New Year Resolutions Review week #7 : Cruising through the holidays

This week, it's been half term for me and the Madhouse kids so I've had plenty of time for cracking on with my New Year resolutions and challenges. I feel vindicated now because I always say it's lack of time rather than lack of motivation that holds me back when I'm at work !

1. Get Fit(bitting) !

Every morning this week has been chill-out time - sitting in bed with my laptop while the kids have breakfast in bed and watch cartoons or read comics - so I haven't racked up more than 1000 steps by lunchtime any day this week. Going out hiding geocaches (more about that in a moment) has had us (and particularly me) gadding about all over the neighbourhood in the afternoons though, so I have had a great week in terms of steps - last Saturday I needed a lazy day and had a long nap in the afternoon (2 hours !!) so I only hit 7k steps, but every other day was good: Sunday 10k, Monday 14.1k, Tuesday 15.6k, Wednesday 13.4k, Thursday 11.3k, Friday 12.8k. That's over 50km covered in a week, which sounds pretty good to me !

2. Get cooking bookmarked recipes ! 

This week was more about using up odds and ends from the cupboard for a #KitchenClearout than working through bookmarked recipes, but I did make Fish with bè rouj (red butter) and Crispy Vietnamese pancakes.

3. Get geocaching !

The travelbugs from the lovely Elaine at Fun As A Gran arrived on Monday so all week, we've been making cache containers, filling them up with swaps and going off to hide them. You can follow our geocache hiding adventures here and here - it's been a real learning curve, from how to make the caches to working out the coordinates, adding a new cache to the geocaching site and having to respect a minimum distance between caches. (I had to move one of mine to a different location because it was too close to another one.) I have five caches out there now and I'm loving seeing people log them, especially as many of them are saying that they are discovering new, beautiful or interesting locations that they were unaware of. The two travelbugs were picked up and they're on their way, and I got to chat to a geocacher who was logging one of her finds next to my geocache as I walked past. A very successful and exciting week !

4. Get comping !

No wins this week, even if I've been entering more than usual as I'm holiday. I'm still on track for one win a month though. My book win from Costa arrived.
(January : 4 wins - £20 shopping voucher, Mr Lee's noodles, Ambrosia trifle glasses, set of 5 books; February : 1 win - prize for Galina, )

5. Get reading !

 I'm still reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. This is book number 6 for 2016 so I'm still on track for my book a week reading challenge.

6. Get FLYing !

I had big plans for dejunking and tidying up the kids' bedrooms this week but went geocaching instead !

8. Get bloggy housekeeping !

I think this week may be a turning point. My visitor stats are usually pretty stable - about 5-600 unique visits and 7-800 pageviews per day (which is way down on what I had before the google penalty). Yesterday I had over 20,000 pageviews and unique visits by lunchtime. I'm no fool, I knew there was something fishy going on and after looking through my visitor information, I noticed that I had a googlebot crawling through my whole blog yesterday for several hours. Hopefully this means that, now that the google penalty has been revoked, it's re-adding all my content to google, which should mean more visitors. I also took part in a twitter party this week, which meant I was more active on social media, but Klout still doesn't like me and my Klout score is at an all-time low : 53.37 (my 90 day high is 56.73 - still not sure why there's been such a drop.) My statcounter rankings have changed a fair bit this week (even before the googlebot put in an appearance), going from B-/B+/C/C+ (overall B-) to A+/C/C/C+ (overall B-), so that's an improvement in traffic but a markdown in social. OK, OK, I get it, I need to be more chatty on social media !

9. Get French !

I finally managed to buy my timbre fiscal. Almost ready to send - I just need to fill in a form with all the info on both my parents and in-laws births.

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