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Bare and uncensored personal expression. Beware!!! |
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** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** "This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me." --- Colleen Wainwright "Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it." --- David Sedaris "Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment." --- Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey "In giving of myself onto these pages every day I allow myself to write regardless of the depth and meaning. I share myself with others without fear of recrimination for these are my thoughts, my feelings and my very being, and there are non who's opinion of me matters more than my own." --- Rebecca Laffar-Smith   The Writer's Round-About |
| After going to bed so late I was surprised that I didn't have to drag myself out of bed this morning. The kids were both up at the same time as normal despite their late night too. Perhaps an occasional late night is actually better for us than constant early nights. Or perhaps it's just because I'm flying on a high and will hit hard in a few days. I started the day working. Well after breakfast and getting the washing machine going etc. Of course early this morning my sister turned up to use my computer. Thankfully she didn't hijack the computer for the day. I get a little 'strange' when anyone is on my computer. I don't know what it is. There must be a link between me and it. Perhaps it maintains my aura or something. lol Or maybe I just don't like sharing something so vital to my lifestyle. She didn't hijack my computer but she did hijack me and the kids. She took us swimming.  I'm so glad that we were able to take Kaylie swimming this week. I promised her that we'd go swimming during the holidays but when we found the local pool is closed for a few weeks I was worried we mightn't manage it.Anyway, my day was pretty boring other than that. Not to mention the fact that I'm so short on steps. I need to get off this computer and get stepping so I can hit my 10,000 today. G'night everyone. |
| Wow!!! It's nearly midnight here but I'm pumped. Dear You has been a great success. There were 25 acceptable entries to the first round and I'm looking forward to the judging. It's going to be tough, there were so many great entries. I've already posted Round Two up so that people can get started on the next letter. With my current focus on exercise and eating right I felt this new letter would be a great one to feature. I'm sure many people struggle with weight control and exercise isn't very popular. I won't get into it all now because I need to save some content for my own response letter. As for the whole Weight Watchers thing, I'm still going strong. Day 4, week 2: We did measurements today. It'll be interesting to know how our bodies change shape given time. I've learned that my calf is bigger than my neck. I'd like to believe it's because of muscle.  I managed over 10,000 steps again today. My mother invited me around for dinner. Rob had called her to tell her he'd cook a roast for dinner tonight. She was working but she called me to invite me and the kids. She picked us up on her way home from work around 5:30PM. Of course when she got home Rob wasn't there. He'd called Amanda (my sister) to get her to put the roast in at 4PM but the vege's weren't started or anything. By the time it was ready to eat it had gone the kids bed times. Josh was tuckered but he still managed to do his dinner justice and so surprisingly did Kaylie. They are getting pretty good an finishing a meal these days. I think it helps to have Josh so eager to eat his plateful because it encourages Kaylie to do so. I know it's not great to compare your kids to each other but it definately helps get her to eat her food if she see's Josh eating his.Anyway, before dinner, since we had a good hour or so to kill, we went for a walk. My mothers house recently had a gate put into the new fence. (I might have mentioned a while back about her fence blowing down in a storm. She had the gate installed when they replaced it.) The gate leads out onto a parklandish type area. There is a bike ramp and some paths. Apparently the area is actually a road safety and awareness course for kids. It makes a great exercise route as the paths are windy, keeping them interesting, and on the opposite side is a small childrens playground. We did a couple of laps and played in the playground a little. It certainly helped me get my points up after having spent another day at the keyboard. Hopefully we'll be able to make this sort of activity a regular event. Perhaps for a Thursday afternoon as that is when we normally have time together. Still, I did have another couple of thousand left to get tonight but I managed it by taking some extra steps while finishing up my Scarlett list. (That's my list of five household chores that I must get done in a day. It changes each day although dishes and laundry make frequent appearances.) It feels great to have done something productive. I think a big part about making this work is the energy you get from doing it. You'd be surprising how hyped I am after being active today. Scarlett and Mel have both mentioned how tired they feel just reading my entries lately but to tell the truth I feel great. Even nearing midnight now most of my body is enlivened. My eyes are drooping however and for health and fitness I should have been in bed a few hours ago. And on that note I better head that way now. G'night every and I hope you're having a fantastic day. Put on some of your favorite music and dance away while you hang out or fold the laundry, wash the dishes, etc. or just walk on the spot while watching TV. You'll be amazed at how great you feel after doing such simple activities. It barely even feels like exercise. |
