Monthly Archives: January 2012

I Love my Motivation!

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Well, we are almost at the end of January.  My initial resolve was to take part in the 365 Project and post on the same theme for a whole year.  I chose motivation but quickly realised that I’d bore myself, let alone my readers, if I posted up about that for a WHOLE YEAR!!  So, I decided to adapt the idea and post on the same topic for a month.  I also allowed myself not to post every day.  I pretty much abandoned the 365 Project in fact!

Anyway, I have, more or less, posted motivationally themed stuff throughout January, I think, and I intend to end with a summary of how my own motivation has helped me to keep up my fitness training and started all the other things I said I would do.

Or rather, that WAS the intent

Unfortunately, I’ve just returned from a slap up meal of Tapas with copious amounts of wine and I really feel a bit of a fraud talking about how determined I am to eat healthily and keep fit.

Although I did go to a personal training session at the gym this morning. AND I have been walking regularly. AND…and this is the bestest AND….I have joined a burlesque dancing class.  So far, I’ve only been to the taster session but I’ve signed up for the full six weeks.  It’s so much fun!   The challenge for me is how to look alluring whilst trying to follow the steps.  Not quite there yet but I’m hopeful!  Anyway, I highly recommend it as a fun way to exercise.

And, joking apart, I am really enjoying my exercise, whatever form it takes.

The Italian classes are great fun too, not too hard but I’m learning new stuff.  It’s fun doing the class with KD who has a fantastic accent and we practise our new words during the week so I fully expect to be fluent by the end of the course (well, I hope to be able to order wine and food at least. Or just the wine even….).

As for the other projects I had intended to pick up on, well, the photography is slow. The weather has been poor and I have yet to find the subject that inspires me….but I will. I am a frustrated photographer.

I have not done any more drawing and I have totally forgotten about the needlecraft apart from a brief spell (one evening) where I got out the knitting needles for half hour.

Still, it’s only January.  Eleven more months to achieve my goals!

I have decided to make my theme for February ‘Love’.

Amore.

Not sure what I’ll post yet but isn’t that the beauty of it all?

Ciao Belle.

 

Fuzzy Eyes

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I am having trouble focusing this morning.  I mean,literally, focusing.  Everything is a little bit blurry.   I sometimes find that my eyes take a bit longer to wake up than the rest of me but this is much worse than usual.  I have cleaned my reading glasses at least three times in an effort to clear my vision but to no avail.

I can only surmise, therefore, that the problem lies with my sight.

I have fuzzy eyes…..

Masterchef…..

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I am just in the middle of cooking a bolognaise sauce for our meal tonight.  It’s one of the few dishes I cook these days, KD being the masterchef in our house now.  

Talking of Masterchef, I love that programme.  We’ve been glued to our seats all week watching the contestants as they strive to stay in the competition.  There is something compulsive about viewing people get it wrong.  I much prefer this programme to any of the professional cook programmes that are on…..

Anyway, while I was checking on the bolognaise, I had a flash back to when my children were small.  I think my daughter would have been about 4 or 5 and my son just 2 or 3 years old.

A favourite pastime of theirs was to pull up a little chair just by the kitchen door and watch me cook dinner.  However, I wasn’t allowed to simply COOK the dinner.  I had to provide a running commentary of what I was doing, in the style of a TV chef.  I haven’t a clue what TV programme we would have been watching at the time but it clearly had an impact on my children.  Well, I say children…from what I can remember, my daughter organised the whole thing and my little toddler son just did whatever she told him to do.

It is a happy memory, me talking them through every stage of the preparation, as if I was talking to a camera.  Silly but fun.  I wonder if they remember it?  My daughter (now 29) has been a very good cook for as long as I can remember.  My son tells me he can also cook but I have no experience of that, so I have to take his word for it!!!!  I wonder if their early lessons with mum are the reason?

 

 

Rouge Nipples

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I have a few different methods for remembering topics I want to blog about.  One is to jot it down in the back of my diary.  Another is to use my dictaphone to say a couple of key words and the other is the ‘notes’ feature on my iTouch.

