Happy New Year!

In keeping with tradition here on if all else fails… I wish you a happy New Year a week late. This time I have a valid excuse. I started the 2015 somewhat internet deprived. I couldn’t even get Google to load, never mind my blog’s dashboard.

I also woke up to the Year of the Spinning Mouse with a burning fever and a sore throat. As if I didn’t feel awful enough already, my condition was exacerbated by the knowledge that it wasn’t even the result of excessive partying the night before – the wife and I were snug in bed by 10PM on New Year’s Eve. I know. We’re very boring.

Stricken down as I were, with no energy whatsoever to engage the outside world and no internet to distract me, I turned my thoughts inward…

…to my continued unemployment and lack of progress in my studies, neither of which are being helped by the fact that I’m still feeling conflicted about my career and vocation, and that led to questioning my dream of writing and my ability to do so, and 2015 was starting to look rather bleak.

Then a thought hit me: This year can only get better. I can’t tell you how much that cheered me up. As if to prove me right New Year’s Day ended with a terrific electrical storm, the first proper one of the season, knocking out the power (now there’s irony for you) and more importantly, putting an abrupt end to the New Year’s party across the river that had been filling our ears with noise all day long.

I’ve been feeling much better since. I have a plan regarding the work situation, and might just be able to collect the resolve to put it into action. I’ve decided to try and write some short stories again to give me some practice with story structure, which will hopefully help with sorting out the structure of the novel. And the studies…yeah, I’m still stumped there, but I’ll work something out.

Resolutions? As I’ve stated before, I believe they are doomed to failure by their very nature. Last year I again proved that when I made the resolution to start writing letters again. I did start, and wrote a grand total of two (though in my defence, the Post Office strike resulting in no mail being moved in, into or out of the country for five months did not help). I’ll try to write more letters this year, but I’m not making a resolution. Not making that mistake again.

I’m trying to get this blog back onto a regular schedule again, though I foresee some more internet woes in the future (don’t ask) and load-shedding* might also complicate things a bit, but I hope to have things back to normal sooner rather than later.

Let’s make 2015 a great one. Gonna spin some mice y’all!

*load-shedding: A brilliant innovation by South Africa’s only electricity provider, Eskom, where they switch off our power for six hours each day in two-hour shifts in an effort to conserve energy. Just us as a country doing our bit for the environment and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that for the past twenty years the electricity provider neglected to increase generating capacity to keep ahead of demand, with the result that we now have such severe power shortages that this is the only way to prevent a complete failure of the national power grid.

• Assorted Hammers