Over the past couple of months I’ve had quite a few very early starting meetings, so have missed a fair bit of yoga – not ideal when you’ve bought a not inexpensive, time-boxed, unlimited pass!**

Add to that, the associated meeting catering (wee cakes!) and I find myself in rather dire need of exercise!

In the spirit of carpe-ing the whatevs and taking whatever I can get, I threw on my running gear this evening and went for a very “quick” run-around-the-block. Exhausting, but I feel a good deal better for it! Especially after being trapped in a windowless room for 9 hours for two days straight.

Also in the spirit of doing something … anything … to encourage us to get moving, we bought an exercise bike over the weekend. It has already seen some use and hopefully will prove over the long-term to be more than an interestingly-shaped storage receptacle for various things.

**The pass itself is really good value – well it is when you actually use it.

It’s the time of year when I start thinking of what I might like to challenge myself with in 2019.

Some of the things I’m idly considering include:
+ only reading books from the library
+ giving up coffee (extremely unlikely)
+ monthly massage / facial
+ no dessert (birthday exceptions only) or post-dinner snacking
+ getting back onto that 60before60 list! I didn’t do much of it at all in 2018 and I really missed the fun of the challenges!

Will of course report back.

It’s indeed fortunate that I’m trying to restrict myself from buying more *stuff*, else these beauties would now be resident in ThePalace(OfLove).

Don was mildly terrified watching me test them out while we were visiting decathlon to suss out exercise bikes. It’s been maybe 18 years (yikes – seems about 5) since I was last on skates – given my wobbling he was probably somewhat justified in his concerns.

unprecedented – babykitty sitting on my desk – first day back from hols

It’s somewhat difficult to know how and where to start after disappearing from here for a little bit, but I’ll dive in.

Our short-ish break was absolutely wonderful. There’s a good deal to be said for lazing around a pool reading books for a week. The lazing was interspersed with the occasional massage, taking in the sunrises, walking on the beach, and yoga classes. Don golfed most mornings while I occupied myself with the aforementioned lazing. I really never thought I’d enjoy a resort-style holiday, and I’m sure it is largely dependent on the actual resort, but I returned more refreshed and relaxed than I have been for a very long while.

As is the way with holidays, I had a bunch of revelations – of the usual sort:
1. We have so much *stuff*. Way too much stuff.
2. We need to take more time and just sit about.
3. We need to spend more time in nature.
4. We really do have way too much stuff.
5. I need more massages in my life.
     I’d had one massage – ever – up to this point. I’m now a convert.
6. I need to stop shopping as hobby.
7. We need more resort-type holidays.
8. Maybe more frequent, shorter holidays are better than one longer trip.

Also refreshing and relaxing was the morning of my birthday, earlier this week. I’d only been back for 3 days, but took an annual leave day from SML and finally redeemed the spa voucher gifted to me by the kiddies for my 50th before it expired. The massage was not quite as good as those in Thailand, but the facial was much superior. While being pummeled, I toyed with the idea of getting a massage each month. After seeing my face, I also toyed with the idea of regular facials too.

I’m sure pretty much every person on earth has said this, but December already! This year has really flown by and I’m going to make best efforts to go a bit slower in the next.

It remains to be seen how this is achieved.

Our high thread count (and thus, not inexpensive) fitted sheets are not really seeming to last any sort of distance, so we now find ourselves with a disproportionate number of flat sheets.

I’m a huge fan of crisp sheets with a low thread count, so thought I’d give ikea a bash for something lower-cost in an attempt to redress the sheet balance and see how they travelled.

Once in the store (the humanity!) I was delighted to discover the piderviva range of linen sheets. I’d not experienced actual linen as bed-linen before, but had long been reading of the benefits – cool, hard-wearing, crisp – and these were comparatively affordable to prices I’d seen elsewhere. So I snapped one up.

After a quick launder and air-dry it was onto the bed with them …

While it rumples in a satisfying way, YIKES! It’s akin to sleeping on sandpaper! Each time I move I feel like layers are being removed from my skin.

