go round the sun again

I've stolen the title of this post from a song written by the band my college boyfriend was in, because I liked the lyric so much it's stuck in my head for 5 years (I'd post the song, but none of them would thank me for it).

I hope that you all had a lovely holiday season and are enjoying the beginning of 2013. I hope this year brings much joy and happiness to all of my readers!

I'm very much looking forward to the next year which I hope will be full of exciting things like fieldwork for my PhD, volunteering with my local history group to help digitize their archives, presenting my first conference paper, attending a short course about Human Osteology (one of the modules that got cut from my masters), setting up my Etsy shop, maybe even buying a house with Ash (excitement, terror, feelings of bank account emptiness approaching =P)

Normally I don't make New Year's resolutions or make them and forget them by the end of January, so this year I'm going to make it simple for myself:

Look after yourself better.

I've not been eating properly, often skipping meals, eating too much junk, not enough fruit and veg. I need to change that. I can see it's effect, not just on my body, but also my mental health. I suffer from hypoglycemia; I get low blood sugar easily, it runs in my family. When I was young with low weight and a high metabolism this meant I had to eat every 8 hours or start to shake and get dizzy. Now my metabolism is slower and I have larger fat reserves I don't get sick so easily so I thought it was less important to eat regularly. Recently though I've noticed that when I skip meals I start to get generally unwell after a couple of days, especially that I get anxious and depressed more easily because I'm putting unnecessary stress on my body which is fighting hard to keep my sugar levels normal.

My weight is higher than my 'ideal', but right now I'm unconcerned by that; although I feel big and cumbersome I know that I'm still within a normal BMI range and objectively still quite small. I do however feel that my fitness really is too poor (I get out of breath walking uphill far too easily!) so I am going to try and do more exercise. I'd like to swim more but unless I can fit it into my daytime schedule it will have to wait until the night's are lighter (I hate walking home from the pool in the dark; it's not the best area of town). In the meantime I will try to do some simple exercise like hula hooping or sit-ups at home!

I'm going to try to do a few other things to look after myself better too like change to a sulphate free shampoo; I recently had a bad reaction to a face-wash which contained sodium laureth sulphate so I'm starting to think that the reason my hair is kind-of crappy is because my scalp doesn't like it either. I might even get wild and try to remember to take my multi-vitamins =P

I was going to post lots of pictures of the home-made gifts I gave to everyone, but realised I forgot to photograph almost all of them before hey got wrapped! None of the necklaces and only a couple of the sock animals got photographed, oopsies!

Here are the pictures I did remember:

The  cat was for Anya; I like making cats, although they take such a long time, because I made the pattern myself - I didn't think any of the sock cats I saw online looked cat-like enough!

The owl with the top hat was for Ed who just got engaged earlier this year, at an owl sanctuary! I made Flick, his fiance, that I've known since school, an owl with a veil to go with it! Cute huh? I wish I had a photo of them both together.