Happy New Year!!

Happy New Year everyone! The world didn't end, and we made it to 2013. I hope it will be a beautiful new year for all of you. Mine has started with the official launch of my project The Footprint Challenge. 40 days of using less energy, less natural resources, less meat, basically less everything! A challenge it will be indeed, but an exciting one all the same... And like last blog, this one will probably be a lot about The Footprint Challenge. Simply because it's what my time has been filled up with a lot over the past month between all the festivities of Sinterklaas and Christmas and New Years. So let's back up a little and start where I left off last time.

I was about to go on another weekend of the Better the World traineeship last time I wrote a blog. Even though the atmosphere and intensity of the weekend was totally different from our first weekend, it was once again awesome to be there. For us as a team, it was really good as well. There were things that everyone had felt beneath the surface already but needed to be said out loud, and that weekend was the perfect time for it. That, and the fact that it was simply so nice to spend time together outside of our two-weekly team meetings =) It was just what we needed as a team and it was good for my soul once again.

After the weekend, we had refreshed energy to dive into our own project, hitting the streets to find more participants and sharing our story with more and more people. I got interviewed for the internal newspaper of City of Utrecht, which was fun, and I went to find new participants in the city center one afternoon with Fabrice. We were both quite nervous to just walk up to strangers and start a conversation about our initiative, but after running out of excuses why we shouldn't just do it (and a drink for encouragement, haha), we did it anyway and got 10 new people in 1 hour or so. So proud of ourselves =)

The rest of that week - besides work - was made up of Sinterklaas celebrations. First with my (ex-)housemates, which was a fun-filled night of dinner, gifts and laughter. Then on the weekend I celebrated Sinterklaas with my family. Lovely presents, funny poems & surprises and again much fun and laughter were the result of that night. Loved it =)

Another week of work and Footprint filled activities followed, interspersed by hanging out with friends and a lovely Christmas dinner with the housemates. We also decided on a new housemate that week, as Judith has recently moved out. The new girl (Berthe) will move in next week, so we'll see how that goes!

And then it was nearly Christmas already! It was so good to have a really long weekend and relax at my parents' place for a bit. I spent quite a bit of time doing next to nothing, and loving it =) Of course Christmas itself was a bit more 'active' with two days of playing card- and boardgames with the family and having a beautiful Christmas dinner together. Having to work again straight after Boxing Day was a bit of a letdown to be honest! Lucky it was only two days until the weekend started again =) In that weekend we had another Footprint session planned, to figure out what still needed to be done in the final few days before our challenge was on. We spent the entire day in Den Bosch, where Geertje was our lovely tour guide and hostess for the day and we got a lot of work done. Awesome =)

So now we're in the new year! I celebrated it by having dinner with roomies & friends at our place last night and then going into the city through the rain to watch the fireworks before continuing on to a NYE house party. Good times were had until the early hours of the very first morning of 2013 =) Because of those early hours, it was followed by a very lazy day of staying in bed watching movies today. Of course with the added excuse that it is very ecologically friendly and it was all helping towards reducing my personal ecological footprint. After all, staying in bed underneath the blankets meant I didn't have to turn the heater on at all despite it being Winter =) As of tomorrow, the hard part will be how to build on this good start of The Footprint Challenge in the next 40 days...

Hope you all had a good end to 2012 too and brought in 2013 with a bang. Let's see what this new year has to offer us all! But first, I think another movie. Under my blankets. And the heater off. Lovely =)
xx