Well hello dear things and welcome to 2009. I’ve already done resolutions post, so I won’t bore you with that here. I decided to do something different for the first Roast of this sparkly new year. Instead of sending y’all willy nilly off to the far corners of this here internet, I am going to take you on a journey through the last year as seen here on Bright Meadow.
So buckle up Dorothy, cause Kansas is going bye-bye…
The year started with me having to say goodbye. I then entered into a period of intense hatred of Motorola and all their devilish works. Sad after a week, by the end of the second week with the replacement Razr, I was ready to do something a lot more damaging than just sit on it! God the phone was awful. Makes me appreciate my shiny E71 all the more now 
In 2008, you had to have been sitting under rather large rock to have avoided e-books. Even my mum has heard of the Sony Reader and asked if she should get one! So did I ever find my dream e-book reader? Yes. It’s called my E71. A very handy app called BooksInMyPhone. There is also MobiReader and I can even read word documents - very handy for the odd manuscript I don’t want to kill a tree by printing out.
I talked about moving to a new city and I actually did it! But boy was I wrong about Oxford! The reality is rather different, and I love it
2008 saw a LOT of health crap coming back to kick me in the stomach with huge hobnail boots. At least I have stopped loosing my voice so spectacularly!
I have thought long and hard over the year about what I want from Bright Meadow. Did I want to keep making the commitment to the blog? (There has been a time or three I thought I would jack it in) then I went and splashed out on a new design, and so many good things keep happening because of the blog, I just couldn’t let it go. One thing that I have noticed lately is a drop off in comments and I miss you guys! Time to follow my own advice I think.
Looking back, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last year navel gazing. But then as we all decided that I am cool, clearly my mid-section deserves the odd glance now and then.
We all shared a lot, this year, and it turns out more than a few of you are as obsessed about notebooks as I am. (The collection has grown even more since then, I blush to admit)
Don’t believe me when I say things are happening to/because of Bright Meadow? I made it into the Guardian, didn’t I?
I still haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer to this you know: how the frack do you mass produce honey?!
I never really talked about my last job when I was doing it for a vast number of reasons, not least because it didn’t seem appropriate and I wanted to keep my personal life as separate from work as possible. As part of a team that helped support disadvantaged people, the job I was hired for was back office (admin etc). In practice I ended up doing a lot more to the point of being an unofficial support worker for the support workers. Not my bag at all, but I hadn’t realised how much it had affected me till this day, shortly before I left. That phone call was the one. The proverbial straw. Much though I miss the folks I worked with, I remember putting the phone down and saying “I can’t do this any more”. Within a month I had moved to Oxford and I haven’t looked back.
Which brings us to the BIG news of 2008: the job. My head is STILL whirling, three months later. God, has it only been three months?! It feels like so many more.
It’s always nice to find out that the career you’ve been dreaming of is actually what you want, isn’t it?
And so ends our little tour through the last twelve blogging months. I’m not sure if I want 2009 to be as eventful, or if I should be crossing my fingers for a quiet patch!
Welcome to Bright Meadow. My name is Cas and I try to post here once or twice a week. I'm also trying to write a book along with hold down a full time job, blog and have something approaching a social life! Check out my