Today marks the start of a new budget month for me, as I get paid today. Let’s just say that last month didn’t work out too well where budgeting is concerned! I spent about £150 at the weekend on food, going out, wii games and various other fun things, which means I spent about £500 on food and non-essentials for the month, and that’s with my dad spending about £100 on food shopping for me. Oops. This month will be a better month though!

I’m also failing on the weightloss front because after a good start, I’ve put on a pound. I think I got too complacent, because I had a big chicken meal on Friday and a pizza on Saturday. Plus, although I’ve completed 10/20 workouts on EA Active (woohoo!), I should be moving around more during the day, and at least be going for a walk every lunchtime. I think the problem is that saving money and losing weight are conflicting with each other quite a lot. If I want healthy options, they often cost more. If I don’t bring a sandwich for lunch so I have to walk to the shops and get one, then I’m spending more than making sandwiches at home and bringing them in. Those are just small examples, but they build up. I think the key is not giving up, and making changes I can stick to. So from today I’m going to be doing a 45 minute morning exercise routine, walking every lunchtime, and maybe doing some yoga or similar in the evening. I’m not giving up!
In the good news category, I signed up for organ donation, and I’m meeting up with a woman this weekend to talk about volunteering with a web and marketing project, so my charity work and good deed goals are succeeding at least.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work and planning for Blossom. I signed up for Remember The Milk, and I’ve already completed or mostly completed several tasks. I’ve installed plugins, added Gravatars to comments (though the comment boxes still need a bit of tweaking), created new email addresses and a feedback form (which I must remember to add to the sidebar) and added CommentLuv. It’s a nice way for me and visitors to keep track of what’s going on, and if you add me as a contact you can even add things to my list. That might not work out so well! But seriously, I’m looking a lot more into pages – what’s broken, what’s popular, what needs updating, so any feedback is good. I’ll be adding this page to the sidebar soon, but for now you can contact me here.

So yeah it’s crazy busy, and with adding other goals and projects into my life, I’m pretty much going to be busy constantly. But I feel very productive, if a little tired, and I don’t think I’ll get this time of my life again – young(ish)!, no one to support, no real restrictions or constraints – so I’m going to try and use it as well as I can.

In other news, and to explain this blog title, I was randomly Googling the other day when I came across a website I made in 2001. It’s so bad it’s hilarious! I look back and go ‘Aww’, and I have to laugh at the ‘blog’ entries, especially the one that talks about coloured scrollbars being ‘illegal’ lol!! And me with crappy frames all over the place as well. Still, I guess it shows how much I’ve learned over the past ten years?!

Ouch…I haven’t blogged in ages! I’ve been pretty busy with work, going home for the weekend and general catching up. And yet after all the catching up I’m still behind! Sometimes I really do feel like I’m going round in circles.

I’ve been getting up earlier to do a workout every day. I’ve been following the EA Active 30 Day Challenge (on my Wii) for the past week, and it’s a pretty good workout to start the day with. I definitely needed to up my exercise levels since I spend five days out of seven sitting at a desk for eight hours or more. Getting up earlier is not fun, but I feel good after a half hour workout and I want to at least complete the 30 day challenge.

A few of you were asking about Wii Fit Plus – if you have Wii Fit, it’s not too dissimilar. It adds some more activities and allows you to create custom workouts. But I read something recently which mentioned that Wii Fit and Plus both follow a more Eastern attitude to exercise (i.e thinking about stretching, posture and balance), whilst EA Active is based on Western thinking of being active. This is completely true, but then again there’s an ultimately fun aspect to Wii Fit which you don’t get with EA Active. You’d ‘play’ Wii Fit, you’d work out on EA Active. Having said that, if you’d the kind of person that prefers fun ways of exercising then Wii Fit is going to be more your cup of tea. It’s something you might play with friends, whereas if I invited one of my friends round to play EA Active, they’d probably take it as me calling them fat or something. Or just be very confused.

I just feel that Wii Fit and Plus, though they are more fun, don’t really count as exercise and so you might be fooled into thinking you can eat more crap than you can. I guess both games have certain advantages and disadvantages.

