Sing when you're hoovering

I am not the tidiest mortal on the planet. I seem to have a subconscious thing going on where I spend one day cleaning and tidying the house and the other six days wrecking it!

I’m sitting here by my little corner table which has a dozen balls of knitting wool, needles, pattern, three books (the one I’m reading and the nest two I have lined up) writers magazine, another 3 different magazines, my laptop, pens, notebooks, several bookmarks, 75 cents and a Ferris wheel toy belonging to Paisley my budgie. It’s a small table.

It’s not that I don’t like housework. I actually don’t mind it. Especially as I like to do it to music. Day tripper by the Beatles is a great track for dusting to. I just don’t seem predisposed to living in a tidy home.

        
I keep making excuses like creative minds are never tidy, a tidy home is the sign  of a wasted life but the truth is I need a 48 hour day to do everything I intend to. If the aging hippie feels like watching a flock of starlings feeding on my shed roof where I have just left their food I do. If I go to dust the sideboard and Paisley starts playing I end up talking to him. If a track comes on when I am hoovering and I want to sing along with it off goes the vacuum cleaner. This happened a lot. So I switched to headphones.

That is when I turned into my granddad. I started dancing with the vacuum cleaner. Granddad used to do it every time and it would torment the life out of my Nan. They were ballroom dancers and he had some great moves.  Maybe vacuum dancing is genetic?

Even the simple everyday jobs are the same. Dish washing should take about 5 minutes, right. I end up with about 20.  You see I have the radio on and then I end up having a row with it. Some host or contributor says something and I argue back calling them a ****** who couldn’t possibly think like that. When my beloved dog Shankly was alive he would come out look at me with his head tilted to one side and give me his ‘she’s on one’ look and walk off wagging his tail. I miss him in more ways than one.

                                                          
Tomorrow I have time managed some housework into the daily planner. It’s all the distractions though. I can see them already. I could have left the book I’m reading at a really place and I want o pick it up, just for a few more pages. A few that’s all. Paisley could start acting the maggot when I’m cleaning his cage. He has taken quite a liking to climbing up on my iPhone when I’m texting or tweeting.
Not to worry. Nothing lifts the soul like the vacuum boogie. It’s a great workout. The all singing all dancing scorpiomoonrose variety show.  I’m no Louie Spence but I can do a mean Peggy Lee.

Keep smiling

                                           

De Election

The time has come to exercise our franchise once again. The election has arrived. I’m sorry to admit to a secret little pleasure but I love elections.

It has nothing to do with politics, although I do follow it. It’s the ‘goings on’ that interest me.

I know the aging hippie is easily amused!

I am not trying to make light of the current difficulties some of us are in. It’s just the people watcher in me. I get great entertainment from watching the posturing.

Crowd scenes are great fun. When a politician is being interviewed on the election trail, watch the surrounding heads. They are all bursting their boilers to get as close as possible to the interviewee while getting their face on the T.V news looking suitably intelligent.

It gets even more interesting when a group of politicians cluster around their leader. Play ‘guess the pecking order’. Can you spot the favoured one with the best spot for T.V coverage? Also if a particular politician has managed to make an unmerciful mess of something, either in an interview or released a skeleton from their closet, see if they are placed in a prominent position for the camera with their leader as if to demonstrate support or their rehabilitation.

Then there is colour. All politicians get fiercely fond of strong colours. The men go all dominant with their ties and the women embrace ornate scarves, brightly coloured camisoles and statement jewellery.

My favourite election pastime is quip watching. It’s all in the digs and how they are barked. They pass between each other like a game of high speed tennis. A massive forehand is returned with a skilful backhand followed with a huge volley replied to with a smash. You can’t buy entertainment like this!

This time around we have the debate and all the hoo ha about who, where, when and by which. This could make great viewing. Yes viewing because I recommend doing just that, viewing.

