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!

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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

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December 3 – Moment
Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
Author: Ali Edwards

It was a walk up West East Lomond, a hill not far from where we live. We flopped to the ground at the top. It was perfectly still and warm. The grass was dry and spongy. A skylark flitted above showing off its vocal range. We just sat there for a couple of hours not really saying anything. It's only a small hill but it was so quiet up there it felt like a real escape.

Then we walked down and went to the pub in Falkland. I ordered steak pie and the chips were soooo tasty. Maybe that's really why the day stuck with me… fried potatoes!?

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I'm joining in Reverb 10, in which you get a daily writing prompt for the month of December to, "reflect on this year and manifest what's next".

Manifest feels like a self-helpy kind of word… and just a jumble of letters away from infest. A infestation of white ants or rats. En blog it will be an infestation of navel-gazing. But don't worry, I'm not going to get wanky about it! It just looks like a good way to get down what happened this year.

So today's prompt, authored by Gwen Bell:

December 1 - One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

"If you encapsulate your 2010 in one word," I said to Dr G, "What would it be?"

"Alright."

Concise.

My word to sum up 2010 would be stripping. Before this year, I'd spent a couple living in a fog and doing things very half-arsedly. So 2010 was all about stripping back the bullshit, delusions and fears. Lots of digging into dark corners of the brain and getting to the real roots of issues and behaviours. Good times!

I want the word for 2011 to be action. Enough thinking and talking and figuring out – now's the time for doing. I want to get back to my happy weight and fitness level. I want to actually finish the projects I've being pissfarting around with forever, instead of distracting myself with silly things.

Is there a better word for this? I was going to say completion, but that reminds me of the poor buggers in Never Let Me Go. Then I was going to say follow-through but that's one Gareth's many euphemisms for crapping your underpants. So action will just have to do for now!

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