Just back from the hairdressers

Can you believe a student did this? I’m going to follow her I think to the salon she has a job at when she finishes.

Trying to show that I sort of have a fringe again!

Friday Randomness

This has been a productive week and I can’t quite believe it is Friday already. And it is November. And Christmas is seven weeks away. Sigh. This must be what getting older means – time accelerates.

I have been running the last couple of mornings and have been really enjoying it. Wow. That is almost a miracle in itself. I took a longer route yesterday and had to run further just to get home and I did fine! Now I just need to get some money to register for the Women’s Triathlons that are on this summer, I want to set some goals.

One of the reasons I am running is that I don’t have a gym membership currently, my gym have suspended my payments and I am looking around to see if there are better options. I just found out yesterday how much J in Florida pays for his membership and it is less than half the cost of my membership here. Now I know we’re not talking apples and oranges when you compare costs from country to country, but the $35 a month he pays seems pretty cheap to me. There is a gym near here that also has a pool that I could use over the summer and while the workout equipment isn’t that great or fancy, if I’m going to do a triathlon I’ll probably make back the money I’d spend on the membership just by using the pool alone. When did anyone think it is acceptable to charge $5.20 for one pool entry I want to know?

On the fitness theme, I have lost almost 8 kgs in the last two months. I fit the dress I wanted to wear to the wedding, which means my boobs have shrunk. Oh well, you can’t have it all. I need to get a wee bit stricter again, but I think I’ve managed to strike a good balance between exercise, eating and lifestyle. I want to get down to 75kgs by the end of the year and I’m only 4 kgs off that now so I think I can do it.

I am off out-of-town to the wedding tomorrow and I’m now starting to look forward to it. My fatigue was quite bad earlier in the week so I had a wee bit of a panic on Wednesday night about what to do about going, but I think I’m up for it now. I’m going to be staying with a guy friend (the crazy one who did the marathon with no training) and his grandma and I’m actually looking forward to it. Even more so because he’s offered to pick me up from the wedding, so I can have some wine there. Being single, I never get to drink at weddings so this is a huge treat! I also decided half of my anxiety was about staying with people who I don’t particularly want to spend too much time with, which was interesting, because as soon as I teed up this accommodation I felt excited to go. The wedding is in a smallish city I lived in ten years ago, so the friends there and I don’t have a lot in common anymore I guess, but I hadn’t realised quite how much I was effected by them. All this is new since my accident, I think I must feel more vulnerable and I just want to be around good people.

Stampin Up! is going well so far, I had a panic (all tied up with the wedding freak out) about ideas for the first couple of demos as I don’t have many of the embellishments that a lot of the ideas I saw online used. But I figured out a couple of designs, one thanks to an angel of a demonstrator who emailed me an easy card design of hers, and I spent yesterday morning cutting and prepping. I can’t cut for crap, but hopefully no one will mind! I’m going to do two simple Christmas card designs for my first demo at my mum’s house and then I’m going to host one at my place the following night with some of my friends here. Mum has nine excited women so that will be challenging, but I’m going to keep my one fairly small so I don’t completely overwhelm myself.

Yesterday, I went to the mall like a good greenie to get my printer cartridge refilled (a whole other story) and ran into the lady who used to do my Origins facials when that brand was still sold in NZ (sniff, sniff, still in mourning) and she offered to do a facial for me using the new products she works with. My skin is currently looking really strange – I had some massive pimples break out last week and the rest of my skin is pretty dehydrated and not great looking – so I jumped at the chance to get this sorted out. Unfortunately though, the range she used has a lot of active ingredients or something because the cleanser stung a little bit, the scrub I think was too harsh and then it felt like razor blades when she stuck the mask on. I looked like a beetroot on my forehead and cheeks after that! She did her best to calm it down and then offered to cover up with foundation, so I chose to try Smashbox and it did a brilliant job. Kudos to Smashbox foundations! Hopefully I will be looking normal at the wedding tomorrow, nothing worse than being single, 32 and beetroot coloured at a wedding.

And to printers…. for the last two days I think I have been living and breathing printers in an effort to get my demonstrator manual printed off. I drove all the way to a mall further away to get the cartridges refilled, only to find out they don’t do that for my one. I went to another mall, The Warehouse didn’t stock my number cartridge, I walked to another store, finally they had it. But it was $34.95! What a rip!

This was after I’d spent most of Wednesday at my neighbours trying to get my old HP, brand new cartridges to work in their printer so as to make the most of ink. Fail.

Then last night I spent what felt like half the night trying to print my document, drama, drama, drama. I finally got it to work this morning and have it printed out, grayscale and two sheets to a page to be more environmentally friendly. Phew!

