Halfway

We’re now more than halfway through 2011.  No idea how that happened.

I thought it might be a good time to revisit my plans/goals for 2011.  In January I decided my word for the year was SIMPLIFY.  I wrote about it here.  I also mentioned a ‘20 things’ list I’d made for that.  Now, for my benefit more than anything (sorry to bore you, feel free to click away), I’m going to revisit that list and see how it’s going (I’m not doing all 20 today).

1. Reduce working hours. I have reduced by one day a fortnight. This isn’t enough and I am discussing it further with my manager when he returns from overseas at the end of August. My goal is to work 3 days a week.

2. Declutter – own less.  Working very gradually on this, have decluttered the wardrobe, some kitchen cupboards and a chest of drawers – this item needs more work. A lot more work.

3.  Reduce online presence.  I’m now only a member of one forum group however I have added Google+ to my social networking.  I do use Hootsuite now which keeps it all together but G+ isn’t on there yet.

4. Meal plan, bulk shop and bulk cook. Ummm….no.

5. Create a household folder – contacts, buzz lists, account numbers and insurance details etc. Nope.

6. Unsubscribe from newsletters, websites etc. Yes! Yes I have done this for all but a couple of favourites. Go me.

7. Combine online stuff – Google reader, email, photos, music etc – one log in would be nice. I changed my personal email to Gmail and do a lot in Google now which is good.  I haven’t moved photos from Flickr to Picasa or anything.  This is a work in progress because I’m not actually enjoying Gmail very much so it could all change.

8.  Bundle phones, internet, mobiles etc. Some of it is and some of it isn’t, I can’t decide if I really want all my eggs in one basket despite the apparent savings you make by doing so.

9.  Stop buying stationery I don’t need. *Whistles and wanders away to look at fascinating mark on the wall….*

10.  Set up automatic payments for ALL bills.  Nearly there with this one, still a couple to organise.

Ok, that’ll do. I’ll give myself 6/10 for this effort and to be fair to myself I think that if I can achieve number 1 then a lot of the others will become more achievable.

Melbourne Belated

I mentioned here and probably somewhere else on my wide interweb presence that the girls and I were going to Melbourne in the first week of the school holidays to hang out with my youngest sister (Fiona – known as Fi or Feebs) and her family.
I’m finally getting round to writing a brief, mostly pictorial, post about the trip.
There was some of this….

…and a little of this.

We took the female children to Build-a-Bear for some of this…

…yes, I know…it’s a dragon not a bear, his name is Norbert.
This one is a bear though…although you can’t tell yet because it’s still unstuffed.

Then we belatedly celebrated Hannah’s birthday…

We also went and saw this…

…well actually we saw the whole exhibition not just the banners but there was a ‘no photography’ rule in there so the best I could do was the banners.
And on the final day I took the four older children to see Harry Potter 3D at the IMAX theatre.  It was the highlight for Aislin (here in Quidditch robes).

All in all a busy, but extremely satisfying and enjoyable, week.

The most honest post I’ve ever written

…possibly the longest too.

For those of you that know me you’ll be aware that aside from my ‘day job’ I run a business.  I teach meditation and run personal and spiritual development workshops for women and do a little bit of business coaching.   For a while I’ve been thinking I need to get more serious about my own business so I’ve been working on a website and blog and creating a Facebook page and generally immersing myself in getting the whole thing online (cos I love me some online).

It has totally sucked. I’ve hated every minute of it (well maybe not the messing with code, I like the nerdy stuff). The rest though? Despised it.  I started and stopped and wrote stuff then scrapped it and wrung my hands and gnashed my teeth and cried tears of blood over the whole damn thing.

I just couldn’t do it in a way that pleased me.  At first I thought I was just being a perfectionist (something I’ve been accused of before) but I really didn’t believe that (on this occasion at least).  It was just all hateful to me, I was unhappy with the content, the images, the general feel and most of all the vision I had. I looked at other online stuff and found myself wanting (comparison is never a good thing).  I couldn’t work out what was wrong.

Then I remembered this...

This is Aislin shopping a few weeks ago, in full Hogwarts regalia including her wand.  When she got out of the car dressed like this I tentatively asked her if she was sure she wanted to wear her robes to shop.  She looked at me as if I was mad and said ‘yes, of course I do!’. And so off we went, muggles people stared, she didn’t give a hoot. Because right now, that’s just who she is.  So wise at 8 years old.

