Hey hey lovelies! As is my yearly tradition, I’m starting off 2019 with a recap of some of 2018’s highlights.

1. Tried Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in March, and it rapidly took over my life. There’s no going back.
2. Went to a Ukelele club! Couldn’t continue going because it conflicted with DnD night, boo.
3. My skin cleared up! At age 27 and after about 16 years of terrible acne, my skin finally chilled out enough to give me a break. THANK U SKIN, IT’S ABOUT TIME. 
4. Took a trip to Glasgow! Glasgow gets better ever time I visit.
5. Getting comfortable visiting Dundee. I love that place now and visited a few times over the years.
6. Getting a solid productivity system in place with Pomodoro timers.
7. Gaming: Finished Persona 3 (after 9 YEARS! And 135 hours) Rose of Winter, Mystic Messenger, and the first Spyro game remastered on the PS4.
8. Games started but not finished: NITW, Tomb Raider, Persona 5
9. TV watched and loved: The Office Season 4, Black Mirror, Star Trek Discovery, Stranger Things S2, Brooklyn 99, Critical Role, Digimon Tri, Samurai Champloo, Aggretsuko.
10. Visited Dundee for my buddy Theo’s housewarming, and got to experience the delights of Dundee (24 hour bakery! Rainbow bagels! Adorable cafes!), test my driving ability on a motorway for the first time ever (super enjoyable!), and we had a chance to visit the amazing Camperdown Wildlife Park. Below you’ll see me making friends with a gibbon.

1. Movies loved: Your Name, Star Wars: The Last Jedi
2. Podcasts listened and loved: Archive 81 S3, Welcome to Night Vale, Strange Animals Podcast, The Adventure Zone, Alice Isn’t Dead.
3. Audiobooks listened and loved: The Daughter of Smoke and Bone series, Tremontaine, Six of Crows, the whole Throne of Glass series.
4. Kept my finances stable. I failed my savings goals for the year but I still kept in the black and kept my emergency fund higher than it’s ever been in the past.
5. Dyed my hair for the first time in January! I didn’t like it much, hah, but I learned a few things.
6. Curled my hair for the first time in August! I LOVED IT.
7. READ SOME BOOKS Y’ALL. The Hate U Give was a highlight.
8. Celebrated my 11th anniversary with Dave. We had pizza. :) 
9. Got OBSESSED with Critical Role. Thanks to all the new spin-off-shows it eats up at least seven hours of my week every week but I still love it to pieces and want everyone to join me in one of the deepest and most rewarding fantasy worlds I’ve ever had the joy of experiencing. And wow, this was a heartbreaking and wonderful year to be a fan.
10. Submitted a piece of fanart to the Critical Role art carousel! It never got featured but I was super proud of the piece anyway.

Active Adventures in 2018

1. Ran my first ever 5k at the Elgin Parkrun… and then ran it three more times!
2. Roller derby: it was a YEAR. Finished up with one club, joined another, and got a ton better at one-foot glides and crossovers. I’m looking forward to what lies ahead.
3. Taking up jogging again and finishing C25K stronger and better at jogging than ever! Started the programme in April, finished it in September.
4. Visited Essex for the first time ever. It was green and pretty, no complaints there.
5. Getting regular sports massages which fixed some major issues in my calves and back. Without these I never could’ve taken up jogging again.
6. Getting back into lifting at the gym! And then falling back out of the habit again, woops, that’s something to fix for 2019.
7. Watched the Roller Derby World Cup with friends! 
8. Started learning Pilates! It’s been super fun so far though now quite hitting the Yoga-learning itch I’ve been having, so I might need to do more YouTube Yoga classes in 2019.
9. Got shiny new derby kit, which turned out to be an absolutely nightmare of configuration issues but heeyyyy SHINY NEW KIT.
10. Climbed up Nelson’s Tower in Forres.