I think in the future it might be less hassle to drive to a copy centre and get them to print for me.

That’s me for this week I think, need to go do some work and make myself look good for the wedding tomorrow – fake tan and weed whacking with a razor!

My new hobby/business

In the weekend I also attended a full day of stamping Christmas projects and we made some really lovely things that I thought I would share:

We made this box, which opens out….

And you put photos on each of the squares – isn’t it cool? I love the effect of the stamp in the middle which I coloured in with markers before stamping to get the different colours.

I then made this little box – you can put a small gift inside.

We also made these little boxes for putting a chocolate bar inside.

We also embossed candles – I love this technique!

And we made some quick cards like this one.

All in all a fun day and I’m so pleased to have some new techniques and great projects to show off.

Achieving a long held ambition and a hen’s night

Yesterday I got to achieve one of my long held dreams – I got to model a toilet paper wedding dress at my friends hen’s party. For the uninitiated, a hen’s night is the equivalent of a bachelorette party, it’s just not as cool sounding. But that’s what we call it. The guy version is a Stag night, doesn’t that sound more fun?

Anyway, so we had the wonderful toilet paper wedding dress design competition and I got to be the model for it. Our design inspiration was big, puffy, 80s style dresses:

I think maybe I look like I’m enjoying being in a wedding dress too much here.

The lovely back view.

I was also a bit naughty and gave the bride a few useful things for her honeymoon, like cranberry juice and some other things that might help them with their goal of only having two children (the groom follows replacement theory, it was in quiz she had to answer about him).

But there were also a few treats for the night as well…. as shown above. And someone baked some really special cookies that I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat.

For any guys who are reading this… the group also hit the town for dinner and dancing (I was too tired and poor to do this) so there was some actual fun in the day as well. Though actually making toilet paper wedding dresses is surprisingly enjoyable as well.

To fascinate or not to fascinate?

Ok, I was wondering aimlessly around the mall yesterday and I found that there were tons of fascinators and hats on sale, post Melboure Cup (somehow in NZ we seem to get the Melbourne Cup-esque stock as well). After seeing them in about three stores, I finally plucked up the courage to try one on, thinking it might be something I can wear to the wedding next week and also solve some of the hair do dramas (but maybe create whole new ones?).

So I need your help, what do you think of this? I am planning to wear a pattern dress that has black in it (if my boobies continue to shrink and I can get it done up)

Please ignore my almost make up less and rather sick looking face and imagine hair that is probably straight ironed.  I’m not sure – I have it on hold for a few days so I can think about it.

What do you think? Any tips from anyone who has worn one before?

PS. I’m wearing the Smashbox O lipgloss, it’s amazing as it adjusts to be the perfect shade of lipgloss for you – it’s on my wish list!

Frugal Friday

My tip for the week is to sign up as a mystery shopper, I have done this and I did my first assignment yesterday. I wouldn’t say you will get rich from it, but it is fun to inspect customer service and actually have a part in improving it. Though, I’m pretty sure I looked really, really obvious as I offered to drive to a store that ended up being quite a hike (and the traffic was horrendous yesterday) and then I couldn’t find the products I was mean to check while waiting for my prescription, so I was glancing in my handbag to see try to match them up with the list I had. Smooth moves.

I did get my prescription for free, all $3 of it and I got recommended some nose spray as well which will also be covered by the allowance and I get $10 for my efforts. If I’d chosen a better time of day when it wasn’t raining and actually remembered driving directions it would have been a far more fruitful exercise.

I would just like to announce….

that I weigh under 80kgs for the first time since… um… I think since I went to Florida in March 2008.

This is thanks to more exercise, eating less and better, cutting out sugar and most recently getting sick and losing my appetite.

If I can do another 5kgs by the end of the year I will be one happy girl. A happy girl who fits into the majority of her wardrobe.

Monday randomness

I’m lying in bed right now as I have succumbed to the fact that I have a head cold, if head colds also make you cough and I am feeling rather miserable. I actually have quite a lot to do this week, but I’m hoping a day in bed will help me achieve all that so much more efficiently as I’ll hopefully be feeling better after the rest.

I’m also still laughing about a friend who came to Auckland this weekend to run the marathon. He stopped in at my place on Saturday before he checked into his hotel and I asked polite questions about his training regime etc, all the while thinking “hasn’t he put weight on since I last saw him, never seen that before when someone is crazy and training for a marathon?”

Turns out, he had in fact not actually trained for the marathon. Unless you count signing up for it in April and booking a hotel room for a night so you can’t woos out as training. I don’t consider that preparation and I don’t think many would. Oh I forgot, he had run on a treadmill for a bit at the gym two weeks earlier. Cos treadmill running is just like running outside, everyone knows that.

