Ohh damn! I am so good at spending time on the net. I finished work early today – great! I could work on my 20’s dress! But lo and behold, here I am two hours later and I’m STILL “researching”. Hahah. Oh well, I found some great recipes to try when things quieten down after Christmas. Such as:
Can you tell I’ve got a sweet tooth?
I live in a 2×1 villa with my partner. It has one common wall with another villa in our complex, and a small atrium style thing in the middle of this wall. When we moved in, it had a few pieces of astroturf and a LOT of sand. We figured it’d make a great project to turn it into something special and the atrium took on a whole new meaning in our minds.
6 months later, it still has a lot of sand.
We have, however, actually begun to do something with it! It’s all about the small wins.
We bought a giant plastic tub from Bunnings with the intent of turning it into a pond. We filled it with water, and put a pot on bricks with a plant in it on top. It wasn’t what we’d hoped for.
So we moved the pot, and headed to a nursery for inspiration. We found it in Fairy Lights – Isolepis cernua. It looked so beautiful, chilling out in the pond with all the other water plants, and we decided to make it the star of our atrium [so many possible puns! SO MANY!]. With the help of the informative Waldecks assistant, we bought moss, a few other plants and a pump, and headed home like a fat kid anticipating cake.
There were a few pallets lying around our place, so we pulled the wood off one of those to create a frame for the pond. Once the frame was there, we watered it, and split the moss around it. Four days later, and it’s still going strong.
The plastic ducks from Pete’s mum. Heehee!
The pump’s working pretty well. We managed to find a solar powered one ❤ Awesome – we don’t have an outdoor socket, it’s more environmentally friendly, and cheaper on our electricity bill. Not so awesome – it stops working at night/when it’s cloudy/there’s no sun (no duh, but I hadn’t fully thought that through). It’s worth it but!
The mosquitoes love it. I’m sure our pond came to be known as the local hospital, where all the female mosquitoes came to lay their eggs. This, as well as the rapid increase in algae, pushed me to buy fish faster than what I’d originally planned. So far, we have two fantails (Carassius auratus) and one shubunkin, and they seem to be going well…they’re not eating as much as I’d like them too, but we’ll see how they go before I go crazy and find an excessive amount of fish 😛
I was thinking of adding mosquitofish? They would certainly enjoy the larvae!
http://blog.ted.com/2013/11/27/a-non-cheesy-guide-to-gratefulness-what-to-read-and-watch/
A great talk, and list of other resources to understand and practice gratefulness.
I hate coming home to an empty house. I enjoy it for a short period, but after a while it starts to grate on me. Regardless of how good a day I’ve had, my mood will start to plummet and next thing I know, I’ve been surfing on Modcloth and Twitter for an unhealthy amount of minutes (like, minutes-turning-into-hours-turning-into-days unhealthy).
Granted, I only live with my partner. So I have a 50% chance of being alone when I get home. The solution is fairly obvious, right? Get a housemate! An animal! More herbs! Extra CLOCKS! Except our place isn’t big enough for more than us. Neither of us are home enough to make having a pet viable. I have a black thumb. And although clocks could work (they keep dogs from getting lonely, right?) it’d probably drive me more crazy and end with lots of smashed hands.
For now, I stem the loneliness with music, planning, talking to the walls and the never ending Internet.
Thank god I have a partner who loves me including my crazy. Otherwise I’d be a crazy dog lady (allergic to cats!). Not that I’ve fully written that off…
So it’s almost 18 months since my last post. Holy shit! I’m impressed I got my login password right on my second go. Life has changed a significant deal since July 2012. Moved out with the boyf, got an amazing job promoting science, doing regular dancing and yoga, and am now dying random parts of my hair.
My job gives me the occasional opportunity to get my face painted. Of course, I always take advantage of this 😀
When you fall over, you pick yourself right back up and keep going right? Round 2. Let’s roll.
Tea amazes me so much. There’s so much variety, so many benefits for your health and it tastes so amazing! It’s funny, I hate coffee but I’ve never felt awkward about it, and that is very much due to tea saving my ass every time. Don’t like cappuccinos? Have a green tea. Dislike long blacks? Have a rooibos tea. Hate iced coffees, mochas or espressos? Have a black tea, rose tea or jasmine tea. Hells yeah, I say!
Tea, we’ll always be BFFs.
I have a habit of not recording and reflecting on the good times. When things are good, I enjoy the ride. I don’t question it; I just try to appreciate the warm feeling of sunshine in my bones.