New Food that I Loved in 2018

1. TRIED HALO TOP ICE CREAM FOR THE FIRST TIME AND OMG IT’S SO GOOD
2. Tried Hawaiian (ham and pineapple) pizza. Not my cuppa tea.
3. Made Pasta E Olio for the first time and proceeded to make it a TON forever after.  
4. Made a Dutch Baby pancake for the first time. Weird name, good pancake, but Scotch pancakes are still my favourite.
5. Tried beef carpaccio! That one is VERY much my cuppa tea, I loved it.
6. TRYING MORE NEW FOOD! YEAAHHHH! HAD MY FIRST EVER KFC. It was pretty darn good even though I still feel uneasy about their welfare standards towards chickens. Good chicken burgers though.
7. FIRST EVER KEBAAAABBBB. I got a mixed one with barbecue chicken, donner, shish chicken and all sorts. That was really good, and unlike the KFC I feel like I could repeat the order without feeling too guilty about it. Also now that I’ve had a kebab I feel like a proper Brit.
8. More food things tried for the first time: Milo Dinosaurs (so good!), Gingerbread pancakes at the Pancake House
9. And just to counteract all the junk food, I discovered that I actually like the taste of water for the first time ever! WATER, IT GUD, DRINK LOTS.
10. Foods I got pretty good at making: salads (using the Leon Happy Salads book), pumpkin spice lattes, poached eggs on toast, Oreo/Malteaser milkshakes. 

That’s it for the 2018 recap! Let’s see what adventures lie ahead in 2019, the year of Dublin Worldcon and who-knows-what-else.

Welcome to the week that was! Today’s topics: derby patches, spinning classes, baked bean tragedies and ice cream miracles.

This Instagram video sums up up my dream attitude towards 2018:

 

Walking into 2018 like…

A post shared by ROY PURDY (@roypurdy) on Dec 31, 2017 at 11:27am PST

Derby Adventures and the Return of Spinning

It was a busy (and tiring) ol’ week for fitness: first spin cycling class of the year, another awesome roller derby session. Yesterday I also sat and watched the awesome Granite City Brawlers (Aberdeen team) do a coaching day, and got the chance to time penalties in the penalty box which was a fun experience and a great chance to use my LOUD PUBLIC SPEAKING VOICE. One more patch for the derby patch bag!

Next week: more spinning, more derby, and my local Elgin team Helgin Roller Derby are doing a ‘Learn to Skate’ free taster day that I’ll be helping out at. Really looking forward to seeing some new faces there, and it’s not too late to click the link and sign up!

Gaming

In video-gaming, I FINISHED PERSONA 3. It only took 9 YEARS and 135 hours. Holy smokes.

But I’m done now, and ready to move on… sort of. I spent the last week wanting to go back and do all the sidequests and get it 100% perfect. This felt like a terrible parralel between my gaming habits and my writing perfectionism.

By the end of the week, I gave in and finished every possible corner of the game, and sailed through the final boss entirely overlevelled… which doesn’t work as a writing comparison, thankfully, so phew! False alarm! No writing parallels at all here.

While playing, I stressed myself out to the nines worrying about wasting writing time. I felt so guilty. But by the end of the game, surprise surprise, I felt refreshed and re-energised with some powerful new story ideas.

Refilling the well is important! Video games are art, and even though it’s difficult to find the time to play them, it’s worthwhile.

Next up, I’ll be wrapping up a few small indie games and starting up Persona 5. I’m really looking forward to playing it without spoilers, without reading guides, and without stressing out about completing it. Just gonna dive in and let it devour all of my free time.

The part where I have STRONG FEELINGS about good ice cream

In this week’s foodie disaster I, despite all claims that “I am an adult, I can make beans on toast” am not an adult who can make beans on toast. It will only end in burning, first aid kits, and grated thumb knuckles. 

But it was totally worth it because I got to enjoy BEANS ON TOAST. The lunch of champions! I satisfied a craving for tomato soup and cheese-on-toast, which is very fitting during the icy January.

Unluckily for me, I wandered into a Reddit thread discussing the best chocolate in the UK and got recommended to try Aldi’s Moser-Roth brand. I’ve tried it, and the unlucky part is that now I want to buy allll of it.

But the real awesome find of the week? The ‘Halo Top’ brand of low-calorie ice cream (which is legendary amongst American calorie counters for having a Ben & Jerrys style texture but a much more diet-friendly calorie count) is now sold in Tesco.

