The last year has been very disrupted for me. I changed (or lost) as job and have moved house (country). As a result of “the move” I still have lots of possessions (mostly books and papers) in storage boxes. This in itself is not really a bad thing, but it has created an opportunity for me to put-off some administrative work that I really should have done.
At the same time, I’ve taken up improving my Russian. I already had a number of textbooks, and I found (or rather didn’t find) that the Russian-English dicitionary I wanted was in one of the boxes I had not unpacked. In a funny indirect way, that was the trigger for me to start sorting out the accumulated admin work.
Once I had started I found the task, that I had probably been avoiding, went more quickly and more easilly than I had been expecting. The apparent volume of the papers shrunk when I removed the envelopes and unfolded the papers. The actual sorting took relatively little time.
It was at this point that a little serendipity crept in. I went to the computer to print out the manifest which lists the contents of all the boxes (in a basic sort of way) and noticed that one of the three boxes standing next to it said “Russian” on the label. Sure enough, the Russian dictionary was in there! I printed the manifest anyway, I expect I’ll need it in the next few days.
None of this was a “New Year’s Resolution”, but it was all on my “List of things to do”. All in all quite satisfactory!