I haven’t actually used this iTouch feature for some while now but I thought I’d just check and see if there are any ideas outstanding that I might want to turn into a post here.

I have five things listed, as follows:

Rouge Nipples

Quotient

Sandwiches

Fabulous business idea

Music

Now, I can remember what the music prompt is to do with and I will blog about that one day.

As for the others, I am totally clueless.

ROUGE NIPPLES??????

Whatever could I have been thinking about???

I’m even scaring myself there…..

I am the milk monitor

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This month it is my turn to buy the milk and biscuits at work.  Everyone takes a turn and, for that month, whoever is charged with the task doesn’t have to pay their subs.

It’s actually a bit of a faff.  People are very picky.  They demand certain biscuits and they have milk preferences too.  Keeping the biscuit tin and the fridge stocked up with the right kind of milk can be very stressful.  There is also the nuisance of having to remember to go to the shops before it runs out (particularly if, like me, shopping is not normally in your daily routine).  I shall be glad when my month is over…

Anyway, whilst standing in the queue at Sainsbury’s, waiting to pay for three packs of choc chip cookies, three packs of Hob Nobs, six litres of semi-skimmed and six litres of skimmed milk,  I was put in mind of the old days at primary school, where we used to have milk monitors.

I doubt that these exist now – do they even hand out milk anymore?  I don’t expect so….

Years ago, we got free milk every day.   Little glass bottles, miniatures of the pint bottles left on our doorsteps.   This was in the sixties, when I was very young.  In those days you could get different coloured foil tops on milk – silver, red and gold.  Gold top was full cream, I know that and we didn’t get that in school.  I think we just got the silver top which I think was full fat and then the red top came in later, as semi-skimmed.  I’ve looked this up and there are a lot of different answers so I can’t be sure now!!!  There was also the special christmas foil top with little holly leaves on it I recall.

Anyway, the milk used to sit there by the door until break time and whoever was milk monitor handed it out.  In the summer, therefore,it was disgusting, warm and sickly.  I hated it.  In fact I’m surprised I can even drink milk now, along with millions of other children who grew up experiencing the trauma of having to drink slightly-off milk!!  I only drink skimmed milk now and I’m sure this is why!

So here I am again, the milk monitor for January.   I miss those  dinky little glass bottles.  Even though they made me feel sick….

There’s no accounting for taste…..

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I just had to share this as it constantly amuses me to see what people have typed in their search engine to end up at my blog:

This is a list of last weeks searches (the number of times the search term was used is in brackets):

stationery  (30)

fish and chips  (12)

high heels walking (3)

snoopy picture

gym (2)

books and stationery (2)

stationery items

beholder with glasses

snoopy driving

project 365

motivation

365 project

traditional england food

office stationeries

stationary item

fish & chips

office

stationerys

cheeseaholics anonymous

fish & chips images

stationery items

images with name

italy knitting blog

i gave up smoking

I have blogged about these topics or included images in one form or another but it is still WEIRD how many stationery hunters there are out there….and ‘beholder with glasses’?  What’s that all about?  We won’t even go down the ‘high heels’ route….actually this week’s search terms are pretty tame compared with some!

Suffice to say I expect many of these searchers are mightily disappointed when they arrive at my blog!

 

Geography – boring with a capital B!

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Last week, whilst watching University Challenge – a regular event in our house – I was once again frustrated by the geography questions.  I have never heard of most of the obscure places that crop up in this quiz and it made me think about how on earth anyone would know the answers to these questions…..

When I did geography at school, it was incredibly boring.  Nothing to do with different countries, just boring, boring lessons on crop rotation.  Admittedly I stopped doing geography in the third year, when we got to choose our options, so I didn’t do it for that long. Actually, thinking back, I didn’t get an option, I was thrown out of the class for being disruptive (difficult to believe, I know).  Maybe if I had seen it through to the end I would have learned more about different places instead of how to irrigate a field (a piece of information I have never found I needed).

