I deactivated my facebook account and survived...

... and I feel so free!

It's not that I didn't love facebook, but I could get sidetracked for hours. It was great for keeping in touch/catching up with/getting to know faraway family and friends. But it really could suck away the hours.

Read the rest here.

Oops, I failed at NaBloPoMo ... or did I?

The thing is, there just aren't enough hours in the day. And I don't really want to be coming on here waffling about how I am missing days and failing at NaBloPoMo just for the sake of it. So I've stayed away.

I work online and I have decided I need to get back to all the things I used to do away from the computer. I used to write in books and draw little pictures and find a lot of pleasure in that.

I used to make little things for people, and present them with pride, knowing that the pleasure had been all mine during the creation process.

But now I type on my computer.

I try and have Sundays off where no computer in the house gets switched on.  Read the rest here.

Oops, I missed a day

Well it just goes to show I'm not perfect. Not that I ever pretended I was.

But that's a good thing - click here to find out why.

Thumb twiddling here in New Zealand

Bret and Jemaine, from Flight of the Conchords

It's been kind of fun doing this NaBloPoMo for the last 9 days, but writing something every day is a big ask. Notice I didn't even say writing something interesting everyday is a big ask.

I'm sort of thumb twiddling a bit.

I mean, I personally think my life is fascinating, but I don't think some would find it so. I can remember a few years back being on a forum chatting with someone, and a complete stranger butted in and said that New Zealand was boring. I know, what a cheek! The height of rudeness!

Read more about my outrage here.

A family fight

My daughter has Maori ancestors on her father's side and we like to visit a spot called Onawe in Banks Peninsula where many years ago there was some fighting between two tribes, both of which my daughter descends from.


View Larger Map We'd stayed in a friend's bach there once and read about one particularly violent incident by the inhabitants of the spot we visited which was so nasty that I won't repeat it here - after I read it I could not get the particularly gruesome images from my mind. Click here to read the rest of this post.

Is it safe to eat nasturtium sprouts? (And other pressing questions about life)

I am a wonderer, which means that I often ask random questions. I've always done this, and while it may have been a real pain when I was a kid, (and I know it annoyed the heck out of my parents and other adults at times), life has taken a turn for the better for me, because now we have google.

So any pressing question I have is bound to have one or many answers out there, not always the truth, but what is truth anyway?

Click here to read more.

What would you do if you thought your world was about to end?

Recently here in Christchurch, as many people are aware, we had a 7.1 earthquake, which was similar in many ways to the quake in Haiti, except that ours was a 4.35am and as a result not many people were out and about and our buildings were prepared for quakes, so we had no fatalities and only two people admitted to hospital with injuries. However, at the time, at my home, my daughter and I wondered whether or not our world was ending. The shaking was very strong, and the quake lasted 45 seconds but felt a lot longer. Also after the quake, we had lots of strong aftershocks. (We are still getting aftershocks, but they are not as strong now.)

Click here to read more.

Small talk and the weather

I can always talk about the weather. It seems to be a great, non-threatening ice-breaker the world over.

Click to read more.

ooh, so handsome

Every morning when I wake up and look over to the head of Hambley on the pillow next to me, it reminds me of how lucky I am to have such a handsome creature in my life. I am always sure to pay him lots of compliments, telling him over and over what a handsome boy he is. That this boy is a black pug does not make me any less happy.

Handsome is such an old fashioned word, I believe it was Monica Lewinsky's pet name for Bill Clinton, I can just imagine her saying "Hiya, Handsome!" Even women get called handsome, although I would not like to be called handsome myself.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
Handsome
c.1400, handsom "easy to handle, ready at hand," from hand (n.) + -some. Sense extended to "fair size, considerable" (1570s), then "having fine form, good-looking" (1580s). Meaning "generous" (in handsome reward, etc.) first recorded 1680s.

Life is about life

The beginning of my day by Me
(no more rhetorical questions)

Today is a great day! I am up and at 'em and the sun is out but no wind, which is just how I like it. I thought I would do a run down on how I start my day, now that it is spring.

Click here to read more.

How did I get here?

I know - another blog post with a rhetorical question. Getting boring yet?

I'm still wondering whether all this philosophy should be in such a public forum. I mean the thing is, I may be holding a public meeting that no one is presently attending, but that does not mean that people won't turn up in the future and find this, and put their spin on it and totally misrepresent what my naval-gazing intentions are.

BTW I especially like the above family photo because everyone can be read so easily (I'm the baby girl). I also like the retro christmas decorations in the window. Because that's how we did it back then.

What do I want?

The thing is, I don't actually know what I want, otherwise I'd be able to go after it, according to the positive thought philosophy of the present day. And I'm starting to wonder if committing to this thing where I write every day isn't just going to make me look like a real dork. Or more of a dork, or whatever. Not that that has ever stopped me doing anything in the past :)

And the other thing is, my work blog and my twitter accounts are all connected to this. So people I may not actually want to read this may find it, although that is highly unlikely, because no one reads it after all, so any people I am hoping see me in a professional light, or haters or stalkers or whatever are hardly likely to suddenly appear.

I guess the issue is, do I want to open myself up and splatter my life and insecurities all over the page and MAKE MYSELF VULNERABLE? Or am I over-reacting? I suddenly feel like Woody Allen.

Have I lost my mojo?

What is a mojo and have I lost mine? Is it a ridiculous idea to think that if I write about losing my mojo I might find it again? Like posting a Lost notice on a notice board at the mall, and hope that someone comes across it and phones me to let me know. How grateful I'd be. Or should I try and find, buy or make a new mojo? Where do you get them?

Sigh.

The thing is, it's the first of November and I've signed up for NaBloPoMo. Which is a bit scary because once I signed up for this thing called P52 where you were supposed to blog once a week 52 times a year. The whole thing flopped. I thought it would be a fun networking thing with other bloggers, and the guy that set it up said it was going to be really cool and we'd be able to follow all these other people's blogs and that, but he never did get around to publishing the list of bloggers, so we were all still out in limbo land, blogging on our own, for nothing, apart from them, of course - them being the clique of bloggers who all seem to know each other. When it flopped, I tried to make my own p52, but then I lost interest and stopped blogging for a bit. Not that I really mind, it's supposed to be my record just for me after all, that's why I started blogging way back when.

Then I started to give my gardening blog all this attention. That was around the time I decided I was sick of making arty freebies which only scrapbookers took, and never even bothered to say thanks mostly. I felt like I was forcing junk on people they didn't want, which is not nice. And if people hardly ever express appreciation, you realise that half the time you are just being wasteful and sort of bossy too, imposing your stuff and opinions of what they should have. Actually, most of the time. I've got some kind of a disorder where everything has to be in order because otherwise I get all confused (not that I'm a neat freak or anything), and manners and civility are important to me because they're, well, orderly, and part of the structure of life. I always make sure I do things in the way that I think is right - if I want someone to do something for me, I know it is going out of their way, so I say please; if someone does something nice to me, I realise they are kind and say thank you; if I do something mean to someone, even a little bit mean, I realise I could hurt them, and try and make up for that by being sorry and apologising. Gosh, that almost seems old-fashioned.

Anyway, so I've signed up for nablopomo. Luckily for me, the theme for November is that there is no theme for November. I just have to post daily! I know, what was I thinking. I will just plod along (my daughter hates it when I use that phrase) waffling on.

Maybe I'll talk about art, or what I am doing for work, or what I am eating, or thinking about, or making. And during that process, if I stick it out (and I'm not making promises), then maybe I'll figure out what my mojo really is.

So I'm 45 years old - is this a kind of mid-life crisis?