I think, with the two runs I did last week, that I may have actually done more marathon training than him. And there is no way I would want to run 10kms, let alone 40!

Well, I’m impressed by my friend as what he lacks in preparation, organisation and a spirit of excellence, he makes up for with sheer confidence and determination! He did indeed finish the marathon in just over six hours (seriously, that sounds like six hours of hell to me) and though he wasn’t sure if he could actually get his legs to make it back to the hotel afterwards, he did make it to the finish line.

I’m not sure if there is a moral to this story, but all I can think is that if I entered an event like that I would want to make the most of the actual training period and reap the rewards of extra fitness, not just crawl over the finish line after six hours of hell.  Still, you gotta admire the dude – he must have been the only one still running by that time!

In other random news, I found out again last week how small NZ is when my flatmate was telling me about her ex-brother in law who was involved in a really famous fraud case – turns out I knew exactly who it was as he is my mother’s cousin! Or should I say second cousin, just to distance us from the scandal a bit more.

Oh and I was at the gym with a girl I went through primary school with last week, we met up for coffee and it was quite the blast from the past. Who needs Facebook to meet up with random school mates in this country! I hadn’t seen her since I was 13 as she went to boarding school in Auckland and for some reason we’d never crossed paths again, it was a little weird talking to her as things changed a lot at school after she and a few of the other kids went off to boarding school – for the better too. Though, it was amazingly lovely to meet someone else pursuing a career (she’s training to be a naturopath around the corner from where I live) and single with no children.

On Thursday, I finally went to ‘Julie and Julia’ last week (not sure why it took so long to open here, release dates are always a mystery to me) and thouroghly enjoyed it, even if I wished I’d taken some snacks in to the theatre – that film makes one rather hungry. Julia Child was an inspiring woman and I’m glad they found such a lovely way to tell a bit of her story.

I’m still waiting on my Stampin Up! kit to arrive so I can get started with my business properly – got people very keen and demos booked pretty much already though so I’m really hoping I can make some good money in November and the start of December to cover me til the end of January, when everyone is back from their holidays. I’m still loving that it’s a party plan type business that so far I’m getting a really enthusiastic response about, people are more than keen to come along and learn about it because it’s so fun.

Ok, I need to go rest my stuffed up head right now. Being sick makes me so grumpy.

Ways to avoid trick or treaters

Halloween has been and gone and I as a New Zealander I still sort of don’t like being part of a tradition that is firstly, not part of our heritage and to most of us adults seems like a way for kids to be incredibly greedy and overindulge in sweets and secondly, because of it’s roots in stuff that is not so great.

Many of us seem to have strategies for avoiding the marauding children and I thought I would share a few of the techniques. My dad had his neighbourhood kids coming around from about 4.30pm onwards so he stuck up some of that brightly coloured ‘danger’ tape that they use on building sites to keep people out of unsafe areas. He apparently strung it up across the entrance to his driveway and he also has a big German Shepherd to bark and scare them away.

My neighbours padlocked their front gate and also utilised the dog tactic – they have one who is a pretty persistent barker at anyone and anything  in the near vicinity and the pre-schoolers who tried to get in there were scared. Little did they know that the dogs are Bichons and tiny little puff balls that don’t do any damage.

My flatmate and I completely forgot it was Halloween, it just doesn’t really register on your radar when you didn’t do it as a kid yourself, and we had some little children come so we had to scramble for some chocolates to give them. I then raced down to the shops to buy lollipops and wait for the hordes of kids I was expecting.

Well, it turns out that was the best deterrent of all as NO one came after that.

While, I’m definitely not a fan of Halloween at all and see it is an imported tradition that has nothing to do with us here in NZ, I also saw that it is a way to get to know your neighbours. One of the little girls had her mum with her and I know she lives in the group of flats across the road from my place. I’m pretty sure her mum is a solo parent and I’ve often wanted an excuse to go say hi to her. In future I think I’ll approach the 31st of October with a different spirit and look at it as an excuse to get to know people who live around me.

Either that or borrow some ‘danger’ tape from my dad!

Frugal Friday

My tip for the week is to check out for discounts on movies and the like. In NZ Tuesday are cheap and it is $10 to go to a film, which is not much more than the price of renting a dvd and you get the fun of the movies. But this week I found out that a more art house type cinema – my favourite type – has a discount for beneficiaries (which is what I now am) as well as Students and you can get in for $8 Mon-Thurs! Yay. I’m off to Julie and Julia today – finally! Oh and my ticket is paid for as I’m taking my neighbour with the serious brain issues, so I think it’s sort of babysitting money.