And the sheet collects all sorts of weird fluff (which you can probably just make out in the pix).

Additionally, I’ve been having a lot of weird and vivid dreams this week – coincidence?

Perhaps it needs a few more washings and beating against rocks before we’ll give it another go – else it will be consigned to the fabric stash or the charity pile.

I did acquire a cotton sheet at the same time – here’s hoping for more success with that one.

And perhaps the lesson is to aim a little higher

The garden (okay, the collection of pots) on the lower balcony was looking pretty dire after winter – so there was a Reckoning.

I bought a couple of bags of soil, mixed it with the compost (okay, stinky sloppy mud-like stuff) from the faux compost bin and some sugar cane mulch and repotted everything. Some of the soil in the existing pots was like fine grey dust, with no organic matter at all remaining. Little wonder barely anything was thriving.

And we’re seeing results – we now have a small plague of tomatoes:

in the curry plant

in the chilli

in the baby maple tree

in the ginseng ficus

Well, we did have a plague, but if left to grow these will only serve as caterpillar food, so unlike prior years, they’ve been removed and returned back to the compost garbage bin / worm farm.

Circle of life.

My baby graduated!

She completed her last subject at the beginning of the year, has a job in her hard-to-break-into field and has an emerging tiny business.

Go Bessie! We’re all very proud.

And as of this week she’s moved in with us permanently – rather than move back and forth between here and her Dad’s – until she moves in with Hansel mid-next year.

I will miss those crazy design assessment tasks! I’m sure she won’t!

I’ve had an account for over 14 years (!), but now I rarely use gmail for anything other than mailing list and shopping type stuff.

So when responding to DishyExBoss about our not-boozy lunch it was the first time in a couple of years that I’d used gmail to actually write anything.

I was surprised at some of the changes – particularly the Smart Compose. I was typing away and I suddenly found it was trying to complete my sentences for me. Wait, what?

I was trying to type “But it will always be thus, so I’m prioritising lunch” only to have it replaced by “But it will all work out”. Exactly not what I had intended and completely lost my train of thought for a while there.

Yeah, no google, I’m really fine composing my email without your assistance. And I probably need to action #27 on the 60before60 list – kill my gmail account(s).

This go-round in amongst the books I had completed, I returned 3 books I’d already renewed twice, had not read and clearly wasn’t intending to read.

I’m now in this weird space where I have now two stacks of books with different due dates. Perhaps I’m being a trifle ambitious with my analogue reading?

1. Theory of death: Faye Kellerman
2. Mischief: Fay Weldon
3. Before the war: Fay Weldon
4. 419: Will Ferguson
5. Best Australian essays 2017
6. Women of letters – reviving the lost art of correspondence: curated by Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire

I’m intending to take a small stack of books with me on holiday. I’ve always existed solely on kindle offerings on previous vacations, so this should be an interesting (and rather heavy) experiment.

We’ve been having some laundry issues recently where tee-shirts have been leaving the washing machine with greasy stains that didn’t exist before they went in. The google machine tells me this is likely because of my fabric softener**.

Serendipitously this laundry post appeared on the organized home yesterday – so I was full of interest.

While I’m not going to rush out for a 500ml US$45 laundry detergent (!) from net-a-porter, I did end up going down quite the natural cleaning products rabbit hole and ended up at murchison hume: boy’s bathroom cleaner.

Who knew that such gendered cleaning products existed!?

The instructions are … ermmm … quite something.

Text in case the screenshot doesn’t appear:
After robust bathroom activity, spritz a little down the bowl & into the air after flushing. Extra points if you spray & wipe the seat, and don’t forget to put the lid down. There’s a good chap.

Robust bathroom activity?!

This is what we’re calling pooping now?

xxx

** This weekend I’ve tried rinsing with white vinegar in place of fabric softener – seems to be working a treat (and surprisingly the clothes don’t smell like vinegar).