Getting nothing done again

Must walk away from the computer... must cook dinner, good heavens this place is so addictive ;-)

Foto Friday

My boy... where has the time gone?

In ten months time I will be

Sailboarding off Whitehaven Beach in the Whitsundays.
Photo: QLD Tourism

HERE

That gives me ten months to complete the process of turning this 42 year old slightly worn and bulging body into a sleek and smooth object of admiration, or at least time to lose a couple of kilos.

To say I am excited is kind of an understatement, because I am beside myself with excitement. We have made plans to do this trip before, but the planets have never aligned to allow it to happen. We are going with friends, there will be four families all together, and amazingly we can all make it at the same time!!

Some of the others are flying directly to Proserpine, but we have decided to make the most of the chance, and take the kids out of school for six weeks and road trip our way there. We are going to the Whitsundays via Central Australia and Uluru (that's Ayer's Rock to those who haven't caught up yet!).

Wow six weeks on the open road and the open seas (ok so the Whitsundays are hardly the open seas lol), it will be really hard to come back to reality after that.

So today I state my intentions for getting in shape before we go. I have already started, but its time to really speed up the action. Before we leave I will be comfortable again in my size 12's, that includes no muffin top bulging. I will be fit enough to participate fully in all of the walking, swimming, snorkelling etc that will be happening without feeling totally wrecked, and without having to slow anyone else down.

To do it - clean eating, daily exercise. Sounds simple... but we all know how deceiving it can be. I will post updates at the end of each month.

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

OK the good news... its only a month till Christmas!

The bad news... its only a month till Christmas :-(


I love Christmas, I love seeing the excitement build in my kids, I love the ripping of paper, and the sounds of enjoyment on Christmas Eve. I love the slow and lazy time on Christmas morning, late breakfast, hanging out with the kids, going for a walk around the neighborhood. I love seeing our extended family for tea. The kids play with their cousins, and the adults lounge around in the garden. Food is alway cold because the temperature is hot, conversation is laid back and amusing and the wine goes down easily. The boys do the dishes ;-)

But,

leading up to Christmas there is this evergrowing sense that there is too much to do. There are gifts to be purchased and no car parking available at the shops. There is food to be prepared and the temperatures are soaring here already. There is wrapping of presents to do, and it always seems to be done the day before it needs to be done (I think that is called bad organisation on my part lol). There is the pressure from all around to spend spend spend, to create the perfect picture book Christmas, and there is complete disregard for the things that really matter.

So although I love Christmas, I also dont love Christmas in some ways, and whichever way you look at it - its only one month away now!!

Mouth watering

I have a question...

Do you like food?

Does your mouth water when you look at photos of food?

Ok so that's two questions, if you answered yes to either question you should go and visit

Citrus and Candy

This blogger has a way of talking about, and photographing food that speaks to me.

MMMM off to find something to eat now ;-)

xx

The Story - Cousins

Credits: Papers: Eternal Love Kit - Scrapgirls.Whitie Tighties Katie Pertiet - Designer Digitals .
Fonts: CK Alis Hand, Century gothic.

Another old photo scrapped, circa 1975, me and two of my cousins.

Hot

Its mid spring and we are experiencing high summer temperatures and everything that goes with that. Flies, fires, sticky skin, muggy sleepless nights and fraying temperatures.

All of this could be easily aleviated if only Mr Accountant had seen fit to allow for the cost of an air conditioner when we built our home. But, he didn't, so we swelter.

Its too hot to even sit here and use the computer :-(

Plans are in place to obtain relief in the form of sweet cool air directed through out the house via fancy little ducts in the ceiling, but the timeframe is still hazy.

Hope you are keeping cool (or warm as the hemisphere dictates). More blogging will follow if I manage to drag myself from bed before the sun rises and heats us up, otherwise things may be slow as my fingers can't even find purchase on the keyboard through the film of sweat coating them.

xx

10 things I love RIGHT now

1. Pink and fluffy slippers
2. Cool mornings for walking before the day gets too hot
3. Photoshop Elements (so cool that program)
4. Vegemite toast for breakfast
5. My kitchen - after ten years I still would not change a thing
6. True Blood Season 2
7. My glasses, no more headaches after hours at the computer
8. My Y&T Yahoo group - these girls have so much to share and are so entertaining at the same time
9. Long warm evenings
10. Taylor Savignon Blanc (to drink on those long warm evenings on the back patio)

This weeks Spraground challenge is to scrap a page about what I am loving right now, so here's the list, and later the page.

xxx

Leaving on a jet plane

No, not me unfortunately :-(

Learning to deal with loss is one of those life lessons, we all have to do it, its never fun.

The area we live in has a very high transient population, there are people who work for the Defence forces in our country, which generally means they are posted to an area for a couple of years, then they pack up and are posted to another area. We are not a defence family, I imagine I will live in this area until I am carried out kicking and screaming to a lovely nursing home, that I will complain about until I breathe my final breath, but that's another story all together.

