Fire and Ice

The power of music is amazing, isn’t it? It can make me feel energized or relaxed; happy or quiet, proud or uncomfortable. I love music and definitely can’t live without it. I hadn’t actually realized just HOW powerful music can be until this weekend. I was in the gym, pounding on the treadmill and generally struggling. The past few marathon training sessions have been disappointing because I’ve got a cold and a really bad cough that I can’t shake. This means that I can’t train as hard as I’d like and I feel like I’m wasting time just having “easy” workouts. Very frustrating, and makes going to the gym feel like harder work than it should be. Anyway, there I was, about to start what I knew would be a tough session and put my Mp3 player on, headphones firmly in my ears. Unusually, I set it to play my Disney playlist (very valuable motivation in my case, preparing for the Disney marathon!) and off I went. I normally work out to a mixture of songs, from Pop to Barry Manilow going through ...

The power of music is amazing, isn’t it? It can make me feel energized or relaxed; happy or quiet, proud or uncomfortable. I love music and definitely can’t live without it. I hadn’t actually realized just HOW powerful music can be until this weekend. I was in the gym, pounding on the treadmill and generally struggling. The past few marathon training sessions have been disappointing because I’ve got a cold and a really bad cough that I can’t shake. This means that I can’t train as hard as I’d like and I feel like I’m wasting time just having “easy” workouts. Very frustrating, and makes going to the gym feel like harder work than it should be. Anyway, there I was, about to start what I knew would be a tough session and put my Mp3 player on, headphones firmly in my ears. Unusually, I set it to play my Disney playlist (very valuable motivation in my case, preparing for the Disney marathon!) and off I went. I normally work out to a mixture of songs, from Pop to Barry Manilow going through ...

After months of waiting, planning and research I finally bought a new home computer. Our old one (nearly 8 years old!) had served us sort of well but sometime in October last year it decided that it WAS NOT going to dial out to the internet. Yes, dial out, as in dial-up. Anyway, it developed cyber-agoraphobia and didn’t want anything to do with the outside world, no matter how much the cables, telephone and even modem coaxed it. No idea what is wrong and considering the thing is ancient, well it just had to go. After all, it only had 4.2 GB in the hard drive!! So we spent a few months doing the research, choosing features that would make our lives easier and finding a nice compromise between function and price. So we finally found it and then waited for the end of the financial year of the company we bought from, hoping for last minute discounts and offers. The upside to all this is that, somehow, I will be getting a PC with Vista on it. I must admit it wasn’t by choice, and thankfully...

We’ve all made them, right? We all wish to lose the weight, eat better, sort our finances, scrap all our backlog, give more generously, that sort of thing. Another resolution is the wish to be a better person – to eliminate all those nasty habits that don’t help us become the best we can be. I was thinking about this when I was reading one of the popular scrapping forums out there and it struck me how many women were proud of deceiving their husbands. Ladies up and down the land were shopping to their heart’s content and then lying about how much they spent, lying about the amount of stash they’d purchased or even hiding purchases from their husbands so that he doesn’t know. I’m sure that it isn’t just scrappers that do this but lots of women shop til they drop and then lie about it to their husband/partner/significant other. In some cases I know that they hold separate accounts so perhaps it really doesn’t matter as each has their own money... but I do know of cases where the woman do...

very year I make the same resolution and inevitably break it by about February (once I made it all the way to March!). I really do need to lose weight and it is really annoying me now. But how can I make sure that this time I go the distance and reach my goal? By doing something drastic, like aiming to run a marathon in early 2008. Yes, this is my novel way of sticking with it and keep focused on the task. In fact, you might have noticed that the goal isn’t directly to lose weight, but this should follow as a result of all the training I’ll have to do. So I can keep focused on the marathon training and the weight loss should follow. Why a marathon? Why not, say, a half marathon? Or something less exhausting? Well, to be honest it is because I am a huge Disney fan and I really want to run in next year’s Disney marathon. It is in Florida and the course takes runners through all four Disney parks, which is motivating all on its own. Also, Florida is pretty flat and the weather is not humi...

Now that my vacation is a long, distant memory I have spent a little while putting together a kit of sorts, with all the various bits that will be used to create the scrapbook. As this one’s a special holiday, it gets a scrapbook all to itself! I noticed that about 70% of what I put away in the box was paper: but we’re not talking patterned paper or even plain paper but more like literature. I had hundreds of bits of papers – tickets, maps, menus, hotel brochures, local paper, theme park guides, etc. I managed to fill an 18lt box with all sorts of random documentation. Thing is though, it is all important to me one way or another. I have always been ruthless to throw things away and don’t tend to hoard anything except for when it comes to Florida vacations. I may grab things here and there on other vacations but when I’m in Florida (especially Disney) I take all I can. I always have. Eventually I had the problem of storage and when my box overflowed, I started cutting up bits and piec...

Just before I went on vacation, a dream store opened here in Milton Keynes: Borders! Yes, the bookstore. I really love this store mainly because it sells books and does this job beautifully. There are few bookstores that display books so well and make it so easy for me to have to buy another book. If I could, I think I’d love to work there and I would be in heaven, surrounded by books. I’ve already been like five times since it opened earlier in the month, and bearing in mind I’ve been on vacation for most of November, it isn’t a bad average. I just love books. I love and love and love books. Books have been my friends for a long time, since I learned to read at the age of 4. Ever since I discovered the written word I have been pretty obsessed with books and have always been attracted to reading. It’s one of my favourite pastimes – sometimes even more adored than scrapbooking, I have to say. Reading is portable, easy to do and it fills my head with places, peoples and ideas that mig...