So how's the New Year's Resolution going?

Even by Day Four of January, 2015, my New Year's Resolution was causing trouble. It was going to be a jolly nice resolution, I thought. In fact, 'nice' was the word. 'Each day I must perform at least one random act of 'niceness'. Pretty innocuous and non-specific...

 Hello Buster!
Buster the Girl Kitten

Day One

Day One was easy. I presented Non-Gardening Partner with fresh raspberries and custard for a summer pudding. NGP loves custard, and it's an extremely rare event for him to be presented with such. Niceness? Definitely. Dripping with it.

Days Two and Three...

On Day Two I arrived at my friend's house, keen to sight-read a new Schubert piano duet. It would have been nicer if I'd practiced it first, so that the double flats didn't put me in such a vocally blasphemous panic. And it wasn't nice at all to guess-thump a fat ten-note chord with eyes semi-shut. Oops. Totally wrong, and it was supposed to be pianissimo.

Upon waking up on Day Three I'd decided that the 'niceness de jour' was to feed Buster the black kitten some of my fresh salmon. NGP kindly pointed out (with the sharp logic of an engineer) that if I planned my random act of niceness so much in advance, then it wasn't actually random, was it? Blast...

 Love you, Minimus!
Minimus the Cottage Cat

But what if I forgot? Imagine lying in bed at night, happy and cosy. Suddenly an alarming thought - no nicenesses had been performed that day. What to do? Leap up and pat Minimus the cottage cat, and tell her she is the best (if the only) cottage cat in my world? Would that do? Hmm...

Definition, Please...

And how to define a 'nice' action anyway? Such a dreadfully bland, vaguely good-manners word. Give a friend a bag of freshly dug potatoes? She might secretly groan and add them to her already overwhelming potato collection.

And what about gardening tasks, like watering the Pittosporums down on the boundary fence? Neither random, nor nice - just part of my responsibility as a gardener, a functional, necessary task...

Another thought concerned stockpiling. If I crammed lots of nice things into one day, then I'd be in credit, and could behave like a complete tosser and ratbag for the next month. Would this be a nice way to lurch through the year 2015? I think not!

 With Rusty the dog.
Working in the Garden

Day Five...

On Day Five I liberated a bamboo which had spent its best years squashed into a thin blue pot. I planted it on my boundary. Extremely nice for the bamboo, but a few years later when it's running (literally) rampant through my neighbour's garden? Hee hee...

Six Weeks Later...

So far, so nice - six weeks down the track I can proudly report staying on track! Well, I think I have. I even have a list of 'nicenesses' (which I will NOT bore anyone with). It's such a sweet, insubstantial word, and encompasses so many different things that I do each day. Dog-sitting, cooking meals, giving away potatoes (yes), buying fillet steak for Buster the kitten, hiking in the mountains...

And doing lots of wonderful things in the garden with my dogs and cats, which is what life is really all about. Yippee! Finally I have a New Year's Resolution I should be able to keep up with all year.