Feliz año nuevo and happy New Year! We at Spark wish you all a happy, healthy and rewarding 2011!

A new year usually involves many people coming up with good intentions and ideas for the new year. I personally don’t normally believe in New Year’s resolutions as I tend to be the type of person who seems to suddenly wakes up with new ideas or improvements for their own life midway through the year. This usually means that at the end of the year I simply seem to have ‘forgotten’ all the resolutions I came up with during the year (worth noting that these new resolutions tend to only last for 2 weeks..). This more often than not leaves me with nothing to say when it comes to my turn to make my new year’s resolutions public. (I used to get annoyed when people asked me about my new year’s resolutions , but I realise now that many people pretend to be interested only to see whether they can ‘borrow’ some of  my ideas because they struggle with the same problem as I do..). Anyway, not having any new year’s resolutions and my complete failure at sticking to mid year’s resolutions, I realised it was time to do something and become a little bit more organised. (Rest assured that I tend to be very organised in my professional life..).

For some reason I felt very motivated about this idea, bought myself a book on how to live a more organised life and even ended up with 3 agenda’s for the new year! I’m sure you can all imagine that I felt that at least the preparations were going well (and according to a famous Dutch saying, good preparations are half the job). So when I got back home from my Christmas holiday and realised that many of my shelves were covered in dust and cats’ hairs due to my absence and lack of cleaning, I decided to put my new plan into practice immediately and get rid of all that dust right there and then instead of putting it off again and again. I started by emptying all the shelves, taking down books, CDs, paraphernalia and flowers and then I proceeded with stage 2: cleaning the shelves. Unfortunately when that stage was completed that also meant the start of the tricky part: the shelves now had to dry, which was obviously a good excuse to take a break and have some tea.

I am sure it is easy to imagine that a couple of hours later, all the books, CDs, paraphernalia and flowers were still spread across the room, partly on the table, partly on the floor, preventing myself from getting to the other side of the room without any dangerous acrobatic balancing and I am pretty sure that they will probably stay there a couple more days before they will finally be put back in their correct place, by which time the shelves will almost be dusty again…

This is just to illustrate the New Year’s resolutions are just not my thing and I think I will just give up on them altogether, but I hope that you are personally better at coming up with New Year’s resolutions and also better at sticking to them. Maybe one of your resolutions is even to finally do that Spanish course that you have been wanting to do for such a long time but never really found the time or energy for. 2011 Might well be the right year to start, together with Spark, who will be opening their doors soon to students of Spanish in Spain.

And if you do, I can assure you there will be no dust on the shelves at Spark, because fortunately there somebody else who is responsible for this at Spark.

Happy new year and hopefully see you some time at Spark!