Another New Year in London

I'm ringing in another new year in London, and it's another one I'll be spending at home in our cosy flat. J and I have big plans to split a beer and a pizza and watch a movie. If you can't tell, New Year's Eve isn't much of a holiday in my books.

However, it is the perfect occasion to look back on the last year and see what I have (and haven't) accomplished. Here were my resolutions from the beginning of the 2011:

1. Enroll in a photography class. FAIL. But I did play with my camera a lot and bought Photoshop and Lightroom.
2. Learn French. FAIL. I think this was a good fail on my part. As pretty as it sounds, it's probably not as useful as one would hope. In any case, the French would be appalled at my atrocious accent.
3. Get back to fighting weight. WIN. I've lost a lot of the extra weight I gained when I first moved to England (thank you, Heathrow Injection), but I'm not as fit as I'd like to be so the fight continues.
4. Visit Bath, England; Paris, France; Barcelona, Spain; Sydney, Australia; hike in New Zealand. WIN. I've visited Bath, Paris (twice!), Barcelona. I haven't gotten to the other side of the world yet, but I think I'll postpone those trips for a while yet since there's still the possibility that J and I may move back to LA and the plane ride to Australia/ NZ will be much more bearable from there.
5. Make more of an effort with my appearance - I probably shouldn't be proud of the fact that I could get ready to leave the house in less than 10 minutes, which usually just entails putting on a long coat over my pajamas. WIN. I suppose it was inevitable with having to go to work without the risk of them sending me home to get dressed properly. As for the coat over pajamas, I'm happy to report I've done that only once this year.

In sum, I think I did alright, and I even did things that were off the list such as:

1. Ran a half-marathon.
2. Visited Formentera and Ibiza (Spain), Zurich and Luzern (Switzerland), Lake District (England), Las Vegas (US).
3. Learned how to shoot a shotgun.
4. Learned how to golf properly.

And now for the upcoming year, I'd like to:

1. Run more half-marathons - I pretty much stopped running after the Royal Parks half marathon in early October and need to start up again.
2. Start weightlifting again - I also gave up weightlifting when I focused on running for the Royal Parks and so need to start this up again.
3. Visit Iceland (August); Seville, Spain (September); Rome, Italy (April); Santorini, Greece (October); Yorkshire, England (March).
4. Be better about keeping in touch with friends back in the US.
5. Learn how to use Photoshop and Lightroom.

I think that's a feasible list of to-dos for the upcoming year and now to see if I actually do it!