When things are bad, I retreat, reflect and get lost in books and movies. I wait until the moment passes, and then go searching for something constructive to do.
I need to record the good moments more. Sometimes, when I’m lost in the deep darkness that everyone experiences, I confuse myself and forget why I love my life so much. I feel like sometimes it’s hard to stay happy (and I realise there is a SHITLOAD to be happy about) because things don’t happen the way I want them to, or people don’t behave like I think they should. Sometimes it’s just my hormones being stupid. And in these times, it would be amazing to have a rope to hold onto, memories to lead me out.
I will do it. Starting with this:
1. My boyfriend.
Playing chess by torchlight is a beautiful thing. Having no electricity for almost 24 hours sure was definitely a challenge, but it was lovely to spend a few hours without the incessant background noise of TVs and computers. It was wonderful to have a proper family dinner, without people running off to do things as soon as they’ve finished their last mouthful.
It almost makes me wish for the times of candles and limited electricity…
But then I go to check my inbox or do some work, remember that the power’s out and I therefore have no Internet or computer, and curse the electricity for being down.
It’s okay not to be perfect. I know there’s always someone better, bigger and brighter than you out there, but knowing it and really understanding that are two different things.
I’m not perfect, and I’ve never pretended to be. On the contrary, I consistently voice my faults – it seems to comfort people, and really encourage them to be better than any pep talks I give. I’m okay with not being perfect, and I am perfectly okay with people knowing my faults.
However, I am not okay with not being the best I can be. And accepting that people will be miles better than me on my best day is something I find difficult to swallow. Everyone deserves their success, and fight it as I might, I am jealous of that success. I want to be a better person for other people, and do everything I can to improve the world. There is always a niggling feeling though, that other people do it better and more efficiently than I. Does this mean I should stop trying? Resign myself to a life lived well with a partner and a pet and no more? I want more. I’ve already proved to myself that I can live in a way that benefits and supports those close to me, but I believe I can be more. I can help more, and have a wider effect on more than just those immediately close to me.
So – am I doing it wrong? Am I not trying hard enough? Do I lack innovation/creativity/passion/insert other essential aspects? I would say no to all the above; I guess it all comes down to what I encapsulate as ‘success’ and exactly how I want to measure it. I don’t have an answer for that right now, as I keep changing my mind about what I think success is. Case in point, I’m indecisive.
There’s no right way to do anything. As a constantly evolving race, we have proved this to be true. I’m exploring the options, figuring out the best way I can help people – and in the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter a great deal how successful I am, as long as I help those who I can.
I feel like I’m winning at life. It’s not like my situation has visibly changed from Wednesday – still job hunting, volunteering, and looking for ways to be better. Still waiting, worrying and thinking a lot. Why, then, do I feel so victorious? Like I’ve been given the job of my dreams or fallen in love all over again?
Could it be the morning yoga?
Could it be the slightly excessive consumption of chocolate I endured an hour ago?
Or indulging my love of fantasy literature for a few short hours earlier?
It could be a combination of all the above. It’s funny, I think I’m above self-denial because I know myself well and try to reflect on my personality fairly often. These past few weeks most definitely tell me I am NOT. I applied for a position I believed I was perfect for a month or two ago, and smashed all the interviews out of the park – or so I had thought. A few weeks after the last interview, I hadn’t gotten any congratulatory calls. As the days went by, I felt more and more upset, but convinced myself it wasn’t because I hadn’t heard any result, it was due to not hearing from ANY companies and my depreciating bank account. I enquired about it this week, and finally had an in-depth conversation about my application and performance. As it turns out, it wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough – I lived in the wrong state! I was given some really lovely and positive feedback, and that made my spirits soar.
After some thinking, I don’t believe it was their belated reply that affected my mentality so much. I believe it was the disjunct between my perceived performance, and the reality of the situation (or what I believed to be the situation – by this stage, of course, I had stupidly built it up to enormous proportions). I was upset, of course, because I had thought I had done really well and proved myself, yet – why wasn’t I given the job? Oh right, I must’ve failed somewhere. Oh, but course, it must be me – my skills, attributes, or my ideas must all be terrible.
All that seems so silly, now that I know it was something (more or less) out of my control, and that I had done as well as I had originally thought. It made me realise I have a great fear of becoming disconnected from reality. I don’t want to be one of those people – those that believe they have certain strengths but it’s all talk and no action. Acta non verba.
Unravelling Everyday Mysteries 