The year gone by

Courtyard in Krakow, July 2016

It's been a good year on the whole, marked for me by my dedication to the Lola Towers Renovation Project. In the past year I have acquired a working garage, lights, door handles, front door lock, the loft cleared (almost), the garden tidied and the bathroom decorated. Planning the kitchen is well under way, and I've even been able to imagine some more decorating taking place alongside the kitchen enterprise. I've also been toying with some ideas about how the different rooms might change their identities when the decorating is done.

Work has been satisfying with new members of staff and plans for new enterprises, although the proposed expansion of the service beyond two new nurses has not been supported by any funding and therefore has not happened. There ought to be a Dietitian involved in the Transition and the Young People's clinics, and we are hoping to extend the insulin pump service to offer appointments at the other hospital, but I won't be doing it until it is agreed that I will be paid for more hours. I enjoy all the clinics I do, the doctors are good to work with, and I particularly enjoy delivering the patient education. So no problems at work at the moment.

In this quiet time between Christmas and New Year (I heard it called Chrimbo Limbo this morning on the radio) I've been working on a Carb Counting Short Course. At this stage I'm considering who to invite and how to evaluate the effectiveness of the course. Our main carb counting course takes four days over three weeks and is only offered to people with Type 1 Diabetes who have been diagnosed for at least a year and are on a particular insulin regime, so there are many people who aren't eligible or can't spare the time but would benefit from a carb counting update. The short course is only two sessions of two hours each, and we will invite people who are newly diagnosed, people with Type 2, busy people who can't take all that time off work, and people on different insulin regimes.

Outside work my badminton obsession continues unabated, accompanied by a little bit of running but only when there's no badminton (like the last two weeks). Obviously I enjoy writing for this blog, and I have read 47 books this year according to my profile on Goodreads, which also tells me this:
Shortest book: Utz (154 pages)
Longest book: The Magus (656 pages) but I actually listened to this one so there were no pages at all
Most popular book: Dune (read by 705,533 other Goodreads readers this year)

Holidays - some really good ones this year - skiing in Bulgaria and France, sightseeing in Krakow and Spain, and lovely weekends in London, Leicester and Bristol. The Buddhist meditation group has become another regular extra-curricular pastime, which I continue to attend and enjoy while not really doing any meditation at all at home - I haven't yet worked out how to fit it into my lifestyle.

This time last year I thought 2015 had been a bit rubbish, and so it had within my little world. 2016 has been infinitely more rubbish when you consider global events like Brexit and Trump, but personally I have had a much better year with lots to look forward to in 2017 too. You never know, this time next year I may have a new kitchen!

Spain, November 2016