I don’t believe much in New Year’s Resolutions, I believe now is as good a time as any to change for the better.
However, there is one resolution I made around the end of last year into the new year, so I suppose you could call it a New Year’s resolution, and that is to pursue personal development.

I recognize I have a lot of thing’s I need to work on in all areas of my life and the more I learn about myself, the more I study and learn from other successful people and role models, the more I realize how much work I need to do in my life.

I’ve subscribed to a bunch of personal development related blogs, listened to a bunch of audio programs and through our VeloCITI Business Acceleration Program I went through a pretty extensive personal assessment, by Roland Cox from Aspiral.

Over the past couple months people have been recommending lot of books for me to read, mostly relating to my business life, but I’ve been so preoccupied with other stuff that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading them. So today was the day I went to Amazon and got all the highly recommended books I want read.
So, yay! I should be getting all books in about 2 weeks.

Woot! I just got back from a 4 day trip canoeing on Orange River. I’m sore and tired, but I had a great time and definitely look forward to doing it again sometime in the future. I uploaded some pictures I took from my cellphone to flickr, so you can have a look at a few of the photos so far, but there’s lots more to come.
Still to come are pictures taken from the River Guides (those will be some good shots, as they’ve got pictures of us in the rapids) and others in our group.

Every year at this time of the year, we have an international food evening at our parish church, and every year my mother makes and serves the food at the Portuguese table, while I help by bring the food to the church hall and setting up the table. Yes, I am Portuguese. My mother and father were both born in Madeira and came to South Africa where my 2 brothers, 2 sisters and myself were born and raised.

Anyways, and every year they have traditional Madeira folk dancing as part of the evening. Now that I got my new phone I decided to record it. Although the people dancing aren’t “proper” Madeira folk dancers, it’s something special to me, as it represents something from where my parents came from and in essence where I come from.

Here are 2 pics I took. One just as the evening was getting started, one later one at night.

And then here’s one of the video’s I took. Excuse the quality, I only realized afterwards that there was a higher resolution option which I could set my video recording to on my phone.

Since my nephew is back in South Africa for a little while, we decided to do the tourist thing and go up Table Mountain. He has never actually been up there, so he, my sister and I went up one day, and I got some pictures while up there.

Yay, Here comes the cable car to take us up

Up on top of Table Mountain Ahh, Home. I love Cape Town

clearest pic I took up there

Spot the gecko, lizard, whatever reptilian thing basking in the sun

One of the more risky photos I took

Messing about, photo my nephew taking a photo of me

On the way back down

I got my new Nokia E70 phone about month ago, so I’ve already got some photo’s and videos to start off this blog.

First off is a single photo I took on one of those family Sunday’s. We don’t have them often, only on special occasions like birthdays or certain holidays, so we have one about once every second month or so, and they’re nearly always at my sisters place.

What I like about these Sunday lunches, is not only the fun and laughter, while reminiscing and story telling around the lunch table, but also the lazy time we spend together chatting after lunch on full belly, chatting about everything and nothing.

This particular photo, although it probably doesn’t capture the moment properly, was taken after the most recent Sunday lunch we had because my nephew came back from the UK on holiday for a week after leaving to work there 6 months ago.

When next we have one of those Sunday’s I’ll get a better picture. I didn’t think of doing this back then. I was actually just messing about with the phone.