New Year Resolutions Review week #4 : Walk this way !

Another week, another roundup of how I'm getting on (or not) with my New Year challenges. The end of January seems to be a popular time for people abandoning their New Year's resolution but so far, so good - I'm still going strong !

1. Get Fit(bitting) !

Last week, I was stuck at home with a poorly Pierre so my step-count dropped dramatically. This week, I made an effort and hit my 10,000 steps target every single day - go me ! That's the first time since I've had the FitBit (at Christmas) that I reached the target on seven consecutive days. On about three days, I hit it naturally, just from my normal daily walking around at work, but on the other days, I made a concerted effort to put in the extra thousand or so steps needed to get there, either walking home from work instead of getting the bus or by doing lots of running up and down stairs putting things away. I've lost 1.3kg since Christmas which isn't much in a month but at least it's going the right way !

2. Get cooking bookmarked recipes ! 

Not sure about bookmarked recipes (I'll have a look in a second) but I did clear out lots of jars that were cluttering up the fridge and the cupboards. I made Savoury Palmiers, using up a jar of relish and some marinated vegetables, as well as trying Chakalaka, a South African veggie dish. I told you about Makowiec, a Polish poppyseed roll, last week but got around to blogging about it this week.

3. Get geocaching !

I managed to get in two geocaching trips last week, on Saturday and Sunday - I only planned on one but Juliette was bored on Sunday afternoon and asked to go out again. It only took our total up from 202 to 205 because we didn't find all of them, but we still had fun and found a few unusual sights in our local area that we'd never noticed before. It was very cold and icy so we get bonus points for braving the freezing temperatures too !

4. Get comping !

As I mentioned last week, I entered loads of competitions on twitter when I was stuck at home with Pierre, and this seemed to pay off because I won not one but two competitions this week ! I won a selection of books from @costabookawards and also a box of Mr Lee's noodles for Chinese New Year. That takes my total of January wins to three, after my £20 shopping voucher, which I'm very pleased with, as I was aiming for one win per month !

5. Get reading !

 I finished children's novel, Charlie on the Case by Paul W. Robinson (click through for the review), which I had very mixed feelings about. I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from the author, to say that he'd taken my comments, both positive and negative, into consideration and would be sending me his next book to review ! I'm now reading a gripping thriller, James Patterson's Jack and Jill, which is the first Alex Cross novel that I've read but definitely won't be the last.

6. Get FLYing !

This week's zone was the bedroom and I only did a couple of the mini missions.

8. Get bloggy housekeeping !

I was expecting things to pick up since being relisted on google but there hasn't actually been any change. My pageload/visitor stats have remained the same so it was a bit of a nasty surprise to see that they've obviously recalibrated the statcounter grades and I dropped from A+/B+/C/C+ (overall A+) to B-/B+/C/C+ (overall B-). I had a C- at one point this week so it seems to be jumping about all over the place. Oh well, I have a new target to beat - starting at A+ didn't give me any scope for improvement !

9. Get French !

I've been in limbo this week, waiting for my empty criminal record to arrive. It's still not here but I've had an email to say that it's on the way, then I can get the whole lot packaged up and sent off.

What about you? Have you set yourself any targets, challenges or new year's resolutions this year?