in the moment

Today was our wedding anniversary, and we agreed that we could celebrate by having a picnic on the South Perth foreshore.

Being Saturday, we did the usual Saturday things first. H went out early for a bike ride with his group out of Garlands, and I woke up slowly listening to the radio. Then it was making the weekly menu and shopping lists, and off together to the farmer’s market and supermarket.

The weather was humid, so cooking earlier in the day to prepare for our picnic was not much fun. But we had a shower to freshen up, then cycled down to the river to look for a gazebo to sit under for the light.

The foreshore is very ugly at the moment with temporary fencing erected for the Australia Day activities. Just about everywhere you look, there is a fence that made me feel I was in a cage. I decided to sit in the gazebo facing H.

It was very pleasant eating our picnic of chicken sausages poached in champagne with apple and cinnamon sauce, potato fritters, and rocket. I couldn’t fit in our prepared sweets of Morrocan figs, pears and red wine and yoghurt. We drank the rest of the champagne that didn’t poach the chicken sausages, and a very nice bottle of my favourite champagne – Veuve Clicquot, UC’s present to H for his birthday.

What added to the atmosphere was other people that were making use of the BBQ’s and gazeboes. There were many sounds of enjoyment and laughter.

healthy comparisons

I was fortunate to be able to participate in the CSIRO Online Diet Study and have access to many of the resources available from the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet (TWD). I say fortunate, because after the completion of the study, participants including myself now have continued access to these resources until June 2011.

I chose to participate as I was already a waning member of SparkPeople. I wondered if the CSIRO Online Diet Study would compare favourably with SparkPeople with the extra benefit of including more local (as in Australian) content.

Although the CSIRO Online Diet Study had the usual hiccups of a new website and the user experience is rather awkward, I do prefer the unadorned simple tools. SparkPeople is a very rich or complicated web site, with many tools and resources that sometimes become overwhelming.

I’m sure the study will show that participation online achieves better results in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. But how much, how little, or what, I think will be difficult to interpret. It appears, that if you participate, you continue to progress. Whether this is eating healthily, exercising regularly, or writing a blog post.

Participation and interacting with others that share similar goals I think is one part of the answer, and being able to do it online too is an added bonus.

does everything happen for a reason?

Scott from The Daily Post has asked Does everything happen for a reason?.

My answer, is “no”.

And, I’m not going to give a reason

Except, it is easy to say ‘no’, in response to ‘everything’.

In addition, when people use the expression, “everything happens for a reason”, usually in response to hearing about a disappointment, I get annoyed.

virtual decluttering

This week I decluttered my desk of the computer that was running Windows. It had had a good innings, as it has been useful for over ten years. I had started to use it less and less as we now run the couple applications that need the Windows operating system in VirtualBox on H’s Linux computer. Also, the battery was a little tired so it took a few presses of the on switch to get it up and running.

There was no sadness moving on this beige box, unlike decommissioning my SPARCstation 2. I shed tears over that. So much so, that I have not been able to finish this blog post until now.

H went to a lot of trouble to choose a new box  that had a super quiet power supply and fan. And I must admit, there was no comparison between my new Linux computer and the SPARCstation. The SPARCstation sounded like a plane taking off in comparison. But I do miss my WYSIWYG FrameMaker application. So far, the combination of the SPARCstation, SPARCprinter and FrameMaker is the only setup that has been truly WYSIWYG.

The SPARCstation and peripherals joined the other stuff in the bin on Resource Recovery Day April 2008.

Ending on a positive note, decommissioning the Windows computer means that I have successfully decluttered another item for the The De-clutter ’52 Things in 52 weeks’ Challenge organised by The Organised Housewife.

playing games

On Facebook, I was invited to play games, but began to find them very tedious as crops, animals, and fish would die, or neighbours would help by providing gifts that then needed to be recipricated within a certain time frame. I have cut back to one game on Facebook, that is, PetVille. So Facebook gaming friends, if I don’t appear to be responding, it’s because I have removed all the games from my account except for Petville.

I was introduced to Travian through Facebook, and I have been playing for just over 18 months, the first game I registered lasted the longest. This first game was on au4, and I overlapped this with aux, and I am currently in the end game of au3. I have played as a Gaul for all games, except for when ‘sitting’ other accounts.

What I enjoy most about Travian, is that you complement the game with other web sites, forums, IRC, and Skype. The conversations in and around the game are as much fun as the game itself.

Although you start off as an individual, it is difficult to continue to play well without teaming up with other players to sit your account and join an alliance.

I’m not sure if I will continue to play Travian as I am currently working fulltime wtih two parttime jobs, and hopefully in a couple of weeks time I will be working parttime and studying parttime. So patchy internet access and time needed to focus on new activities to do well.

back in the saddle

I haven’t rode my bike for a couple of weeks for various reasons; holidays and hot days being the main ones.

H has adjusted my saddle tonight and I have had a test ride. Hopefully, we have got it right now. I have been experiencing a sore neck and shoulders after riding my bike, enough to worry about it and nearly get to a physiotherapist. Except, that if I don’t ride my bike and do a few stretching exercises it comes right after about a week.