In other news…thank God the snow is over!! We had a day of black ice to round it off, and it was horrible. A two mile journey took me nearly an hour and a half, and it was so slippery in places I physically couldn’t walk uphill without the aid of a well-situated fence or hedge. Crazy. The only reminder of the snow I have left is a small scab on my knee from where I ripped my jeans (and part of my leg) open last week. Fingers crossed the weather starts to get better. It’s already getting darker later, which I love. I’ll be complaining again once it starts to get hot though!

I’ve installed Google Analytics for WordPress, and I’m going to delete CyStat because it’s just too buggy. Google Analytics has a lot of useful information, though I’d prefer an overview of general stats as well. It also seems to be missing the (very basic) full referral URLs of visitors, though there’s a hack I can implement so I might try that.

I’ve also signed up to Delicious, so if you’re interested in what I’m bookmarking or have an account, feel free to add me. If you’re interested in stalking me all over the Internet, then check out my lifestream (but I only add people I know on Facebook).

The Haiti earthquake is all over the news, and it’s pretty emotional stuff to watch. For all the hate and war there is in the world, it’s pretty amazing to see how much people can achieve when they actually work together. I’ll definitely be donating to the cause in a few days when I have more money, and then I intend to blog all about it. Until then, I’ll just count my blessings that I live in a non-extreme country (however boring it may be), and realise that I should stop complaining about the snow.

So, to round off – if you made any new year’s resolutions, how are they going? Have you broken any yet? If you didn’t make any, why didn’t you? I’m finding that mine are actually pretty tough going, but I haven’t given up yet

Hmmm…the blogging every other day thing isn’t going so well, looking at the dates. It’s kind of averaging out though…?

So far the new year is going pretty well. I’ve lost about a pound or so (the scales are telling me 3 but I think that’s to do with differing times of day), I’m eating lots of fruit and veg and less processed food, so my skin’s feeling (and probably looking) somewhat better and fresher too. I need to up the exercise more, and I haven’t quite cracked the getting up early thing – but hey, half 7 is better than 8am.

I also realised I forgot to mention one of my new year’s resolutions, which is to do something helpful for charity every month. I imagine this will be mainly donating money, but if I can find other ways to help by volunteering and helping out with things then I can. I already have a few ideas of places I’ll be donating to, but if you have any suggestions they’re more than welcome. I’m also trying to make my life more eco-friendly. I don’t have a car and I recycle as much as I can, use cloth bags and some environmentally friendly cleaners, but I’ve been looking into soapnuts recently and I want to try them out when I run out of washing powder. I’m also thinking of buying some e-cloths and an e-mop this weekend, because using Flash floor cleaner seems to make the cats a bit sick, and it’s also very expensive for what it is. Just plain water and good microfibre should do the job better, because the Flash mop isn’t very effective anyway. Wow my life is exciting…

Budget-wise, I’m doing okay. I’ve spent maybe £60, but a big chunk of that was food. I would have liked it to be less – I’m finding it amazing how much I spend – but I’m fairly on track. I’m going shopping and having lunch with Bethany tomorrow, and then on Sunday I’m going to Birmingham with Joe to see the IMAX version of Avatar, so it’s going to be a fairly expensive weekend. Not sure when I’m going to have time for food shopping either.
I still have a massive to do list of things to sort out, and it seems never ending. It’s still snowy and icy outside, which doesn’t exactly help. For the past few days I’ve been getting home absolutely freezing and rushing to make myself a mug of hot chocolate. Curling up in bed with a book or my laptop (or watching Come Dine With Me) on the sofa completes my middle-aged style life. It doesn’t help that I only get about an hour of sunlight a day either!

I’ve been focusing on review writing over the past week or so, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the money yet. Part of me wants to save up for the £50 cheque, and part of me thinks I should cash out for Amazon vouchers at £20. I have a massive 5 page wishlist of things, but I’ve got lots of time to decide anyway.
Site-wise, I want a free weekend to do a complete fresh install of WordPress. As much as I love it, I think this old version has been hacked and modified to pieces, and hopefully doing this will solve the two main problems I currently have – weird page referrals and 404s appearing where pages exist. The site itself is such a big job I don’t even know where to start really, particularly as I’m so short of time. Why is it that by the time I finish one thing there are at least three more to do?!