| Well I'm getting blank screen syndrome from my blog today so instead of trying to figure out what I should write about I've decided to just write. Forgive me if that means I end up with a cluster of scattered thoughts rather than a cohesive entry. I spent a lot of time in front of the computer again today. Once again with the promotion of Ipseitys. I finally managed to write an introduction and a couple of descriptions I am happy with. I've laboured a few weeks over these items because they are very important to the success of the site. A description can be the difference between someone clicking my link or moving on to the next one. The introduction needs to be compact enough to hold a reader, long enough to decide they want to keep looking around. Both are vital and I hope mine are interesting and compelling. I've also been busy submitting the site to search engine and link pages all over the web. Increasing the number of websites that link to mine improves the rankings at least in Google and of course it means more exposure. It's been interesting looking around the web. I've come across a couple of websites that were created because of my original RPG site, Outlanda Games. Some so blatently so that they are almost word for word or follow almost identical design. It made me a little angry but I feel better knowing that their sites never really made anything but my Outlanda site is still going since 1998. Although the current administrator seems to be MIA at the moment which means the site isn't active the way it would be if she was available. I hope she's ok, and I keep emailing her in the hopes of contacting her. I wish I had her offline contact details. Other than Ipseitys work today I've had a rather interesting day. A neighbour who has a child in Kaylie's class stopped by for a short while. She left her little girl with me for a short while. Stephanie is so quiet and shy. She talks but barely to me. Of course she didn't stay long, because I'm practically a stranger to her at the moment when Josh accidentally bumped into her on his motobike she burst into tears and wanted her Mummy. So I walked her home. Kaylie then stayed at her house to play with her and her brothers for a short time. Then when she came home Caleb (her school friend) stayed for a short while to play. Kaylie enjoyed having more people around to share her toys and games with. I managed to get my 10,000 steps today despite all the computer work. It meant nearly 2 hours of walking, jogging, dancing on the spot in front of the TV. I watched my WW Powerstart DVD and let my mother borrow my computer while I did it. It's great to manage the 10,000 steps, even more so because I thought I might not reach it. I'd only done 2,000 steps during the day and it's not easy to get another 8,000. I've also managed the 2L of water again today and it's easier to accomplish than I had thought. It's just a case of remembering to have a glass every couple of hours. I'm under points again today although I probably had a larger dinner than I should. I made more of the tuna and tomato pasta than I planned by it does mean that I have left overs to eat another day. Other than that there really isn't much to tell. The Dear You contest is almost finished and there are a lot of entries. So many fresh ideas for Mother of Teens. I hope it helps her deal with her smoking son. Meanwhile, I better start tuning down for the night. G'night everyone and do something healthy for yourself today. Oh, PS, there was a great quote on the powerstart DVD I thought I'd share with you. You are never given a dream without the power to make it reality. |
| Today I've done well on the WW front. I got to my 10,000 steps and I even managed 2L of water. I did 20 out of 22 points today which is great. I feel very good about myself. For anyone who's never followed the Weight Watchers plan the rule about food is to eat a balanced diet (daily requirements of each food group) up to a certain point limit. Because of my current weight my current daily limit is 22 points and anything between 18 and 22 is considered excellent. Doing exercise earns bonus points and by doing my 10,000 steps I reach what is considered a healthy level of activity plus at least 1 bonus point. You can eat up to 12 of these bonus points per week but I plan to save mine. By saving them (assuming you don't earn so many that you body needs them as sustinance) I should be losing weight faster. That's not what I was planning to talk about today. I've been busy today getting my role playing website online. Ipseitys is now in action. There are still a number of features to add but