Apparently this is the year the world is going to end.  It could be from mutating neutrinos or as a mission of mercy from @DeathStarPR (they’re ready for the opening night of Twilight: The Musical, apparently the Mayans booked them) or from one of those little accidents with big toys like the Large Hadron Collider.  So let’s enjoy 2012 while we’ve got it!

Reason #1- 1 year of blogging.

Yep.  Although I’ve tried on-and-off to blog for a while, 2011 is the first year I’ve blogged pretty much consistently all year through.  This is largely thanks to linkys such as R2BC to inspire me and keep the juices flowing.  True, I’ve found it hard to get moving again since NaNoWriMo wrung over 50,000 words out of me in November, then Christmas got in the way.  The excuses are too easy to find and this year I’m going to have none of them!

Reason #2 – Back to school, back to work.

Christmas was fantastic.  An excellent break, a wonderful time catching up with the family we’ve got scattered across the UK.  You can read about it over at my wife’s blog – http://claytoninshetland.blogspot.com/.  The Dr Who Christmas special was better than usual, The Gruffalo’s Child was superb.  New Year was, as usual, quiet.  Stephen Fry’s top gadgets programme carried us nicely to midnight, we read a bit of the new Terry Pratchett book and went to sleep.

But now everything’s back to normality, back to the routine.  I got back to work to find that none of our servers had had issues over Christmas, the printers were all happy, everything just tickety-boo.  There was still enough going on to keep me rushing around yesterday like a blue-arsed fly running quests for the other college up here who weren’t so lucky.  And they all went back yesterday while I had a day relaxing…

Reason 3 – Speaking of Quests…

Aragorn’s Quest.  Borderlands.  De Blob 2.  I received these three excellent games for Christmas.  Can’t beat 2-player gaming, even – especially – if you’re both crap at it.  Borderlands had my wife and I sprinting through emotions – frustration, panic, shock, hysterical-roll-on-the-floor-crying laughter!  We’re getting better at it now, but not much!  Aragorn’s Quest is an excellent game – even if Sam Gamgee does have an annoying habit of embroidering the story as we know it just to make things more difficult, all the male characters would make excellent goalkeepers (Seriously!  Massive hands!), and we’ve now started sending the kids on “quests” rather than errands and “side-quests” if we think of something they can do while they’re in the area.  De Blob 2 is brain-off-the-hook fun. And it plays into my “must collect everything/complete all missions/get 100%” that I normally exercise playing Lego games on the PS3.

Reason #4 – Carcassonne.

Both the boardgame and the city.  One of the most enjoyable things about finishing the holidays and going back to work is planning the summer holiday.  And that’s where we’re going this year.  Can’t wait!

For more reasons to be cheerful, follow the linky and have fun!