Jump start January

A New Year and a fresh start at work. I've survived the latest round of redundancies, the enterprise architecture team being viewed as providing a key function in the company's quest to realise strategic goals. But the Group Technology Direction department of which EA was a part has been disbanded and the manager made redundant. We're anticipating a new Chief Architect to lead us in March so we have another period of uncertainty to cover until then. It's increasingly apparent I work for a plc rather than an old-fasioned mutual insurer.

The Lasts popped in last Sunday. It was good to see them and prompted Finn, as ever, into much silliness with Morven, sticking coloured spotty stickers all over his face as "chickenpox." Needless to say I was picking them off carpets, slippers and clothes for the following few days.

Sharon has been getting back into running and Paul was trying to persuade her to target the Grangemouth 10k early in the year. In an effort to join Sharon in her quest for fitness (she had a good 2010 with her personal trainer and is keen to maintain and improve on that in 2011), I have embarked on the KettleWorx course of Core, Cardio and Resistance training using a KettleBell weight. I have reached the point where my appreciation of the need to get fitter has overcome my loathing of doing organised exercise. I doubt you'll see me in a gym (ever!) but I'm prepared to do the three times a week, 25 minute KettleWorx workouts as they seem to target the areas I really need to improve on, especially to offset the detrimental effects of coeliac disease and asthma.

The boys seem to have had an extra long Christmas break. I took Finn and Rowan for a swim on Tuesday, my last day off, and Sean has had a couple of days round at friends' houses, but the Christmas present pile has been well worked down. Sean has had fun with his electronics set which is much more plug and play than the one I had as a boy. That one required wires to connect spring terminals with a much more physical view of the resistors, capacitors and transistors. Bad memories of my second year Uni Electrionics module!

Angus is off the bottle. He was perfectly content with it before bedtime, much longer than the others it seems, but that was probably due to us not breaking the habit. So we're breaking it now. His bottom two molars have erupted so we expect him to be ploughing into raw steak soon.

Sharon hosted a reward dinner on Saturday night which went on into the small hours of Sunday morning. Fortunately I had the ear plugs in! The snow returned this weekend with a hard frost but it didn't prevent Hannah and I having a brisk Sunday morning walk up to Swanston village which looked very picturesque in the wintry landscape. Sharon and I then enjoyed a rare lazy afternoon, the boys playing amongst themselves (which they do very well when the mood takes them) while we watched a couple of films on the telly and cuddled up on the couch.