Getting back to the point in hand, my children have had to learm from an early age that people will enter their lives and then they will leave. Of course there will be some who are always there, but there are likely to be many that will only be here for a short period of time. My middle child met her friend in the last few weeks of term last year, and they instantly clicked. In the last few weeks of term this year my daughter's friend and her family will be packing their bags and moving back to England.

We are all sad to see them go, mostly my middle child, and we wish them all the best with their next posting. On the weekend I snapped a couple of shots of them together, and put together this page. I will add another page when middle child has had a chance to think a bit, and she can add her own journaling about her friendship.

Who knows, in this day and age of technology they may keep in touch via email and Skype, and when they are old enough to travel overseas they may even meet up again and continue on with their friendship. Here's hoping :-)

Credits: Sayge Paper Pack by Michelle Martin at Designer Digitals

Faces have been blurred to protect the innocent ;-)

I laughed

I especially like the bit at the end where she swipes at the camera, think I have done this myself.

Enjoy!

I Twi

Hi my name is Jocelyn and I am a Twihard.

Yes that's right I am a huge Twilight fan, I have read all four books in the series more then once, have watched the first movie Twilight many, many times (too many to acually admit to here) and I am eagerly awaiting the release of the movie version of New Moon next week.

So in celebration of my addiction I have temporarily redecorated around here. We will return to our original programming soon (probably).

In all liklihood I will not even see the movie for ages yet as we just don't do movies here much anymore. The cost of five of us going to the movies is ridiculous, especially when one in particular of us isn't even remotely interested in watching teen/vampire/werewolf  romance, heck, I can't even convince him to watch human adult romance lol.

All of the elements used to create the new look are from the digi kit Into the Twighlight, by the very talented Flergs.

Moving right along now...

Ok so I needed to post something, anything to make sure the the photos of my messy house were no longer the first thing anyone sees when they come to visit my blog lol.

I promise it doesn't look like that around here anymore, it is actually tidy momentarily ;-), no doubt it will be back to that state again before long and I will have to start all over again. That's the thing about housework, it really is the most thankless task, and it is never done. Well it might stay done if no one was living in the house, but because we have five people continually in and out of the house, plus extras on a regular basis I have learned to accept that my house will never look tidy all of the time.

Having said that, most days it doesn't take me long to get things in order. I have a system that works, ever heard of Flylady? that is where my system started. I have customised things for myself now, and I dont get the Flylady emails etc anymore, but when I was a full time stay at home mum with three kids underfoot that system was my life saver.

Most days around here I still feel like I am playing house, then every so often I will look around and be surprised to realise that this is MY house, I am the grownup, and all of that mess is MY responsibility.

Then I go and turn on the computer and ignore the mess for a bit longer.

Round here...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guess I should turn the computer off for a while.

Sigh...

Vegemite kid

Many years ago I used to have vegemite toast for breakfast everyday. Two slices of toast with vegemite... every day.

Then I started reading stuff, and listening to other people, and I changed my habits and started eating cereal and milk for breakfast. For a long time I did this, but I was never really satisfied. There is just something about that salty, yeasty, vegemitey taste that cereal cant live up to.

You see I was under the impression that having vegemite toast for breakfast was unhealthy and was contributing to my waist gain :-D

So I ploughed through bowl after bowl of cereal, never feeling satisfied, always left wanting something else. Because I was feeling unfulfilled by the cereal I looked in the cupboard for other things, eating my way through until I felt satisfied.

Not to mention the other side effects... which I wont because well... yuck who wants to mention those things?

So last week I said to my husband I think this cereal is bad for me. He in his loving attentive way continued to spoon cereal into his mouth, raised his eyes from the newspaper for a millisecond and said "well dont eat it then"

And just like that 14 years of self imposed vegemite toast denial was over.

Photo courtesy of Limes and Lycopene

This morning my son came out to breakfast commenting that my toast smelled so much better than his cereal - I just smiled and pointed to the toaster - that's my boy!

Please look at this

My last post of links was entirely frivolous, but this is something completely different. I have been following this blog for quite a while now, and was heartbroken when I read about the tragedy this family has lived through. I would like to do my very small part in trying to stop this from happening again.

So in memory of Ava I ask you to go to this blog and read this post.

Lets see how many links I can get in one post

Some of the things I am into right now...

When I was a lot younger than I am now I used to live in Sydney, beautiful Sydney, and I spent a lot of time at the beaches and in the bush around Sydney. One man who seems to have a real appreciation for what it is about Sydney that I love is Matt Lauder. Go and check out his website, he takes gorgeous photos, and he runs workshops. One day I am going to do one of his workshops.