This afternoon, while wallowing in internet misery, I had an epiphany. The reason this work on the business is making me so unhappy and uncomfortable is that it’s not ME.  I have spent so long learning how to do this and looking at how others do it that somewhere along the way I lost sight of me.  This is the same me that conducts a perfectly successful business offline…but I was unconsciously trying to be someone different online.  Where along the way did I become so confused about my identity? At what juncture did I start to believe that the real me wasn’t good enough to grow my business further or that I had to be different to appeal online? I dunno.

I also realised that over the years, the most ‘me’ I’ve been online is right here on this blog. The one I don’t tell people about…HELLO!! I’m here!!  Posts have been erratic for a while now…but it’s still here and it’s still mine and it’s still home.

Ironically one of my business messages is about authenticity and here I was not taking my own advice…but let’s just skim over that for now *blush*. 

So here it is, the truth of me (at least some of it). Who I am and who I’m not…

• I’m deeply spiritual, but I’m not about angels and unicorns.  I think both are cool, but they’re not my thing. You go ahead though.
• I’m a bit of a hippy, but I don’t do tie dye…I’m lovin’ it on you tie dye gals…but it ain’t me – my hippy-ness is more internal. Internal tie dye if you will.
• I meditate but I’m not a zealot, at the same time as I’m teaching you how to do it and singing its praises my own practice falters. This is my truth with meditation.
• I sometimes swear – yes, even ‘fuck’. You don’t like it? Thanks for stopping by anyway. Ciao.
• I read a lot of spiritual and self help books.  I rarely put any of it into practice. I like them though.
• Except Eckhart Tolle…sorry Oprah …that dude sends me to sleep.
• My humour can be both sarcastic and ironic. I’m not sorry about that.
• I don’t give a crap about RSS and SEO and Google analytics or any of that. I care about people.
• I’m not a perfect mother. I  love my children with every breath in my body but I get impatient and frustrated by them.  Sometimes I let them watch more TV than is appropriate because when I’m busy it makes my life easier. They have eaten baked beans for dinner more than once when I've been trying to work. I’m so tempted now to back this up with positive things I do for my children so you won’t hate me…but I’m not going to.
• I worry people will hate me…or judge me…or criticise me.  See above. 
• I’m not a perfect wife. But I’d take a bullet for him and fully intend on seeing out my days in his precious company.
• I sometimes read and watch horror and sci fi (quite a lot in fact). I love Jane Austen and Shakespeare…but at times I have the literary taste of a 14 year old boy.  Judge away if that’s what you like to do. 
• I have my own brand of spirituality…it’s a kind of Buddhist/Pagan/Celtic/Catholic thing and despite everything you’ve seen here I really am a compassionate person. 
• I want happiness.  I want you to have it too.

You may be seeing some more businessy type stuff from me from time to time. It will be real.  It will be the authentic me.  It will make no apology for the fact I’m a flawed human and it will not try to portray me as some kind of blended personification of the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Ghandi. There will be no rainbows, unicorns or angels (I may occasionally mention dragons).  It will be me in all my glorious, disrespectful, irreverent, imperfection.

If you don’t like it you don’t have to read it, I won’t be offended.

Congratulations if you made it to the end of this post.

My blog is broken

Notice anything missing?

Dammit.

The July update…

…because I’m not going to be any more optimistic than that.

The mid year term holidays are upon us, I’ve taken some time off and we are heading to Melbourne on Sunday to spend a week with my sister and her family. We have some rather exciting plans for Melbourne but I hope to blog about them so I won’t spoil the surprises by blabbing here today.

I’m recovering slowly from my shoulder injury, I have some more movement and a bit less pain.  I call that progress.

Work continues to be just that…work. That’s all on that topic, after all, I’m on holiday.

My girls are still gorgeous. Hannah continues to amaze me with her creativeness and intense commitment to anything she does.  Aislin just amazes me. Her Harry Potter obsession is not lessening, in fact here we are on a shopping trip.

As you can see she is in full Hogwarts regalia (and yes, she has a wand)…my little Gryffindor. She’s eccentric, but I like that…it just confirms that she is mine. Fortunately she has a best friend who is equally HP obsessed so she has someone with whom she can share her freakiness.

I have to say, as I sit with here my morning coffee, posting to my blog I am filled with a sense of nostalgia for the days that this was a more regular occurrence.  I miss those days.