011. Go to 10 gigs or tours (8/10)

I bought James tickets to see Ed Sheeran for his birthday, which was just before Christmas. On Saturday January 21 2012 we almost left our tickets at home and after the taxi driver took us home to pick them up we finally made our way to London on the train!
I was worried about it being a standing venue and not being able to see, but we were positioned quite well and on my tippy-toes I did manage to get a good look at Ed (it was definitely him, no mistaking the hair!). The floor is also sloped towards the stage, imaginably for when it becomes a completely seated venue, so this helped loads!
During the final song Ed brought out just a couple of friends/special guests in Devlin, Rizzle Kicks and Wretch 32. I thought the girl stood next to us was going to pass out from excitement! It was pretty cool and added something special to the night.
Note to self: Buy better gig footwear (I was in agony!)

036. Buy a dressing table and finish the guest room

I finally got my dream dressing table. It's from IKEA and is from the Hemnes series. The drawers are also Hemnes and it all fits together beautifully.

The drawers and dressing table are now full of all my wonderful beauty bits and pieces.

The guest room isn't exactly finished, but this is as good as it's going to get at the moment. Now we've just go to decide if we want to keep the bed, or ditch it for a sofa/sofa-bed instead.

027. Send 20 postcards through postcrossing.com (20/20)

I knew I was only a few postcards away from sending 20 via Postcrossing. At the weekend I wrote out six more cards and sent them out. I also managed to have cards that suited most of their tastes and collections, so I hope that they like them. 
I'm not too bothered about receiving cards, I'm sad that my 101 WDW didn't really work out, but it doesn't matter.

Project 365 2012

I don't really know why, but I just couldn't keep up with continuing my Project 365 for 2011. I made it to 33 days that time, not good! And I missed two of those. I had to quit it again.

This time I'll finish, see all the pics on my Flickr.

Fitness Goals

I started back at the gym today. Big step! I'd made my playlist and it was approaching lunchtime, if we had lunch we'd have to wait a little bit of time before going. So, I said let's go now before I change my mind.

It's so quiet on weekends, even for the beginning of January. And the football was on, so it wasn't a bad visit. A good start, back again on Tuesday.

I've got lots of fitness goals on my 101 list that I really want to start cracking through those this year as last year wasn't that successful.


I wonder if I can achieve all three of these in one month, starting from now?

040. Stop drinking fizzy drinks for a month
041. Go a month without chocolate
043. Keep a food diary for a month

We don't generally have fizzy drinks at home, it's only when we're out for dinner or at work that I have drinks like Diet Coke. But, it'll be easy to cut this one out, I'm sure.

I usually have some kind of chocolate snack, usually a cereal bar with chocolate, during the work day. But, as long as I replace that with something else that's not chocolate then this can be achievable in a month.

I'm going record what I eat and count calories using My Fitness Pal - I've done this before and it's worked well in the past, so it can work again.

022. Watch 100 never-seen-before movies (20/100)

Two movies to start off 2012. 
We'd had 'Life in a Day' saved to ages and finally got around to watching it. Such a great movie! I hope to see more of these kinds of movies, it's just fascinating. I was expecting it to be a bit more sad towards the end, but it was truly uplifting the whole way through.
I fancied something light, but still interesting for tonight's Friday night movie, so we went with Burlesque. I was prepared to really dislike Christina as an actress, but she was alright. I think it was a few years too late for her and would've gone along great quickly following her 'Back to Basics' album - she seems to leave huge gaps between projects which I don't think is a good thing. 
We've got lots more movies to watch, so I hope to get through a couple more this weekend.

033. Throw away lotions, hair products, beauty stuff I don’t use

I got my beautiful drawers from IKEA last week which meant I could finally begin organising my life! After Christmas and New Year shopping, plus the collection of toiletries I acquire from work I really needed to sort out what was good to keep and what was old and had to go. I'd chosen to have one drawer dedicated to all toiletries, creams, lotions, potions, etc.

This is what my toiletries drawer looked like before it got full, below you can see it in it's full beauty!

Back row L-R: Body lotions and body butters; more lotions, hair products and body spray; sun cream and travel toiletries

Front row L-R: hand cream; face wipes, cotton pads and hair removal; facial moisturisers; cleansers, toners and make up remover

You can see some close ups of each section in the picture to the left (click to see bigger on my Flickr page).

The majority of my collection is Nivea when it comes to moisturisers. Recently I've been using more medicinal lotions because of my eczma, but I do like Garnier body moisturisers, especially the Summer Body gradual tanner.

I don't think I need to be buying much more, I think I've got enough stuff to last me all year!

What happened in my 2011?

I wasn't going to do one of these posts, but when I thought about it 2011 has been a really great year and we've done so many amazing things. So, I want to share that with you.

January - February - March

I started the year with my first A Day In My Life, showing that my New Years Day was just an average weekend, nothing special! The previous year I'd bought James a stone to lay outside the Arsenal Emirates stadium. It was so hard to choose what to have inscribed, seeing as it's going to be outside the stadium for a long, long time! We finally got the chance in January to go and see the stone in it's final resting place after I'd bought James Red club membership and tickets to a match for Christmas.

February was pretty quiet apart from the one whirlwind trip we had to Nottingham to see Russell Howard. With only one holiday day to spare from work we took one afternoon and one morning off. It was so tiring but I wouldn't have wanted to take any time unpaid from work, so it was completely worth it. Russell Howard put on an amazing show and we had a lot of fun.

