Happy New Year!

It would be easy to describe this blog as a new year's resolution, but that's not quite true. The seed was sown a few months ago, at time when I was planning a trip to attend a friend's wedding, and seemed to constantly be reading or hearing about my friends and contemporaries announcing engagements, pregnancies, even the birth of second or third children. I've always known that marriage and babies weren't for me, and that it was just fine, my life was going to be just as full and meaningful as everyone else's. But suddenly people around me actually starting taking these big, recognisable steps in life, and I began to wonder what my big landmarks would be. Just under a month a go I realised I had exactly 2.5 years until I hit the big 30 - which obviously is a totally arbitrary age and no more significant than any other day. But, human nature being what it is, it seems like a good, round number and a fitting milestone by which point to have 'made something' of myself. Which leads us to...

The Plan.

Simple really: thirty big things - achievements, changes, new skills, adventures - before I'm thirty. Now I'm still young enough to think that two and a half years is a good long time, but 30 vague goals over such a long time might easily fall by the way side and I'm old enough to know the years will flit by a lot quicker than I'm expecting. That's where the blog falls in, to keep me honest and on track, remind me what I've got planned and when I need to get it done - and maybe entertain the occasional reader and let you know what's been helping me along the way.

1/30

Although there are a few things I'd definitely like to put on the list, I'm confident that many ideas will change, grow, fall by the wayside or be totally replaced by new and exciting things that I will discover over the next few years. They won't necessarily be achieved in the order I might expect. Some are going to be decidedly trickier to measure than others so I'll have to come up with different ways measure my success. I'll be cobbling together an initial list of ideas soon, that can be prodded and poked as we go. But the first one is an easy pick, even though it's probably one of the hardest tasks I'll set myself here: run a marathon. I won't be doing it tomorrow, but I'd like to think - injuries allowing - it's something I'll have done by the end of 2013.

After that, the other 29 will seem like a breeze, right?