December 15 – Five Minutes
Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010.
Author: Patti Digh

This is a goodun! Brain dump ahoy!

• Orangette's blueberry oatmeal pancakes
• pootling around San Francisco Bay in the fog with our friends Greg and Jill on their little boat
• my friend Jenny getting engaged
• post-Zumba highs
• growing potatoes, parsnips and pea shoots
• absolutely gutwrenching finale of Wallander Season 1 (the Swedish one) (yep I'm slow to catch on)
• cackling with Rhi when we went to a very posh restaurant for lunch and the very posh old bloke at the next table said gravely to his companion, "You know I've had to downsize to seven bedrooms because of this bloody recession"
• zygocactus in crazy full bloom
• wee brother's wry one-liners on Facebook
• Halloween guilt when the three little girls next door came trick-or-treating and I'd totally forgotten to buy any sweeties
• taking belated sweeties next door the following evening and getting stuck there for over an hour while they read me stories and told me their best jokes. From the three-year-old: Why does the snowman like toys? Because he likes them.
• finally getting back home to find Gareth had cooked my birthday dinner!
• brilliant chat with Cilla in Edinburgh just after the Christmas lights went on
• making stupid poems out of Love Hearts candy @ Girl Geeks workshop
• seaweed fishing with G
• Chilean miner watch
• sunburn and sheep with giant heads at the Highland Show
• kettlebell lesson with Gillian
• homebrew bloody homebrew
• accidentally stumbling into via Margutta 51, where Gregory Peck lived in Roman Holiday
• foods of italy
• Andre Aggassi's autobiography
• sushi lesson from my friend K
• snow snow snow
• TIME'S UP, BABY!
• that was actually ten minutes
• okay now i have further cheated by spending 20 minutes adding links and finding photies to illustrate. Shame job!

December 11 – 11 Things
What are 11 things your life doesn't need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?
Author: Sam Davidson

1. Workplace panic
2. Cabbage white butterflies
3. Unfoxy undergarments
4. All Or Nothing thinking
5. Catholic guilt
6. ?

I am happy with my life. I have made a lot of mistakes, this year in particular, but I'm getting better at laughing and learning from them, instead of falling into a quivering heap. So I don't feel the need to eliminate anything in 2011. I just want to keep adding fun and small steps forward and striving to be a decent partner, friend, daughter, worker bee, etc etc. I think I'm getting too old and self-conscious for this much public reflection.

Meanwhile here are my favourite Eating Disorder Pigeon and stroppy Robin hanging out in the back yard last week. The pigeon's utterly blank expression slays me every time.

December 10 – Wisdom
What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?
Author: Susannah Conway

The second wisest decision I made was to get counselling. I'm glad I finally stopped worrying – about the cost, that people would think me wussy, that I didn't feel awful enough to be shrink-worthy – and just bloody got on with it!

Some weeks I think it's an indulgent waste of money, but most weeks I feel a lovely combination of serenity and kick-arsedness afterwards so I know I'm getting somewhere.

The absolute wisest decision happened only last night, when I bought these truly sexy old man slippers from Tesco. They look worn and decrepit already! When you shuffle across the living room it feels you're like walking on clouds and your only responsibilities in life are to put your teeth back in and moan about the weather. A steal at £7!

(Incidentally slippers are called baffies around here. The word just sounds dead comfy, eh?)

December 8 – Beautifully Different
Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you'll find they're what make you beautiful.
Author: Karen Walrond

I'm a long time fan of Karen's blog – from her writing and photography to her magnificent quest to try 50 kinds of rum. She also responded swiftly and generously when I asked if she'd be up for donating a copy of her new book The Beauty of Different for next month's Dietgirl 10th Birthday Giveaway!

As a result, I feel like a right shit that I could not come up with anything for this prompt. Just could not do it. To quote the great Momo's response: I’ll pass on this one — it’s not the Australian way!

December 7 – Community
Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?
Author: Cali Harris

I love how you can indulge every interest and every shade of your personality on the internet. No matter how nerdy, obscure, bizarre or perverse, a community of like-minded souls is but a Google away.

