About a month ago, perhaps a smidge longer, I was doing a little light gardening on the lower balcony, mostly of the tidying kind.

Part of this was ruthlessly removing some very sad and tired rosemary and preparing the pot to take some small basil plants it its place. After removing the rosemary I was left with a pot half full of fine grey dust – there was little evidence of any organic matter at all. So I used the opportunity to combine it with compost (if that is what you call the worm poop?) from the classy worm farm.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks later to find these tomato plants going completely nuts. It was especially surprising given that I hadn’t actually planted any tomatoes. Clearly treats from the wormies!

Knowing my dreadful luck with tomatoes, I’m not holding out much hope for anything to come of it (and they should definitely be thinned out). But hey, Go Nature!

Wow! It’s been quite a while since the last film!

Film 5 was The Matrix – currently available on Netflix.

And in 10 words or less: Tedious. Dated. Long leather trench coats – never a good idea.

I really need to get more of these films watched before summer cricket starts and consumes the evening television time.

I’ve given myself until Old Lady Day to replace items on the 50before50 list and then I plan to stick to everything for the remaining year (no pressure!).

I’m replacing another item today and there is likely to be some minor additional reshuffling in the coming days as we count down to The Day (eeep!).

#12 on the list was go skiing, but it is pretty unlikely that we’re going to get skiing in next year. Especially as skiing is so hideously expensive and we’ve already planned next year’s not inexpensive holiday.

So I’m replacing skiing with … stop drinking alcohol. 

And I mean stop – for, like, ever.

<gasp> 

I know.

I’ve given this a crack before for just under a year, but it has a nasty habit of creeping up on you. There’s been no horribly drunken event to trigger this, just a realisation that “hey, I’m drinking regularly again”, an acknowledgement that I’m feeling a bit dusty some mornings and that evenings just seem to slip away. Drinking is preventing me from doing a whole lot of the things I want to and stops me carpe-ing the diem.  I’m pretty sure that I can’t do moderation, so quitting is the only thing for it.

There’s a lot of things coming up that would normally include drinking – Old Lady Day, various SML events, Xmas, New Year &etc. It can be quite a challenging thing to do – Australia has such a huge drinking culture and loads of otherwise quite sane people can be very confronted by someone not drinking and attempt to coerce you into “just one”. But I’ve survived most of this before – I can definitely do it again (positive thinking!). 

So I’m currently in the midst of reading a whole bunch of giving-up-drinking memoirs to get me through the initial rough patch. Today is day five and all is well!

I’ll need a fair bit of luck with this one!

and of course i also held on to the bessie fish at the same time

Today was full of an all day cross-functional process review workshop facilitated by the Competent Consultants. No phones or other distractions permitted – which is actually a pretty great strategy.

It was actually pretty great because the majority of the participants were invested in making big improvements – but there is always one person who is wedded to a ridiculous status quo, which makes for an exhausting  day. Especially exhausting when I am leading this project and have to expend lots of energy being all enthusiastic, justifying the rationale for change, hand holding and bringing people on the journey. Mostly what I want to do after a couple of hours is tell them to STFU because we need to drag ourselves away from work practices that were probably outdated in 1978.

More fun tomorrow wrangling the leadership team in another lengthy meeting.

(I have come to realise that I kind of do like meetings- which is fortunate because it seems to be where I spend most of my life).

A few weeks ago during the Ruthless Decluttering of Bessie’s wardrobe, she also attacked a stockpile of completed Uni work.

Amongst this stash was a bunch of stuff from an assessment where she’d adapted a bunch of Joe/Frank’s very old artwork into fabric form. The assessment was to, well I don’t even remember, something about Community Groups and monetising something. I’ll update when she is home.

But naturally I wasn’t letting these treasures go anywhere!

Napkin:

Based on this fish:

Quite why I have been hanging onto that fish for well over 10 years is something I cannot explain.

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Another napkin from a not-quite-so-elderly drawing:

When he was a small boy he really loved to draw maps, so he whipped up another for the project:

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There were also two t-shirts which I have yet to photograph, but which I adore.

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So far we have a pretty great stash of items from Design Student Bessie, I should document these more rigorously.

These Chickpea Waffles Are Low-Sugar, High-Protein, and 100-Percent Delicious

I love chickpeas, but this sounds 0% delicious and 100% unpleasant.