my primary goal at the moment is site promotion. I need to get some players together and this can only be done by creating awareness of the site. There are a number of things a web designer needs to do to generate awareness on the web. Anyone can plop a webpage down on the web but unless you do some of these things no one will visit because the web really is this huge weave of links. At the moment I'm optimising my META tags. META tags are little bits of code hidden in the page. The visitors can't see it but web sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. use these tags to figure out how to list your website on their search engines. The idea is to use specific words that are important in relation to the website and to use them frequently. The more specific words are found, the more importance the search engine gives them. The more important yours keywords the higher you'll rank when people search those sites for that keyword. The great thing about this is that there are websites out there that help you know how optimised your keywords etc. are for your site. So my goal is to get all these little bits green. Which should make my site rank highly when people search for information about role playing online. Of course, it all requires a lot of brain power. A lot of surfing. A lot of fiddling. Which means I have a headache. *sighs* What is worse is it's nearly bed time and I know that I'm going to have trouble turning my brain off because I'm leaving this task unfinished for the night. Still, I can't afford to stay up until it's done, especially not with this headache. So, that's my day for you all. If anyone stumbles across her who is interested in Medieval Fantasy Role Playing Games. Feel free to check it out. It's not as pretty as I plan (because I'm no graphic designer but I do plan to hire one when I find one I like who can do it for a reasonable price) but it should, hopefully, be fully functional. G'night everyone and I hope you all have a productive day. Don't over do it and make sure you have a chance to do something you love. |
| Last week as a congratulations on joining Weight Watchers gift my mother gave me one of the Bonus Buddy WW Pedometers. I'd never used one before and it was interesting to find out the amount of walking I did in an average day, an average week. If I didn't do the walk to school (a weekend) I'd be barely hitting 1,000 steps in the day. The walk to school is almost exactly 1 kilometer. 1 kilometer, with my stride of 55cm equals nearly 2,000 steps. You need to walk about 3 kilometers per day to hit the healthy level. This means that even if I wasn't trying to lose weight I should be averaging 6,000 steps per day to maintain health. The good news is that on a good day I'd be hitting that by the walk to and from school twice each weekday. Of course, Tuesday mornings I don't walk to school. I do however go shopping which gets the points up about as much as walking to and from school (at least according to my measuring it today). Thursdays I occassionally don't walk to or from school and so far haven't done any other exercise to make up for it. So, I've learnt that even to maintain a healthy standard of living I'm not moving around enough. Working on the computer is a huge inhibitor to getting the activity level up there. Today, I was reading some of the fitness threads on the WW web site. Apparently for effective weight loss you should aim to get 10,000 steps in at least 5 days a week. So, this is this weeks goal. To get at least 10,000 steps into every day. There is a great website that can hopefully help keep me motivated. A few other WW ladies have joined a group there and we are stepping together in a goal to reach 6.5 million steps. Being able to do this with others is defiantely great for the motivation. I'll tell you what's not great for my motivation. My weigh in today. I GAINED WEIGHT!!! 82.2 KG starting weight, last week. This week I was up to 82.3 KG. I was wearing basically the same sort of clothing so it's not like any of that could have factored in. The good news is that there was a lot of things I hadn't been doing right. Many of those I'm going to start getting right every day. First of course is the 10,000 steps per day. Second I'm going to get 2L of liquid into me. This one is a big step because I know that I'm always dehydrated. I never drink enough liquids. Some days I can go a whole day without remembering to have even 1 drink. Even sitting here right now I can feel the stress my body suffers through thirst. I'm also going to be more careful about my sugar points. Last week I baked a cake. At 6 points per slice. The cake is high carb, high sugar and high G.I. So very bad for me. I shouldn't have done more than one slice in the week. I could have halved the slice portion and had two slices. Oh well, we live and learn. Hopefully next week will be better. I'm definately getting more involved in making it happen this week. Last week I mostly just tracked my food. I didn't really think about exercise other than measuring what I was already doing. You always hear the ads on TV about finding 30. 30 minutes of exercise, take the stairs instead of the lift, get off the bus two stops early etc. I thought that doing 20 minutes to and 20 minutes back was me finding 30. I thought that meant I was doing plenty of exercise. Anyway, going over the same old same old. lol Basically this week it's more water, more exercise, and less sugar. We'll see what those nasty scales have to say about that next week.All the best to everyone, g'night and have a great day. |
