It’s time. It’s time for you to let me go. Now run! Run into the light!

Whoop, happy new year!  I spent my Hogmany working til 8, sadly, which left me with only the energy to eat some crispy duck, drink some wine and sing along to Elton John with my mother.  Rock and roll.

I’ve been trying to blog for over a week now but I think this is the first time I’ve sat down to actually do it.  I wanted to do my photographic round-up of 2008 to say goodbye to it all and look forwards to the year ahead. Here goes:

January was not too eventful. This photo was me after getting my hair cut with a voucher I won in a raffle, which sounds disasterous but was the best hair cut I’ve had (no, really).  I made the decision to leave my job in January of nearly six years which led to me moving to the other side of the world later in the year.

February saw a lot of upheaval as I tried to fit in lots of things before I left.  One of those was trying my hand at pottery with Jo! I made these pots and sadly whilst I was away, the place closed down and we never got our pots back. But look at them, don’t they look great? I would love to try it again some time.

March saw my departure for Bangkok, which was both wildly exciting and desperately sad to leave Lee behind. This was on my first day there, from the balcony of my temporary home at the hotel.  It was so HOT. The first few weeks there felt like a holiday and it wasn’t until I moved into my own apartment that it started to feel real (and thus, the homesickness kicked in).

It wasn’t all about crying into my pillow though, I did manage to have some fun in amongst the weeping.  Here are me and Liz at Songkran, Thai new year.  We hit up Khao San Road and got totally soaked to the skin in the water fights and all clayed up.  It was such amazing fun!

The first rule of monk school is there you don’t talk about monk school. This was from a wee jaunt to Wat Po that I took myself on. These boys were so colourful, it’s really stuck out in my mind.  It was around the end of May that I started thinking about coming home – work was getting to be a pain, I was really missing Lee and I was struggling every day with a decision to stay or go home.  Some quiet reflection in the temples helped though.

June saw me deciding to go home and also deciding to make the most of the time I had left. It also saw Liz depart for England (and go on to have a lickle baby in Sheffield!) and Marceline come to visit! We had a fantastic time shopping, eating pizza cones and Beard Papa and going to the Rabbit Resort which was the ultimate in relaxing luxury.

July saw my return to Scotland, but it was not without it’s problems (arrest for overstaying visa, excess luggage, stolen luggage… let’s not go into it again). However, it did mean I returned to Lee, hurrah! Here we are on Stevenston beach having a walk and generally being happy.

August was a good month and a bad month. It was bad as I was still jobless, money was tight to the point of non-existence and I was quite down about it all. It was good in that we had some fun times, including going to some friends’ wedding – look how tanned my arms are!  Towards the end of the month, I did get my subtitling job and better times lomed up ahead.

September – the first of the major craft events! It started to get really busy on the Miso Funky front which means that most of my photos from here onwards were of various halls where craft fairs took place.  This one was at Byblos, in Glasgow where the Glasgow Craft Mafia put together a little shopping village for a charity fashion event.

Look at me! In the Daily Record, which is a national newspaper here in Scotland.  It was a piece about an event I was doing a stall at and it turned out really well. I got lots of enquiries from it and was even star-spotted in a local shop, ha! It also saw me start my new job and get my subtitling groove on. A very busy month, but not as busy as…

November! Which was full of craft events and subtitling. We did an event in Newcastle which did let us have a wee weekend in Tynemouth which meant we got to go to the market, hurrah! I picked these things up there.  The rest of the month was just SEEEWING in a blind panic.

December! It was all done with at the end of the month and I could stop sewing for all of 2 days. We celebrated Christmas with a trip to the panto, to see the Christmas lights and then for dinner and generally relaxed for a bit.

And now it’s 2009 already! No resolutions as I won’t keep them, except maybe to try and blog a bit more. 2009 is going to be the year of making stuff happen though.

Happy new year to you all!

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