This year's mainly been on a downer, starting with coming back from Dublin for New Year's (not a big party destination for that holiday, I was seeing family) on the ferry, only getting on the ferry because I had the directness to ask if they'd closed boarding so they had to tell me not. Everyone who hadn't asked was kept waiting until they were told they'd (literally) missed the boat. That's what happens to your customer service when you only pay Eastern European minimum wage in Western Europe. Various stresses of the journey meant I arrived home with an evil migraine (y compris auras) and vomitted through the night. So that was a nice start to the 'get my shit together and put everything in perspective' period of the year.

Got my car up on the jackstands soon after that to replace some suspension bushings and some of the bits were stuck, so after a week or so of working on it for two or three hours before it got dark, I took it in to a local specialist garage to fix it, mentioning that the MOT was due in about a month. So he loooked at the suspension, found £600's worth of stuff to fix on that (all new bushings, droplinks, etc.), then another few hundred quid's worht of mild stuff (new cambelt, timing belt, brake hoses, ...), and in the end it added up to, well, fuckloads. And it took ages, so knowing I had to spend fuckloads and still having to commute by train (i.e. 2 hours door to door each way) meant that I wasn't too relaxed most of the time.

So those things kind of took the oomph off the start of my year.

And I diarised about a few non self-aware people making me feel like shit, one deliberately, one merely because of narcissism (frowned upon in her chosen vocation). But now, well, there's a few things I can do at work which I wouldn't be embarassed to put on my CV, and I've got some socialising booked up for most weekends, so I'm reasonably content. Not as much as if I knew people local to me and had a job which paid money and used my brain, but you can't ask for everything.

</self regarding claptrap>