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The #1 Reason You Should Be Adding Beans to Smoothies

What?! There can be absolutely no good reason to do this!

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I’ve realised that most of the links in this series (okay, it is a series of five) come from popsugar fitness, either they have a very high proportion of stupid post titles or I need to get out more.

I had long been super sneery about padded pants and lycra for cycling, but after actually wearing a pair of padded pants I was all turned around on the subject.

yeah, i know you can see what i see in that stitching

I adored my winter pants, but with their superior thermal abilities and water-resistance-ness they were killing me in the spring heat. So I decided to go all out and get myself a pair of the more premium lightweight castelli bib shorts for summer riding.

They arrived during the week. I was wild with excitement and then I unpacked:

Eeeep! Why would anyone choose this colour for the padding of ladies pants? WWWWHHHHYYYYY?!?!

WHY?!?!??!

Despite it being over 4 years since my hysterectomy, I was visited by very horrible nightmares related to, well I’m sure you can imagine, on the night of the unpacking.

I’ve yet to wear them for a ride, but they are extremely light-weight and crazy-comfortable. I’m very excited.

But for the love of all that is … whatever … WHY WOULD YOU SELECT THAT COLOUR????

It’s the home stretch of the Babor advent calendar project!

Behind door #20 was another HSR lifting glamour fluid. More face gold!

It claims to visibly reduces fine lines and wrinkles, but I’m pretty sure I have the same number of (if not more) wrinkles – despite three weeks of application.

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Door #21 and #22

Next up: Glow Booster Bi-Phase Ampoule. The claim: promotes radiance and a youthful complexion.

Unusually, I took handwritten notes, which I’ve reproduced below:
+ small ampoules (see comparison photo – quite a bit smaller than the rest)
+ thickish (takes quite a bit to cover face)
+ skin very, very glowing afterward (also could be the result of not drinking … for those days)

very tiny!

Apparently this contains an effective combination of vitamin C, extracts of seabuckthorn and bistorta root, as well as α-tocopherol.

I have absolutely no idea what three of those things are, but hey, whatever works.

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Door #23 and #24

Sea Creation THE SERUM (their caps). The promise: restructures the skin with luxurious, active anti-aging ingredients.

ZOMG! Sea-telligent!! This word is so glorious, I can’t even!

Door #24 was quite large and I was expecting something spectacular. To my surprise it was just more of the Sea Creation THE SERUM. Way to not end with a bang, Babor!

This was not too bad, but nowhere near as good as the Glow Booster Bi-Phase Ampoule. My skin did not appear to be restructured. Did last the full week though.

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I can’t believe I’m done! And that it is just a smidge under a year since I bought this (and that I put off opening it for 6 months – what the hell is wrong with me?)

I really would have preferred this activity to have something new in each window, but given you’re supposed to do this over a month rather than drawing it out over six months, I can understand the repetition. Nonetheless it was really, really fun to have a wee treat to open on Monday mornings.

My favourites?

#21 and #22 Glow Booster Bi-Phase Ampoule

#1 and #2 and #3: hyrdra plus active fluid

Would I actually buy them? I’m not entirely sure. I do need a new serum – generally I use l’occitane immortelle precious serum and have run out. But the ampoules are really quite fiddly to manage and to be honest I am staggered that I have not spilled them all over the counter.

I did take a couple of drunken selfies with the DSLR last night and gosh! I am confrontingly full of wrinkles, so I’m pretty sure that this experiment didn’t do a whole lot to improve this. Though who knows? Perhaps I would have been even worse without!

While randomly clicking about on the InformationSuperHighway this evening, I stumbled across this device:

The Chip Smart Cookie Oven!

It does what it says on the tin (makes cookies) … and … using a companion app, you scan the barcode off a pack of specially-made dough pods, drop the dough in, and the oven does the rest, automatically adjusting the temperature and cooling down at just the right time to guarantee perfectly baked cookies, every time.

You can even get yourself an additional cookie-dough subscription! A la carte = 4 classic (uncooked) cookies for US$5 … through to Premium = 16 (uncooked) cookies for US$27 per month.

The kickstarter.

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And verily the cookie maker will become part of a zombie bot army and indulge in the occasional DDoS attack.

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Note: I realise that some people out there will not have an oven in which to bake cookies, but come on, this is completely and utterly bonkers.

From the meagre remaining collection of Japanese coins.

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Occasional series inspired by the excellent Katy