What I do is turn the volume down. Ok so you miss the rehearsed pre packed and specially prepared for your delight answers to predictable questions. But what you do get is more fun than listening to the thunder. Watch the body language. See them squirm under the directions their communications coach gave them on how to stand and look cool calm and collected. Watch them try to cover up fury as one of them hits a raw nerve. Watch the ones who are off centre at a particular point in the debate, trying to look as though they have a clue what the other guy is on about. It could be just the laugh you need.

So to survive the election season, with a few good laughs, watch and see the antics, the faces, the gait and the P.R in practice. Enjoy the farce. You never know you could find yourself voting for someone you never thought you would!

keep smiling

Every Crown has a silver lining

I’ve noticed something in recent weeks. I’ve grey hair creeping in. The Silver is appearing across my fringe at regular intervals. I noticed a few little highlights arriving on the right side too. It reminds me of little Halloween sparklers I had when I was a kid. These little shiny sparks are like a firework exploding from the side of my fringe and back through the rest of my hair. You know what?                 I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t think I’m supposed to love it but I do. A reaction of panic followed by reckless scrambling for a bottle of dye is the norm so they say. I have had the conversations. People in general, friends and family show me greys with a mix of fear and rueful regret. Youth is behind me. Its elastic stockings and sensible shoes (and that’s just the men) from now on. Fair isle, beige and boring handbags. Sorry I don’t buy it. (Especially the boring handbags).

When it comes to hair, I’ve run the gauntlet. I’ve had highlights when it was a form of medieval torture. A crochet hook pulled strands through a rubber cap or a plastic bag. It was Pain incarnate. Then came the 80’s perms. I even brought a picture of Nicole Kidman with a head of curls to my hairdresser and said I want that!

At 16 I bought a supermarket hair bleaching kit and ended up looking like a marmalade cat. My cousin had to fix it the following weekend so I spent the week in school hiding the disaster in a ponytail.

My first passport photo I have black hair and a curly perm(the nicole). I look I am recovering from major surgery. After that I went through the red period. I was hostelling with a gang at that stage and one of the girls reckoned each time she saw me I had a different colour hair. There was auburn, henna red, red, mahogany red, red, chestnut red, and red.

Then I took to the bleach. It began on the slippery slope of a few highlights and became the whole head. That lasted nearly 10 years. I did have to have it cut as it was breaking and thinning but I held on in there.

To be honest the aging hippie was behind the decision to revert to my own colour. Besides I couldn’t remember what my natural colour was as I hadn’t seen it since I was 12. I had embraced the organic lifestyle and had chucked out all the chemicals I had. Food is organic and I had gone into chemical free cleaning. I always watched what went into my cosmetics. So the dye had to go.

The decision was helped when a wrecked knee laid me up for a spell and the colour grew out. When I was remobilised I got the rest covered up and now it’s ’all me own’.

So I intend celebrating the silver. My great grandmother died at 96 still with her long white hair. And I will be doing exactly the same. I’m having fun watching the silver spread across and giving me an interest as I brush. Mark Twain said age is a state of mind. If you don’t mind it doesn’t matter. I will be seeing my grey in exactly the same light. A silver one.

Keep Smiling

Back to the Brush strokes Chinese Style

I was back to Belfield on Wednesday night for my Chinese Calligraphy class. (http://www.comfuciusinstitute.ie/courses desc calli.html)

I love being back. It is a small class but the advantage of that is always how quickly we get to know each other.

I have to say this; I’m not the star of the class. I have to work at it and always did. I remember after 5 classes of my first term I was going to quit. I really thought I wasn’t for me. Then I talked myself into staying until the end of the term. I have this theory, you see. I always think it takes 6 weeks to decide if something is really for me. When I changed jobs or workplaces I gave it that time and in relationships I pretty much knew if the guy was right for me or not in that time. What I did with that information is another story!!!! But I stayed with Calligraphy and signed on for term 2.