| Ok, before I begin, Scarlett, (and anyone else who needs the tips) a detailed "How to Backup to CD Rom if you have Windows Operating System" is included in the comments for yesterdays journal entry. Feel free to ask questions if you have any. I'm always happy to help. Now to todays topic. I'm grinning with pride today. I didn't imagine how successful the Dear You contest might prove. Those of you who remember my mentioning the idea might remember how unsure I was of myself. I personally thought it could be a great idea but well, I don't really trust my opinion all that much. But with all your positive comments I went ahead an created the contest. In the first week I ran a pre-contest contest. This was to get actual Dear You letters which I could use as prompts in the contest. There were 8 great responses to that contest and so I ran with the first one for the first round. Round One is still open with about 5 days left and already I have 21 acceptable entries. There have actually been 23 submissions but two of them aren't the kind, supportive, and helpful entries I'll accept. I know, the current contest doesn't list any rules, I plan to remedy that next round. I think that this is a great response and I'm so pleased that the contest has proved popular. I hope the Mother of Teens who wrote this first letter finds the responses helpful. I'm sure she'll get a wealth of idea's and hopefully feel encouraged and supported by the advice. I must admit I'm not looking forward to judging. I've read each letter as it comes in (and copied it to another item so that I can send Mother of Teens a compilation) but deciding the top three is going to be really tough. I am looking forward to the next round. The donations have been wonderful and I've even created a group to keep aside funds so that I can keep the contest running (without worrying that sponsering will deplete prize money lol). Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to go ahead with this contest idea. For anyone who's interested, feel free to check it out:
Now, finishing my entry just in time for "House". Stay tuned for tomorrows entry which will hopefully have some good Weight Watchers news. I'm really starting to wonder how my weigh in will go. G'night everyone and have a great day. |
| Ok, how many of you are already going, What The? Well in this, the computer age, the trust Backup is one of the most vital tools a computer user can ever make use of. While 98% of the time you'll wonder why you bothered, 2% of the time you'll be offering your first child to the CD Rom Gods in thanks. So, some of you are still wondering what I'm talking about aren't you? Hands up if you store some of your writing, work, favorites, email, etc. direct to your computer? Ok, pretty much everyone should have their hands up, because the fact is, saving email or favorites to disk every time would be a pain in the donkey (that's, um, ass btw, I have a five year old, have to keep things clean. )Ok, hands up if you save your commonly used files to CD at least every week? Huh? One, two, zero? How about every month? Mmmm, not very many hands. How about every six months? *shakes head sadly* This doesn't look too good people. Let's try another test. Hands up if you've owned a PC longer than a year and have for one reason or another had to have it repaired? *nods head* Yes, as I suspected, nearly everyone. Hands up if you've had to have the hard drive completely reformatted? I feel your pain people, I feel your pain. So Backing Up. Basically creating a backup would be taking everything from one drive and storing it to another medium. Some people back up their hard drive to another external hard drive. (Or sometimes even an internal one) Of course storing the entire contents of your HD is rather tedious and bulky and for the most part, if you have original disks for your programs (ie. legal) and you save your downloads to a folder you shouldn't need to backup windows or all your installed games or programs. Instead, you might have lots of files you've created in your My Documents. My Music. My Pictures. etc. Maybe you don't have a Windows Operating System but you probably have files you've created and stored in a folder on your computer. These are often fairly small. Note: Small these days can get to a few MB but most files tend to be less than 1MB. Some of these files you could store to a good old 3.5 inch floppy disk. Of course, with so many electronic items in your home containing magnets and thus, magnetic fields, 3.5 inch floppys are a risky bet. Accidentally leave your floppy on your VCR, DVD player, Monitor etc. and it's by by backup. These days there are other options, flash drives, zip drives, memory cards, etc. These can be great too but you still must beware magnetic fields. I find my most trusty medium for backing up is the CD Rom. They store a lot of information 750MB is an average I've found available and reasonably priced (so that