Productively using time on earth

I am treating this blog the way i treat my plants at the moment, watering them when they show such marked signs of neglect that they can no longer be ignored. But it is Christmas, I am in the process of attending 6 Christmas functions in about 8 days. I spent all of last Friday and Saturday dedicated to the boys one, a lavish affair that had me kitted out in a Victorian ensemble and firing a semi-automatic shotgun. I hit 4 clay pigeons out of 10. After a day spent rushing around, eating little and a couple of glasses of pinot. He hit one.

I would like to promise more photos of that event, but this week promises to be just as frantic as the last. I don't finish work until Friday midday, and then Saturday is Christmas eve and i'll be en route to Auckland where my charming sister will ferry me from the airport to Tauranga, arriving at about 10 that night. Christmas day will be a relatively quiet affair i imagine, spent with little brother and stepdads whanau. The boy is coming up on the 27th for a few days, getting off pretty lightly with meeting the parents. Dad and stepmum will be up north, I probably won't see them until Kel gets back from Chile. But it will be nice to hang out with him and Frank and Jake and bbq and go to the beach and so forth.

I am more excited about New Years than Christmas. I am formulating very fixed ideas about what I would like to achieve next year. Most incongruent with the slap dash spontaneous approach to living I have adopted the last couple of years. So while the night itself may be a very low key affair spent on some remote coastline in the back of a 4x4, I expect a lot of the year to come and what the 1/1/06 will represent. Moreover, I expect a lot of myself.

This love thing is a rather frightening distraction. Although he is away in Europe for a month from the middle of January, and I expect to be away for at least a couple of months around the middle of the year, time is so easily frittered away in his presence. I am loathed to make any sacrifices for anyone at this stage in my life even as I watch some of my closest friends make life long vows of commitment and embark upon familyhood. I'm not saying love and personal development are necessarily mutually exclusive. I am just conscious of my tendency to become all-consumed by affairs of the heart, and that I really need to put my head down and bum up this year coming.

Reflection, it's a potent drop.