I have always been a fan of fantasy worlds, either on television, at the movies or in books, as a little girl I firmly believed in magic. Right now my fantasy world revolves around the undead. If you have the time to and meet my friends Edward, Eric and Bill, and Jean Claude. That's right I am loving the vampire scene right now.

I used to be a paper scrapper, but now I have been completely seduced by the dark side, that's right, I am one of those... a digiscrapper. The only paper scrapping I do now is my kids school albums because I paid a truckload of money for a Becky Higgins School Kit for each of them, and I can't bear to see it go to waste. Everything else, digi baby! If you are new to digi or you want to know a bit about it you should visit Jessica Sprague. And if you like that and want to get some digi stash happening try Flergs, Paislee Press and Taylor Made for some truly gorgeous digi goodness. I've linked you to their blogs, and from there you can get to their respective shops.

Last of all one of my very favourite things to do is to go camping. We like to explore the state we live in so I spend a bit of time studying here. And of course the best thing about camping, is sitting around a campfire with your favourite people.



Anyway enough about me, I am off to read about some more of you

xx

A funny thing happened on the way to this blog

This is not my first blog, in fact its not even my second, but more about that later. This is actually my fourth blog.

The first blog was called When I Grow Up, it started life as a weight loss journal/experiment with this whole blogging stuff blog, and it was pretty anonymous. At first I had no photos (mostly because I didn't know how to put them in lol), no real names, no identifying data, but, over time it became less anonymous.

I had a lovely little following of other like minded bloggers, nothing huge, but a few regular commenters who always said just the right thing. I became more and more comfortable on my home on the web, and began sharing more personal information. As anyone of you out there who have attempted to lose more than 10kgs could attest to there are times when things are going well, and times when things are not. There are also little things that come up on a weight loss journey that are fairly personal in nature, and I was sharing these kinds of things with my blogging friends.

Then one day I was talking to someone in my life outside the computer and he referred to one of my more personal posts on my blog, saying something along the lines of "when I was reading your blog the other day I had to laugh when you said..." well I wont go into what it was that I said now, but suffice to say it was not something that I would ever EVER ever talk about with him in real life!

The result of this was that I stifled my blogging, in fact I probably went too far. I was just not willing to risk blogging anything that HE would read and comment on, either to me, or to other people we knew.

So eventually I had to move. I was just so uncomfortable knowing that he might be reading. Moving was a pain, I didn't want to leave a big announcement on the old blog, because he would see it (at least if he was still reading he would), so I had to leave comments all over the web to try and contact my other blogging friends.

Then he was speaking to me and asked where my blog had gone... I lied and told him I wasn't blogging anymore.

After that it took me ages to feel comfortable on the web again. My new home just didn't feel right, so I moved again, and again... and finally here I am. I lost a few of my followers to Facebook (the blog killer) and a few more I am sure through irritation at my random blogging attempts and change of addresses.

This blog started out as my scrapping gallery type thing but I've been living here permanently for most of this year now and it feels like home to me again. I will forever be careful about over sharing on my blog again, if I cant say everything I write here, to the people I know in real life, I don't write it here either. You never know who is reading...

Redesign

All those years I put off changing the way my blog looked because I thought it would be too hard. What a dunce.

So I have made a few changes, and I am quite happy with it. Its in my favourite colour, and I finally worked out how to get rid of that stupid little box that used to sit around the header yay!

If this is not displaying properly for anyone please leave me a comment so I can see if I can sort it out.

:-)

Do it now

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am really good at putting things off. I can find a million reasons not to do something right here, right now, I am the Queen of Procrastination.

Unfortunately it almost always comes back to bite me on the bum.

Case in point, I purchased the Becky Higgins School Kits KOTM a while back. I am sure others of you did too, so you know how long ago that was. Last weekend I finally opened the box, dug out the kids school photos and started trying to piece together their school albums.

I remember thinking when they started school that the events were so huge in our lives, that I would never forget the details of what happened. I was wrong.

Putting together my sons (14 yrs) kindergarten page I was at a loss as to what to include. I couldn't remember enough. Of course after sitting and thinking for ages, and talking to my husband and my son, I managed to come up with some info, but I know there was more, and what should have been a fairly easy layout to pull together ended up taking hours, and became a very frustrating experience.

That brings me to today.

I have started the Blogging for Scrapbookers course on line at Shimelle.com and the first day she talks about using your blog as a tool to write your stories for scrapping in the future. Write them while the memory is fresh. There was a time when I did a bit of this, but as can be seen, my blog has been suffering from neglect for a while now, so over the next three weeks I want to establish a habit of recording the things that happen from day to day, even the boring things that no one else is likely to want to read, in the hopes that future memories can be captured and relived without the stress and frustration of relying on my sieve like brain lol. My mantra - DO IT NOW!

Feel like joining in? Go to Shimelle's site and take a look.

Fabulous FREE course at JessicaSprague.com

As she did last year Jessica is offering a free course, with unlimited participant numbers, come along and have a go!