Yesterday I joined up for three months the gym that I have been trialling for the last week. They had a Christmas special where you could buy a membership that works out per month to be less than I was spending at my other gym (which is still on hold, for now) and it is close enough that I can bike there. It’s a great bike ride too as most of it is through the racecourse in my suburb.

The concept of training there is short, supervised workouts where you push your muscles to failure. They are hard! The good thing is you are in and out in about 30 minutes though and in all honestly I couldn’t work out at that intensity for 50 minutes anyway. The supervised training is great too, they have been upping my weights on me and I hadn’t noticed at all until the sales person who signed me up encouraged me and told me how well I was doing.

And here I was thinking I am a weakling every session as the weights always felt too hard.

The circuit of machines I’m using at the moment are almost totally different to any I’ve used before, your feet dangle off the seat for starters which is strange and there are seatbelts to keep you safe on some of them. I sort of like that, I know myself too well. It is possible for me to fall of stationary chairs, I have done it before.

The other thing, well other than the wonderful hot showers and salon quality shampoo, is that I noticed everyone is in really good shape that works out there. I don’t think it is an overly fancy, gym bunny type gym and I am working out during the day when there are retired people etc in there a lot. But all the members have really good muscle tone and look in good shape. I think that is definite proof it works, as is that every woman I get in conversation with in the changing room says that it’s the best gym ever and one girl yesterday told me that she has gone from a (NZ) size fourteen to a ten in 13 months, without changing her eating habits!

Right now I’m lying in bed and feeling sore all over, but it is a satisfying feeling!

Can you believe that November flew by as fast as it did and Christmas is only a month away? What is it with the year accelerating by as it approaches its end? I’m in full Christmas mode this week as I tackle my Christmas cooking and try to get most of it done before next month and the inevitable heat. The humidity already started this week and the last thing I enjoy is cooking in a hot kitchen when it’s humid.

Yesterday I made a batch of Apple and Cranberry chutney, which is a Nigella Lawson recipe and it seemed to turn out pretty good. I am going to get a batch of Beetroot and Ginger chutney done today too. My idea for gifts is to make these now as then they’ll be perfect for eating at Christmas time and don’t require any last-minute effort on my behalf. I plan to stamp some labels for them and decorate them up a little as well as my jars definitely don’t match (recycling is good remember).

I also had a trial at making peanut brittle and I think it turned out ok, I totally burned the first batch as I followed the instructions in Nigella’s book and that meant the toffee completely charred. It was pretty gross! The second batch was more chewy that crunchy in the end, but it tasted a bit like butterscotch so I think it worked.

Finally, I have also cracked a gluten free/dairy free pastry recipe after about a year of trying! I made mince tarts for a gathering last night and everyone gave great feedback so I can now safely serve them to people over the holiday period. My pineapple and brandy fruit mince is safely in a jar in the fridge and will last until Christmas so I can whip tarts up quickly if needed. It’s a really good recipe for fruit mince and I think it’s the same once as I used last year – I always seem to make something good for Christmas and then forget the recipe that I used!

There are a few ideas for crafting projects to do next month bubbling around in my brain as well, some using Stampin’ Up! supplies, so I will keep you posted as I complete them. In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m not really planning on buying gifts this year. I think it is actually so much more fun to make them!

I went to the Girls Day Out expo yesterday and met a lovely girl who did my hair with the GHDs and created this….

Isn’t it cool? I just wish I could figure out if I can recreate it at home.

I also had my make up done there as well, but I’m not sure I loved it, Cover Girl foundation smells sort of funny. I also heard about a great cosmetic brand called Bridget Black and met the founder herself – I’m keen to try it out and am looking forward to trying the samples they are going to send me. Her products are well formulated and much more economical than a lot of brands.

Right, I’m going to go look at my loot bag from yesterday.

This is more of a tip on what not to do… I got a lovely letter in the mail last week from a nice Senior Manager at my low interest credit card company.

They are very kind and have pre-approved me for a credit limit increase of $1000. Yes, because what I need right now is more debt.

Seriously, it seems like no one has learnt anything at all from the last couple of years and they are still handing out way too much debt to people who can’t really afford it. The silly thing about it is that they don’t know that my income has just dropped so significantly and I definitely do NOT need to have a credit card with a higher limit when I am trying to pay off the ones I have already.

Sheesh.

Are you proud of me that I’m going to completely ignore that letter?

In my quest to figure out which gym to join, I’m doing a trial at a gym near here and I did my first workout today. It is a pretty small gym, with only cardio equipment and weights but it is nice and the changing rooms have perfume, hair straightners and salon quality shampoo in them.

Their point of difference is that they offer supervised training and they have a system where you do a circuit and work out pretty intensely for about 25 minutes 2 or 3 times a week. The concept of working out til failure is a pretty big shock to the system I can assure you, I’m not sure I’m going to be loving the trainer tomorrow morning when I wake up.

Price wise, it’s ok as they have a special for 2 or 3 months for Christmas (I think to get people in the gym when a lot of their members are away in December and January) and that works out cheaper per month than any other option I know of. But I’m not sure if I would miss the opportunity for classes, or TV on cardio equipment. I’m tempted to do the 3 month membership and then decide as it might be the jolt I need.

Anyone else had experience of this sort of training and what did you think?

I just got back from my friend’s wedding in Hamilton, it was a lovely day, the bride was absolutely stunning, the church service beautiful, the food amazing and the venue gorgeous. It was really worth going down and made even better that my friend dropped me of and picked me up from the reception so I could have a few wines as well!

This was inside the Cathedral – I was one of the first people there and I arrived only 15 minutes early, which in my opinion is probably even a bit late for getting to a wedding. NZ weddings are notorious for the bride arriving late and the guests do too, but I think it must be more common outside of the bigger cities as I hadn’t seen a wedding like this one for a while. I got the best car park though!

Here are the newly married couple – didn’t the bride look amazing! She’d been dieting and working out for over a year and it really paid off.

A group of us girls outside the church, I’m having a snooze in this shot…

The reception decorations – I had to take a photo of them.

The cake was very simple, but it actually tasted amazing according to everyone, which is rare with wedding cakes.

And finally, Megan and I giggling together later in the night.

It really was a lovely day, and as I have been friends with the groom for a while now, it was also great to see that he married such a wonderful girl, whom I’m also friends with. He was the last of his circle of guy friends to get married and went through a hard patch, but, I had the thought last night that he actually married someone top shelf and so much better for him because he waited. I’m so happy for both of them.

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!

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!

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.

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.