As a wee reward for a week well done, I finally tried it. After trying similar attempts—including Oppo, a UK brand that I found kinda weak—Halo Top’s cookie dough and cinnamon roll flavours blew me away. It’s expensive, but whew, it’s worth every penny. And unlike Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s I don’t particularly feel the urge to go through the whole tub, so it lasts a while.

Just a shame it’s not cheaper, honestly. That price point really does sting.

Books and Telly and Bloggity-Blogs

Star Trek Discovery returned after its mid-season break, and it was SO GOOD OMG. But this week for me was mostly a week of reading: I finished The Hate U Give, which was beautiful and heartbreaking, and finished A Short History of Nearly everything. Now, to look at the to-read pile and figure out what to tackle next…

Writing didn’t happen much this week, because I used up a lot of my word-making energy on my bi-annual performance review at work. But I kept up blogging, and I’ve been enjoying it! I hope you lovely lot are enjoying my posts too: I’ve been noticing a lot more comments on Facebook and Mastodon, and I really appreciate my small group of blog-reading buds. <3

I’ll leave you all with a Very Good Tweet about buses:

I needed this so much today pic.twitter.com/SFRhIVne3W

— Jade Hayden (@JadeHayden) January 8, 2018

After the September/October overdue recap, it’s time for a wintery November/December overdue recap! After that, I’ve got a few photos to share from our Helsinki adventures, and then I’ll be all caught up on blog posts and we can go full steam ahead into the end of January.

Christmas Dos and Blood Donations

Writing this recap makes me feel old, because I can barely remember what I got up to in November and December. Jeez, Emma, that was a whole YEAR ago. I can’t remember that far back!

I gave blood, which I am historically absolutely terrible at. I started out with no fear of needles and a lot of eagerness to donate. This is my seventh time donating (fourth for the NHS), and only the second time it’s succeeded for me instead of going wrong in horrible and guilt-inducing ways. Now I am somewhat cautious around needles and felt a buzzing ‘am I going to fail at this again’ anxiety for the whole day of the donation, but hey, I did it anyway!

It looks like my iron supplements are doing their job, so here’s to many more successful donations.

December was Christmas Party season, including the work do (where I was too sozzled to post any photos up here) and my first-ever Derby Team Christmas Do (where I was sober, so you get photos).

I GOT A CERTIFICATE! It was really wonderful and kind and I still get emotional looking at it and looking at my happy elf-eared face on the day. I mentioned this already in my 2017 best-of post, but hey, it was awesome enough to get posted here twice.

Winter Means Comfort Food!

Dave got drunk and made corndogs, while I ensured nothing caught fire. They turned out surprisingly  (and deliciously) well given that none of us have ever seen a real corndog. No idea how authentic they were, but they were great. Sober-Dave kept up an excellent noodle-bowl making game, and pulled together some excellent soft tacos.

I’m not a huge fan of cooking, but I do enjoy making veggie-heavy meals. I had fun making a new egg recipe called shakshuka: eggs poached in tomatos with lots of spinach cooked in.

The true love of my life is hot drinks, so I spent a bit of time mastering my pumpkin spice latte recipe to get the layers right at home. Mission success, I reckon.

I also tred out hot chocolates of all stripes and fell in love with the Singaporean powder mix Nestle Milo, which makes great hot chocolates and amazing ‘Milo Dinosaur’ milkshakes.

Oh, and we had gingerbread pancakes at the small-ish Scottish chain restaurant The Pancake Place. They were AMAZING.

And Comfort Movies!

The new Star Wars movie came out in December! And it was fantastic! It’s themes around failure really hit a chord for me, and Kameron Hurley’s blog summed it up pretty nicely. I really, really enjoyed it and want to watch it many more times.

But a surprise favourite of the month was YOUR NAME: an animated movie about two young teenagers who keep swapping lives. Your Name is beautifully animated with a really unexpected depth. It’s difficult to talk about without spoiling story elements but it’s free to watch on Amazon Prime so please watch it if you get the chance!

Aside from that, December was a pretty quiet month: writing, eating good food, spending time with the family. And you remember how in the last post I wanted to spend more of September catching up on beta reading? I did it! Success!

I had a few nice treks in the woods, too. The colours were really beautiful! It was great to get out there before the ice crept in and made it all too treacherous.

What did you get up to over winter? Is anyone else already struggling to remember that far back? It feels like so long ago!