I wanted to write a cheer­ful happy, oh 2011 was so won­der­ful, let’s hope that 2012 will be even bet­ter! post, but, I’m just not feel­ing it lately.

In 2011, it felt like I spent the year tired and always busy, but never get­ting any­thing done.

We bought a house. I got a sec­ond job. I fin­ished half my novel.

I started exer­cis­ing a lit­tle in the sum­mer, but once school started in September the park was invaded by teenagers. I couldn’t run along the paths any­more when them crowd­ing it to get to school.

Now, my exter­nal hard drive crashed, and so did the hard drive on my laptop.

For next year, I have only a few hopes. I want to fin­ish at least the next quar­ter of my novel. I want to work exer­cise back into my life. And I want to try harder at being pos­i­tive and happy. I usu­ally am, but lately it’s been a string of things which make that pretty hard to do.

Question to the read­ers: What are you hop­ing to accom­plish in 2012?

I hope every­one is hav­ing a lovely day. Ours has started out very nice so far. The cats loved their presents.  Mandy has been play­ing with her lit­tle feather thing all morning.

This is our first Christmas in our new home. It’s such a good feel­ing to have our own house. We don’t have to worry about the neigh­bors upstairs, down­stairs and on every wall (just about) com­plain­ing about noise. Our old­est niece and my sister-in-law came over last night for a visit, and she got to play around all she wanted. We didn’t have to quiet her because it was after 8pm and she was laugh­ing. She’s four, I don’t want to stop a four year old from laugh­ing to make her think she’s done some­thing wrong.

My hus­band loved the presents I bought for him, and I loved mine as well. Mostly, I’m look­ing for­ward to a nice lunch with my fam­ily, and play­ing games after. We did the same at Thanksgiving last month and it was a nice day. I don’t get to see my hus­band or my par­ents as much as I’d like.

Honestly, I don’t get to see my house as much as I’d like either. We’re always so busy with work!

We love our house though, and I’m really enjoy­ing my new job ¹. The two things I miss the most about our old apart­ment are the dish­washer and the cen­tral heat/air. Oil heat is too expen­sive for us to leave it set at 74*F like I’m used to. Now, we leave it at 65*F. I expected to be cold, but the bath­tub is cast iron inside (I think, it’s still got the coat­ing on it like a reg­u­lar tub but it sounds metal when you tap on it) and that thing just cups the freez­ing cold air inside.

Dishes used to be a quick thing, just toss them in and go do some­thing else. Now, they’re a chore again. The one chore I hate more than any­thing. I’d rather scrub the bath­room than the dishes! They take so long, and since we’re recy­cling, I’m also wash­ing the trash  Laundry is much less of a chore now, so I guess that’s a bit of a trade off. Now that we have our own machines in our place, instead of going to my par­ents’ house across town, it doesn’t take a week to do a load of wash! I can do sev­eral in a day.

It’s the lit­tle things which amuse me.

It’s fun to dream about all the things we’re plan­ning to do. It gives us some­thing to work for. When the days at work are long, we can remem­ber why we’re there, and that X amount of hours will add up to fix­ing the chim­ney, or the porch, the base­ment, tak­ing down the pan­el­ing, get­ting rid of the ‘70s pink car­pet, adding a sec­ond bath­room, adding more than two elec­tri­cal out­lets to each room, rear­rang­ing and mod­ern­iz­ing the kitchen, etc …

Not too many of my friends real­ize just how much being a part of this online forum and club means to me. It’s a site that I go to every day. I have friends there. It’s a place where I can go, and feel like I fit in, some­thing that is impor­tant since I don’t usu­ally feel like I fit in anywhere.

The main thing about it is the trad­ing of patches to form an online quilt, but its most basic ele­ment is to make new friends. There are bees from all over the world, of vary­ing ages and backgrounds.

The highly antic­i­pated ver­sion 3.0 is in the works, and it’s going to shake things up a bit. There’s all kinds of cool new things going on. On top of that, there’s all the reg­u­lar cool stuff going on. Every month there’s an activ­ity, or three. The B*B*S is always buzzing. There’s a chat room to hop on to talk with bees about any­thing. There are groups to hang out in to dis­cuss some­thing you’re espe­cially inter­ested in.

This month, in addi­tion to three cool activ­i­ties, we’re also doing a Christmas card exchange. It’s so much fun. I love get­ting mail from far away places. I’m still in the process of writ­ing out my cards, but I hope to have them in the mail soon. Otherwise they won’t arrive in time!

For my part as a Princess bee, I make the monthly newslet­ter. The last few months have been out late, with every­thing going on. I’m hop­ing that with the January newslet­ter, after things set­tle, that I’ll be able to add some more things into it. I’d like to cre­ate some more excite­ment around the newslet­ter to bring in more sub­mis­sions, feed­back and to draw more bees to the site with it.

There are going to be a lot of bees rav­ing about the club, but the best way to really get a feel for it, is to head over and explore. If you join, tell them I sent you