Then it seemed to change for me. Something clicked in my head and I fell in love with this art form. I started to relax when practicing and just looked forward to class. Even when I get characters wrong I just giggle. Even my teacher, Professor Zhang, knows I’m in for the long haul now! Last Chinese New Year he showed us the character for year of the Tiger in cao shu script and I made the character in silver jewellery wire. He got a kick out of seeing the work take another form.

This term Professor gave us new brushes and practice paper to work with. (Forgot to mention I started my 2^nd year in September 2010) So far he has given us work mats, ink, ink stone (yan), inkwells, brushes (maobi), paper (zhi) and in my case a lot of patience. We are currently working on New Year banners. We planned to make them for Christmas but with the bad weather our last class was cancelled but we will have them for Chinese New year instead.

2011 is the year of the Rabbit. This is a peaceful year with less regulation where people relax and have more fun, which is just perfect for an aging hippie like me.  It’s a nice year to welcome in, after the upheaval we have all been through up to now. It will I hope be a year when I get to work more with my calligraphy. I have a few perhaps over ambitious ideas for it but that’s me! After working on perfecting different strokes dots and dashes, which does put the new student off a little, I find that when I look at the characters I wrote last year versus what I can do now I can see how far I’ve come.

Sometimes the best things in life are what we worked hard to achieve. We tend to expect to be brilliant at something from day one and then drop it like a hot spud when we are not. If I had dropped it, then I wouldn’t have made the cheeky signs I have over my desk in work!

From my calligraphy I get something a lot different from anything else I do. It has become almost a meditation now. There is a reason why we learn to sit how we do, how we hold the brush (as a tiger passes the river with a baby in his mouth) and focusing on the stroke order of each character and creating the strokes themselves. But like the year of the Rabbit its sit relax and have fun.

Keep smiling!

Time is of the essence

I've decided I need to learn the art of time management. Now that I blog and also as i need more writing time for my beloved Novel project, I have to plan. So i enlisted the help of a week planner pad I bought on a trip to Bath 18 months ago. It's really cool with all different drawings of shoes on it. That's the thing about us shopaholics, we know something will be useful eventually!

Now, as an aging hippie the free spiritedness doesn't lend itself to time management. It's all go with the flow. I like to get up and think ' today i will ..........'.   But the thought of having more free time to go with the flow or suddenly get an inspiration for a new style of earring and then having a time in place to work on it has me sold on this planning lark.

I work a four day week with flexi hours and I'm an early starter which helps. Two evenings of the working week are busy. Tuesday evenings are my Chinese Medicine appointment and nothing comes between me and my acupuncture! Wednesday evenings are my Chinese Calligraphy class at U.C.D. Although I am not the star pupil, I love it. I have to put the time in on homework but that doesn't break my heart.  
I have the usual housework stuff like everyone but my three day weekends are where the most planning is required. It feels like a huge amount of time until it is Sunday night again and i wonder how did i not manage the ironing again?
So I'll give the time management stuff a go. I should be able to make it rock. As I once said to a friend of mine when you live in the moment how do you know what you are going to do tomorrow? I will let you know when i find out.
Now, how much time do  I get on e bay


keep smiling,

blog my First

Greetings.
Welcome to my first Blog!
I've been planning to blog since the idea was planted in my head by the irrepressible John Fanning, who along with his truly amazing wife Kerrie, are directors of La Muse Writers and Artists retreat in the south of France.

I spent three weeks there in  October 2010, writing and silver wiring, along with six other amazing goddesses as I love to call them. But more about these ladies on another post.

So, John being John, he took every available opportunity to convince me that blogging is for me.
Well, I'm about to find out!

I shall be sharing my thoughts on different stuff, having a rant and rave occasionally and throwing out some interesting (i hope) thoughts and ideas on the things close to my heart.
I hope to convice some of my friends to guest blog now and again for me, just to keep things a little different.

Hope you enjoy my take on the world

keep smiling.