Tomorrow I will be riding to work, then meeting up with H and a friend at the Somerville for this week’s Festival Film – In a Better World, then riding home.

It is going to be cooler tomorrow, only 25 deg C, so the ride in the morning and evening will be pleasant temperature wise. We should zoom home as the winds are forcast to be a moderate South/South West.

posting every day

While looking through the last six years of diaries, I read lists and notes of topics that I wanted to write about – and never did. I kept transferring the notes into a list of topics with the heading ‘dilettante’ from one diary to the next. Well, I have decided the list stops here.

To help me along the way I have joined the The Post Every Day Challenge and I will be posting on this blog once a day for all of 2011.

I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

— The Daily Post at WordPress.com

I quite understand if you wish to unsubscribe from my feed if a post a day from me is too much of a change from once a year. But I hope you will stick around to read my blog and that you’ll “encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way”.

decluttering and letting go

I wouldn’t call myself a hoarder, but I definitely have ‘stuff’ that is not loved or used – too much in fact! Well, not according to some people I know, but it is a personal decision and I consider what I have is far more than I want.

I have been flying on and off since April 2008. Looking at all my stuff, you would probably say ‘off’. But while I know I may not have ‘put away’, ‘give away’, or ‘throw away’ as much as I would have liked, I know that I have not recently brought into my home anything, and resisted most strongly when other people want to give me their stuff.

This Christmas New Year period I had two weeks holiday and decided the main task that I wanted to do was to begin to declutter. Note, the word ‘begin’, because even I know that realistically I could not declutter over two weeks.

I started by gathering together the pile of diaries and calendars (1999, 2005-2010) and spent a week going through them all and noting in a personal journal and 2011 desk diary any achievements and experiences where I could improve. This not only decluttered the physical diaries, but decluttered my mind.

I plan to follow FlyLady’s How to Declutter, i.e. set a timer for 15 minutes and ‘put away’, ‘throw away’, or ‘give away’ during that time. Also, I picked up a copy of Corinne Grant’s Lessons in Letting Go before the holidays which gave me some perspective to the task that I was about to begin.

During decluttering I came across The Organised Housewife with a number of posts related to organising and decluttering. The “The De-clutter ’52 Things in 52 weeks’ Challenge” is appealing because the number 52 makes decluttering my home sound so easy. Fifty two weeks in a year, one declutter a week, I can do that!

2010 in review

I thought at the time that participating in Blog Action Day 2010 was a way of starting to again regularly write for my family and friends that I don’t often get to see. However, there was only that one new post to this blog last year.

Having just been through my diary, started my 2011 diary, and put up our 2011 calendar I thought I would reflect on 2010 and attempt to start afresh.

In January, our photovoltaic system was installed. As of today it will have been installed a year, and the novelty of looking at the meter spinning backwards has still not worn off.

In February, H and I went to Sydney with Mam, Richard and UC. This package was to take in the Edinburgh Military Tattoo – A Salute to Australia which was a very generous present from Mam and Richard. I also fitted in a cruise of Sydney Harbour, a job interview, and a visit to the Rupert Bunny exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.

February was also the Festival 10. Although we only went to eight events, we attended almost all of the festival films.

In March, I was able to persuade H to go to salsa dance classes at the Kings St Arts Centre and we continued right up until the end of August.

I bumped into April, literally. Fortunately, CT scans and time have shown that I have no lasting effects from running into the stairwell in the University Guild, except for giving the stairwell a wide berth when making my way to The Co-op Bookshop or Talking Heads hairdressers.

In May, Shelby had a stroke. She is still with us, but continues to have days when she walks in a curve or puts her head on the side giving us what we have come to recognise as ‘that look’.

In June, we started to go to QiYoga at the hall just down the street.

Started a master’s degree in July, but withdrew in August with the intention of starting again in semester one in 2011 instead.

At the end of August, H set out with the Flying Cyclist as a crew member to support the record attempt to cycle from Perth to Sydney in under eight days.

In November, Midnight was put to sleep as attempts to treat a severe UTI were unsuccessful and she stopped eating and drinking.

Throughout the year I continued to make weekly menu plans and took my shopping list to the Manning Farmer’s Market.

I’m not one for New Year resolutions, but 2011 is ringing in some changes so I feel that I will need to set some goals. Plans so as to focus on what I want to do and not overscheduling to allow for what does actually happen (when you don’t plan at all).

pelican

We have pelicans in South Perth, but I went all the way to Monkey Mia, Western Autralia to take a picture of this one.

I was supposed to notice the dolphins, but I didn’t feel part of the ‘Dolphin Interaction Area’ that morning and sat off to the side on the beach.

Like the dolphins, the pelicans keep to the schedule such that the DEC have to have a pelican decoy. It was quite humorous seeing the patient birds line up in a very orderly fashion for the bucket handler. Actually, they were much more polite than the line up for our own breakfast at the Boughshed Resturant after the dolphin feeding finished.

Suprisingly, people left the ‘Dolphin Interaction Area’ as soon as the DEC people finished their formalities. The dolphins were much more visible without the line of people on the shore.