It's always a rush finding people who share your obsessions. This year Gareth has discovered the dark art of home brewing and in turn, brewing blogs and forums. Just from reading Two Jews Brew and the Inveralmond Brewery Blog over his shoulder I now understand wacky words like kräusen, sparging and trub. Anyone for stout? There's 36 bottles maturing in our dining room.

Some communities I throw myself into wholeheartedly but mostly I lurk at the edges feeling a bit uncool and uncertain. You can learn a lot from the wallflower position, though! Here are my main tribes:

• Health and fitness blogs – I love people who write about their lives and struggles and don't take it all too bloody seriously.
• Food blogs – I lurk at the monolith I Can't Believe That's A Pound Of Butter food porn kind of blogs but comment enthusiastically on the smaller, every day food kind of blogs
• Gardening blogs and forums – I'll need another year of growing and learning the lingo before I'll get the nerve to pipe up!
• MotoGP forums – until I gave up because MotoGP was boring as batshit this season
• Cricket blogs – there are some witty cricket blogs out there but I'm too ignorant about the rules to comment anything other than "huh huh huh, funny."
• Guardian Mad Men blog – there are some extremely learned people on this highly addictive blog who find enormous hidden meaning in everything from set design, closing credits music and Don Draper's choice of socks. Again I just lurk as my thoughts are limited to, "Joan rocks!" and "I dreamed about Don again last night."
• Facebook – for the fabulous folks back home. Reduces longing by approximately 53%!
• Twitter – where all your interests merge in a big chatty mess.
• Our kickboxing team – albeit from the fringes as I'm too wussy to be a proper fighter
• Girl Geeks Scotland - this year I was lucky enough to attend some weekend workshops and met some truly kick arse tech-savvy women who are doing really exciting stuff with their lives. I learned gazillions and was so fired up about life afterwards that I could barely speak for days. At one point a bunch of us were gathered around an iPad, cooing and squawking like it was a precious newborn. That's when I knew for sure, I have found mah people!

As for the second part of this prompt, in 2011 I'd like to participate more and be less stalkersome!

December 4 – Wonder
How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
Author: Jeffrey Davis

I'd never seen so much Bonne Maman in my life. We were at a Carrefour supermarket in Lille, gawking adoringly at the endless rows of jam, all jewel colours with jaunty red-and-white lids.

"What the hell is a myrtille?" I asked. Unlike Bonne Maman imported into the UK, the labels were all in French, naturellement.

"I'm not sure," said my sister, "But it looks tasty."

"I shouldn't have skived off French class so much. Hang on! The generic jams have illustrations on the labels, so if we find myrtille on a generic jar we'll know what it is."

"Nice one. Is that… a blueberry?"

"Or really spherical plum?"

"Nah, definitely a blueberry."

"SOLD! Ooh… they have rhubarb! You can't get that one at our Tesco either."

We'd caught the Eurostar over from London for the day. I'd been trying to recapture the sense of wonder of the early days when we'd just moved over from Australia; that awed feeling of DUDE, we could pop over to Europe for a day if we wanted to! In seven years I'd never got round to doing that. But this time I was visiting Rhi in London and we'd nabbed a cheap fare, for the first train over and the last train back.

It was a Monday in August so almost everything was closed. So we just pootled around the cobbled streets saying, "Oh yeah, that's French as f*ck!".

We were all wandered out with three hours to go so we headed to the supermarket near the train station. This was my saddo highlight of the day. We scoured every single aisle (except for baby stuff and pet food, zzzz), admiring all the French Stuff. The produce piled up high unconstrained by plastic wrappers, the fancy yogurts, the endless array of animal parts arranged into sausages.

As well as the jams I got some fancy peppercorns, some fancy chocolate and this here cave a chorizo.

I know chorizo isn't Frenchy, but it was made in France. Apparently cave in French means cellar (sayz Google Translate) so I'm guessing in essence it means, "a shitty plastic container for your chorizo"? Any francophones out there?

Regardless, I prefer to think of it as a cave in the English sense of the word. A cave for my chorizo. Would you like some chorizo? Hold on, I'll just go fetch it from my CHORIZO CAVE!

Anyway. A little day in Lille really gave the sense of wonder a good reboot