Happy New Year friends! Hope you all enjoyed your Christmas and celebrated the start of 2017 in style. This year has been a rollercoaster year, more so than any other. It’s probably been the most challenging year of my life but also the best for many other reasons. As this is the first post of 2017, I’m going to recap on what’s happened in the past year to both me personally and to the blog itself! Here is my year in review:
The blog had a name change!
Mainly because I couldn’t advertise the last blog name with it having “bitch” in the title – boooo! But so far I’m loving the new name, it still sums me up and it’s opened a lot more doors already. You may also notice the design itself has changed, which I’m thrilled about. I have so many things planned for you all and chose this design by Pretty Darn Cute Design specifically as it will lend itself to all said plans 🙂
Anxious Lass was on the radio!
Just after Christmas, BBC Radio 5 Live had me on their drive program to discuss Anxiety with a panel of experts. It was the second scariest thing I’ve ever done after speaking in public. They sent me to the BBC Bristol studios where I sat in a room with a mic and a headset and joined in a 20+ minute conversation. My nerves were all over the place but it went much smoother than expected, I even wanted to say more but hopefully I’ll be able to hit on those points here at the blog soon! The main things that got me through it was a) knowing I might be able to help someone who’s listening and that would make all the nerves worthwhile and b) getting to go to Nando’s after for half a chicken and spicy rice!!! NOM!
If you want to listen to me on the Radio you can check me out here. The Anxiety discussion is the last 20 minutes so starts around 22:38:00!
Christmas at home for the first time in years!
This year I got to cook Christmas dinner for the first time in a long time but not only that, I got to spend it with Shay! Our first Christmas together. We also had my Mum and Stepdad over for dinner and snuggled up and watched Jingle All The Way after. It was perfect. Best Christmas I’ve ever had.
Halloween Party!
If you don’t know by now, Halloween is my favourite time of year, ever! I’ve always been a huge horror fan, so Halloween is the one time of year I get to celebrate all things horror with my friends. Usually, I go out for Halloween and tend to be disappointed, usually because of the lack of good music or just because I desperately want to do the decorations myself. This year, Shay and I had a party at ours. I decorated the flat with cobwebs, Halloween lights, a misting cauldron that changed colour, crows, gauze, a dead body in the bath made from bin bags… and to top it all off, I found the most amazing costumes at AbracadabraNYC.com! I also had some of my own horror photography playing on the TV along with a cool AF playlist!
After the weekend we also carved pumpkins (mine was a Mushroomhead pumpkin of course) and we did a couple of halloween themed photoshoots and watched tons of horror films!
Trip back up North!
In October I took Shay back up to Chester as he’d never been before and to meet my Dad for the first time. I lived near Chester (Deeside in North Wales to be more precise) for 24 years and everytime I’ve revisited it’s mostly been for work, which is awesome because it means I get paid to go visit my family and friends but it’s always an exhausting trip and I never get to stay for very long. This was by far the best trip I’ve ever had back up North, and definitely the best time I’ve ever spent in Chester.
We spent the first night in Hickory’s, we ate outside under a heat lamp listening to the river and Lynyrd Skynyrd coming from the speakers <3 perfect! We went back to Hickory’s two more times for breakfast because we couldn’t stay away. The second day we spent the morning in Grosvenor Park with the squirrels then met up with my Dad and his girlfriend Zoe for lunch and ended up in the pubs drinking all day! It was drunken Maccies on the way back to the hotel that night. The next day we did some perusing around Chester itself, went to Off The Wall to watch the football (Shay supports Southampton) and then went to the hotel room for a nap. We were planning to go for Tapas that night but because of my illness, I couldn’t leave the hotel room and instead just had a shower and crawled into bed… Shay got us another Maccies and we ate in bed with Family Guy which was brilliant enough! The last full day we went to Deeside, met up with my oldest friend Amy and had lunch with her and her daughter then went to my Dads in the afternoon. That night we went for cocktails and tapas at Fiesta Havana which was amazing! We ate far too much food.
Basically we ate, drank and ate some more.
I also got to see my little brother graduate with a Masters Degree this year, as well as have him stay with me for a couple of months. I turned 27 in the summer. I quit my second job to focus on my self employment and my health in the winter. I met lots of new people, creating some amazing meaningful friendships. I photographed weddings. Saw my favourite band live for the first time (Mushroomhead) after 13 years of waiting. Best of all, I finally told my real life friends & family about my blog on Facebook which was received a lot better than I ever expected.
A lot of bad things happened in 2016, sure. But looking back I think the good outweighs that massively, despite this being one of the hardest years of my life. I’m positive that 2017 will be a winner, especially after my surgery! Here’s to a happy and healthy new year 🙂
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