Anyway, I still don’t know how people come to know all this.   Those students on Uni Challenge can’t all have taken geography at A level – I mean, who would want to take geography at any level anyway, it’s so boring? – but, somehow, they know these random things about random places.   KD didn’t do geography A level and HE knows.  So why don’t I?

I am considering investing in a globe of the world that I can have by me at all times so that, in a moment of boredom, I can discover some new place I have never heard of.

Then again I could just accept that geography is not my strong point and take up something far more useful, like knitting.

2012 so far….

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Buona Sera (practising my Italian)

Well, it’s the end of a very interesting and pleasant week.  I have taken up a new challenge , the Italian class, which has given me something to focus on and it reminded me how much I love languages and learning new things, which made me feel good.

I have had a very rewarding week at work with some lovely, positive outcomes for the young people I work with.  Which makes me very happy.

This morning, I saw the most wonderful sight on my way to an appointment.  I drove past a field of horses, probably about a dozen and possibly a mixture of ponies and horses (I’m not really a horsey person so I can’t tell the difference – ponies seem a bit fluffier to me and smaller but that’s all I know).  Anyway, I had to pull over and watch them as they were so entertaining.  They were chasing each other, frolicking, playing and just generally having fun.  I wished I had my camera with me and I will definitely go back there to take some photos or film them at play.  That made me happy too.

I have also decided to give up on going grey.  I have been growing out HALF my hair for a while now, to see what it looks like ‘au naturale’ (blimey, she speaks French too!).  When I say half, I don’t actually mean left vs right.  I have a (dyed) pink/purple fringe and I used to have dark brown for the rest of it.  This bit, I have left to grow naturally.  After several trims, it is pretty much its natural colour now.  Which is a rather unattractive mish mash of brown, grey and silver, in no particular pattern.  There are just ‘clumps’ of different colours.  It isn’t a good look.  The grey isn’t healthily glowing either.  It’s matte.  So, today I have decided to end the experiment and revert to dying the lot again.  It may not look natural but it certainly looks better than the current faded effort…..

Tomorrow I start back at the gym and get myself back on track there.  I’ve just made enquiries about a Burlesque dance class too so that may well be another on my list of projects this year.

And I get my new car radio fitted.  It has been awful with nothing to listen to other than the sound of the engine this week.

So far, I’m liking 2012 🙂

I expect I shall look something like this when I am doing the burlesque dancing…..

Mi Chiamo Flossie…

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Tonight, KD and I attended our first ‘Italian for Holidays’ evening class – the first of twelve (dodici) lessons.

I have been in and out of study for years as an adult, always to do with my career, but this was my first time back in a classroom learning something totally new to me since, well, I can’t remember when….I used to like languages at school but I haven’t done anything like this for years and years.

It was fun actually and we now know how to say our names, ask someone else what theirs is (formally and informally!) as well as a range of greetings – oh, and how to count to twenty (venti)!

I was reminded of the ‘language lab’ we had when I was at school in the early seventies – very high tech at the time – where we sat ourselves down with headphones in our little individual booths and learned French or German.  It was so boring, and I used to use the time to have a nap usually, but I can still remember French so it must have sunk in!  (I’ve forgotten all my German though but I don’t remember learning that in the language booths, I just remember a formidable woman with wonky eyes teaching us the old fashioned way).

Anyway, being back in the classroom learning something other than the academic stuff I’ve had to concentrate on the past few years was fun, not least because there isn’t an exam at the end of it, we are doing it purely for pleasure.

Next week we will be learning how to book a hotel room in Italian.  Which is a bit silly because we’ve already booked ours….

Ciao!!

Cheese-aholics Anonymous

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Having said I would NEVER go to the gym again once my personal training sessions were finished, I have just booked myself in for 14 more, starting on Saturday.

Now, how’s THAT for motivation?!?!

The fact that I look like a big fat cheese due to the ridiculous amount of the stuff I have eaten over Christmas and New Year, is neither here nor there…..