I've been delighting in the camera built in to my new macbook and so this post contains no less than SIX videos - for the optimum experience watch them in sequence as you read the post! Just knowing that I can make little videos without having to mess about with cameras is quite empowering and making me re-think how I present things online. Readers may also be glad to know that I've turned comments back on after a two year break and am readying myself for a deluge of spam in the short term while I sort out some kind of authentication - let's see who gets there first.

So... It’s the new year, we’re all back at work:

And we’re on the trains and back to the daily grind of it all:

2008 has in many many ways been an absolute bugger of a year - with a turbulent domestic life, messy feelings and lack of sensible behaviour on my own part, and things really hitting the fan at work. All of course inter-related to some degree. At work I've been finding it tempting to think along the lines of “Oh that bit’s easy, it can wait” or “Oh that bit’s hard I’ll think about it some other time...." and consequently several rabbits that I need to pull out of hats have not been forthcoming and I now need to grab them by the ears or there'll be nothing to put in the pot and make stew out of. You get my drift? My colleagues helpfully suggested that I might want to look at my behaviour patterns and think about how they come to be... and that's what I'm doing by writing this post I guess.

Being a new year I started trying to decide what my resolutions might be and trotted out a few obvious ones:

• establish better routines: eat well, sleep well
• keep social (drinking) engagements at a sensible level
• communicate better with everybody
• do things that make me feel good about myself
• work harder, stay motivated, but be relaxed too

But somehow simple that they may be I’m already doing badly at adhering to them. This next sequence of 12 second clips from late last night:

And finally a longer edited piece again thinking about resolutions, sleep and behaviour modification:

While this may all seem rather rubbish and flakey and has been causing me a lot of self-inflicted stress I have to remember that I’ve got some very positive counter-balances of my own... I’m pretty good at knowing that niggly things can easily be treated as “not problems” upon which they cease to exist. Everyday botherments like sitting in a traffic jam or doing the shopping or getting through a pile of paperwork can actually be quite enjoyable if I just put myself into the mindset of thinking, “yes, this is ok and I can find a way to enjoy it.”

Talking about it, writing about it, and making silly videos about it is all part of the process. It's opening it out. Perhaps doing all this is a distraction in its own right but I think a helpful one that gets me focussed back on where I really want to be.

Where's that then?