It’s chinese year of the TIGER… grrrr. Came out of my house to see a dragon earlier – COOOL! Missed it the last few years, video below.

So for me, as usual, I set my resolutions at CNY – mainly because, the start of the years always a weird point to do things and there’s always lots going on.

Last years “no platic bags” was generally good, hard at first but worked out. The greener me went well, sold the car (saved bucks and the environment) and I made some good progress on a number of projects.

So what for this year?

1) No more Mr Nice Guy – I’m taking a much firmer, no-nonsense approach with companies that don’t pay up on time. Training is all paid up front anyway,  as it has been, but no longer am I going to tread gently with organisations that take months paying. My payment terms for project work remain 50% up-front, but I won’t do ANYTHING till that’s paid now (no strategy meets esp.) and 50% on completion -  BUT I’m adding a discount for people that pay within 7 days of the invoice… and using the EU 8%+BR+£30 per overdue invoice.

2) More Mr Nice Guy – I kept this pretty quiet, but I wrote an eBook and a publishing agent has got interested – if I can write a draft of a full book by april, he’ll take it to the London book fair – yikes.

3) More downtime – been working faaaaaar too many hours, saying no to a few things.

4) A charity challenge – any suggestions for this year?

Hey ho… not sure anyone reads here anymore – if you do, say hi.

Luke

Now that seemed quite a large number to me, being more than one every other week.. it did make me wonder how many I used before.

Time to start planning this years resolutions, as with most years I’ll be setting them on chinese new year.

Can’t wait till February… damn new years resolution swimmers were clogging up my lanes last night!

I will start using this again in the new year, I’ve finally nailed the techy stuff I’ve been struggling with and I’llupdate here soon.
All I have to add is that I’ve only used 32 new carrier bags this year, something I’m quite proud of.

What to resolve for 2010???

My march to more sustainable, responsible living continues:

1) No more carrier bags – win
– used 2 since June, donated the first half of the money to Julia’s House for the parachute jump. Its actually quite hard to break the habit, try it.

2) Sell the car – done
- A few reasons, but mainly –> I don’t need one! I was getting lazy and using it when I didn’t need. So I sold it. Also to encourage me to plan a bit better and use public transport (I get loads done on the train). I’m going to work out how much it cost me to run across the year and compare to a year without.

3) Own an electric car by 2012 – that’s the plan… if someone can make one that does > 100 miles!

4) Do more meetings over the web – I’m trying to cut down some of the meetings I do that I don’t really need to do face-to-face. First proper one this Wednesday.

5) Don’t eat air-freighted food – bye bye sugar snap peas

6) Your ideas – suggestions please.

#1 went to wilko (woop) and Lidl (I love lidl) with a reusable bag… no problem there, except I needed some cleaning stuff, so I had to resort to using a new carrier bag to separate them from the foodstuffs = bugger £1

#2 walking in town later on, I realised I’d forgotten to buy a couple of things I needed for the flat… I then find myself in a dilemma… do i buy the items and stick another quid in the pot… or set a reminder to get them another day when i have a bag? = another £1 to charity

I was doing so well! it’d been nearly a month since I last used one. Must add up the pot, see how many bags I’ve used in 3 months… ooh a Q1 review! Bum, that reminds me its time for end of year stuff…

UPDATED: Q1 review = £10 that’s not bad

Thanks mum.

Oh yeah and apparently it’s snowing so the country has to stop… or something.

I’m taking a wander down to the beach, will update with wintry pics later.

UPDATE: Bits of snow down here, not much… not sure it’s quite this warm though!

“I must always carry re-usable bags”

As soon as I leave my normal environment, I seem to forget the plan.

This is the hard bit of a year without plastic bags, being away from the flat and not having any alternative.

So as I wondered around a small Tesco in Nottingham this weekend, I realised… I had no choice than to use a bag, or buy another re-usable one.

Must stash one in my car and repeat the above mantra.

Does that mean I part used a bag? Should I chuck 50p in?

I’m not saying I’m responsible for the usage of my flatmate… but the biscuits were for me.

(and very nice they were too)

Hmmmm.

The next day, earlier on I did have a shoulder bag with me so that was ok… but then again later on our way back from central London to the studio, I weakened into getting a subway (it seemed the lesser of the evils) which was handed to me in a bag before I’d realised… double damn! (+£1 into the pot)

So all in all, I’ve learnt that:

1) I need to always have a bag on me, which is a bit of pain

2) Takeaways are a plastic bag fail trap!

Pot so far is £4… after 12 days… at this rate, I’ll of raised £122 for charity thanks to my own stupidity at using bags. Ooops.

My report card def. reads “Must try harder”.

We don’t want long handles like this, blokes don’t shoulder their bags!

All the ones I’ve seen that do have shorter handles are more designer ones and very girlie.

Maybe I should make “bags for blokes”