"i’m setting NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS ABOUT NINE MONTHS TOO LATE"

Dear Donna,

To kill my involuntary time off, I have resorted to setting New Year’s Resolutions about nine months too late and trying to complete them all in one go. Turns out this is actually quite hard when you’re not earning any money. I’m not pointing the finger, but it’s definitely your fault.

1. GET FIT

I pick up yoga classes again. Luckily there’s a v. zen studio offering a 30 day $30 membership.  If I go 30 times, that’s only $1 per class and maybe I’ll make some new friends. 30 days is up. Now it’s $17 a class and the yoga teachers lack cynicism. Because of this, we can never be friends.

I start running in the park. It is 35ᵒC in the park. I stop running in the park.

I have downloaded a fitness app and it’s great. My phone multitasks as a personal trainer, I can do it at home and most importantly, it’s free.

It does, however, involve lots of jumping around. Far from ideal with floorboards as noisy as ours. I scan our flat for sturdier flooring and the only patch I find are the tiles in our rather narrow kitchen. I now do jumping jacks in the company of the cake I baked the day before (see below). Motivation or distraction?

2. DO MORE BAKING AND GET GOOD

I’ve baked cakes. I’ve baked scones. I’ve baked brioche. And in between these, I bake bread for the week.

We have a breadmaker.

This does not negate my achievements.

3. DIP MY TOE INTO AMERICAN CURRENT AFFAIRS

If I’m not going to find my work permit in the letterbox, I might as well find a bastion of stateside journalism. I sign up for a twelve week subscription of The New Yorker for $6.

The covers are beautiful, which makes up for the lack of pictures punctuating the very, very long articles. It’s forced my brain to focus on words and forego visual stimulation. So obviously, I have fallen seriously behind and have a stack of current affairs mags that when I get round to reading them, aren’t so current any more.

In summary, the real test will be whether I can do Resolution 1 at the same time as Resolution 2 and whether I’ll hear from you before the next issue of The New Yorker is out. At least employment will be a better excuse for falling behind than, ‘the words are small and the pages are long’.

Stay tuned.

Daniella