The biggest thing we did in March was take a week's holiday and go to Disneyland Paris! Finally, I was there - I'd wanted to go for so many years and we picked the perfect time to go. Although the castle was partly covered for renovations we had a really great time and the weather was unseasonably warm. As well as the Disney parks we took an afternoon out and saw some of the Paris sights as well. We have to go back, our poor aching feet couldn't make it everywhere we wanted to go.

April - May - June

I finally got the office I'd wished for after having the time to organise all my things into the shelves I'd had since the beginning of the year and fitting curtains to make it cosy. I blame that stupid eBay seller for messing me around. James had a top secret work trip to Manila at the end of April, during all the Easter and Royal Wedding bank holidays. I was at home off work on my own for quite a lot of that time, so I ordered myself some pretty flowers to brighten the house up. They lasted for weeks, very impressed with Interflora. I also got a promotion to supervisor at work, a very welcome surprise and pay rise!

May was a month of just chilling out and doing nothing really, lots of Formula One races to enjoy as well. We did take a trip to Cambridge for the last May bank holiday seeing as James had missed the others at the end of April/beginning of May. It's a city that's so close to Norwich and our hometown of Boston, but we'd never visited. I did keep track of my spending knowing I had a couple of expensive events coming up and No Buy May seemed to be a success!

A very expensive month was June, with my birthday and a trip to Dublin to see Take That's 'Progress' tour at Croke Park. I don't think I've recovered financially from the expense of a trip to Ireland! We did enjoy our time in Dublin and we got to see the sights, but it wasn't a city that we connected with and doubt we'd go back (unless it's for work). As for the Take That show? Our seats were high in the stands, but we still had a great view and Robbie Williams' performance was out of this world! Must buy that DVD!

July - August - September

At the beginning of July I met up with my Uni friends in a 'half-way point' of Peterborough. It was a very sunny day so we spent a lot of it lounged on the grass outside a church/cathedral just chatting and catching up. Another week off in mid-July was for our holiday to Copenhagen during the Elephant Parade. We'd spent a few days in London during the Elephant Parade there and really enjoyed seeing the city in a different way as we worked our way around with a map of elephant locations. It was the perfect way to combine a visit to a new country and a new city, it gave us some kind of direction on where to go and what to see because the elephants were strategically placed. Another holiday with perfect weather, couldn't ask for a better trip.

August was another big fat nothing month. I did try and start another Project 365, but that didn't really work out. I did bake some cupcakes at the end of the month for a friends' birthday, though!

September was the month we rejoined a gym, we went hard for a few weeks and were there 4-5 times a week. All was going so well....

October - November - December

October was the busiest month we've ever had with gigs and events to go to. It did all start with Lee Evans in London at the very end of September, from there we saw Noah & the Whale at our local university (UEA) on October 19. Quickly after was a long weekend away in Liverpool to see Jessie J play at the university there. We also got to have a day in Liverpool going round the docks, the museums and Liverpool One - I even did A Day In My Life for one of the days we were there. One week's rest and we were back on the road down to London for a Britney Spears concert! We didn't take the train and stay over in London in our usual style, too many events meant we could do with saving the cash for Christmas - so I drove down to Epping and we 'tubed' in from there.

Wrapping up a long month of travels and events was the Tinie Tempah show at the O2 on November 4 - the best show I've ever seen in that venue. I have never seen that building so freaking hyped! Amazing. We also combined the Tinie Tempah show with a hotel stop over in Stratford and a theatre trip to see Wicked - an amazing show as well! From there November was pretty quiet, full of Formula One, shopping and X Factor. Oh, and fun with my new iPhone!

December was full of more shopping, this time of the Christmas variety, and a last minute trip to Milton Keynes for the Red Bull Racing celebration for their Championship victories of 2010 and 2011. The Red Bull cars were on display in the city and the drivers took the cars on demo drives up and down one of the main streets. I did manage to get a blurred picture of David Coulthard driving the Red Bull Nascar but there's about it. In December I died my hair brown after being a blonde for so many years! We also managed to stay until the end of the office Christmas party this year, something we'd not managed before. And, I spent far too much money, hence No Buy January!

No Buy January 2011

I did mean to have a No Buy month during October, but with so many events during October and November plus Christmas, it didn't really happen! So, here we are at the start of a new year and a new month, it's the perfect time to start fresh.

Welcome to No Buy January! I've done a full month's worth of spending between Christmas and New Year, I'm still waiting for some purchases to be delivered! While the point of a No Buy month is to not spend a penny, that's not possible really, is it? So, I'm going to try to spend as little as possible instead. Back in May I managed to achieve 16 complete No Buy days - that's over half the month. I did spend quite a lot but what I did buy was noted down and I was aware of where the money went (mostly on hotels, train tickets and our London 2012 tickets!).

During January we have one trip to London planned for an Ed Sheeran gig and I have a haircut and colour booked, but apart from that we don't have anywhere to go and no reason to spend masses of money. Plus, we want to spend our evenings after work in the gym instead of lounging at home for too long, this means less time for me to be browsing the online shops!

I'm going to aim at matching, if not beating, those 16 No Buy days I achieved in May. Time to lock up the debit card, let's go!

022. Watch 100 never-seen-before movies (18/100)

We were talking at work one day about movies and this was one of someone's favourites, so she insisted I borrow her DVD and watch it. I've had this DVD and others for a few months now, but I promised that over the Christmas holiday I would watch them all and return the DVDs!

It's a ridiculous movie! I don't think it's good at all - especially when we saw that Mean Girls was on TV just as this movie had finished. In comparison to Mean Girls it's terrible, but it's an okay way to spend an hour or so.