you can buy lots of them). Most computers come with a CD player and many with a CD writer as standard. Now to back up. Grab all the files you commonly use or have created (even your story that you wrote last year but haven't looked at again) and copy to disk. Label your disk, store away someplace safe. This is a backup and you can now weed some of your old files from your hard drive and know that you still have them. Well, I've gone on and on about the virtue of backing up. But the interesting part of todays blog is still to come. Today, I found that 2% reason that backing up is so fantastic. I back up every month. My favorites, my websites (I program web sites), my writing, my music, my pictures, my downloads, my saved games, etc. I back it all up to a disk (usually all fits on one disk). My last backup was in August. I was working on Ipseitys, anyone who's read back in my blog might remember that this is the new Role Playing web site I'm currently working on. Anyway, I'd loaded up a file and was making some changes because I needed another that was almost identical. Anyway, I'd cleared out the majority of the code I didn't need for this new page and put wrote the code I did need. I clicked save and was a very happy camper when the code loaded and worked perfectly. OMG!!! I forgot to SAVE AS and just saved this new file over the top of my old one. The old one was some complex programming I did back in August. Fingers crossed, prayers to all the major deities and especially to the Sisters of Fate. Pulled out my archives (this is what I call my back ups) and plugged the disk in. *sighs in relief* It was there, the file I had lost, safely backed up on disk and ready to restore to my current work. Hours of programming restored in seconds after a silly little mishap that can happen at any moment. Thus is the virtue of backing up. And having waxed poetic about this rather insignificant topic, I go to create Septembers back up. G'night everyone, and if you haven't done so recently, please, make a backup of your vital files. You never know when a mishap might occur to destroy them forever. |
| Well, after a dull weekend I woke up in much the same mood but being a Monday and not having any milk and a daughter who wanted to go swimming I dragged myself up and at them anyway. We walked the thirty minutes to the local pool only to find that they are closed for thew two weeks of the school holidays. Poor Kaylie was very disappointed and by then so was I because the weather is beautiful and it would have been lovely to go swimming in. But, I figured we'd just go up the road a little to get the milk and bread, maybe a DVD and something sneaky for lunch then head home. Of course someone forgot to tell me that for some reason it's a public holiday today. Who goes and springs these things on people anyway? If Kaylie wasn't in school holidays I'd probably have walked her to school only to find out that they weren't open. Add to that the fact that all the good DVD's were already out. Well, one of the takeaway places were open so we did stop for a tasty lunch of fish and chips. Great weather for it which made eating outside lovely. The petrol station nearby was open too so I did manage to get some milk before heading home. The day wasn't a total bust but I was glad to get home again in the early afternoon and go back to bed where I managed to finish book 8 of The Wheel of Time. I've also managed to finish the message boards section of Ipseitys so the day was rather productive. After a slow start, pushing myself into the day seemed to work well. I don't however have much else worth talking about tonight. Only making an entry at all because of the promise to myself to do so every day. Two weeks of maintaining that promise. I'm doing pretty well. But now, it's back to the TV for a little bit before shower and bed. |
| Today is a bad day. Not so bad as it could have been for Mel and Tor thankfully and I'm glad to hear they've come through the worst of it safely. But in my own less interesting closely focused world, today has been a bad one. Today is what I considered a low. Not as low as I can get but low enough to make me wonder what the alternating high was. My lows often consist of total lathargy (falling asleep while I'm in the middle of doing something sort of thing) and just the lack of energy to get motivated to do anything. On my worst days I'd barely make it out of bed although being a mother I often have for force myself anyway. If I could have slept the day away today I would have. I can't even really fathom a reason for such a low day. I haven't recently had any substantial high days and this has been a slow decline when usually my swings are much faster. Those of you who read my entry yesterday might remember that I mentioned a lack of attention span? Well that's connected to the low and because I'm in the low point (the lowest point I hope) I can see that. Yesterday, I was on the way down but didn't even realise. Too busy paying attention to where my feet were stepping because tumbling head over heels down a hill isn't a good idea. lol Anyway, I hope tomorrow brings a better mood. Kaylie still wants to go swimming and we've had nice weather this weekend. If it holds up I'll probably take her and Josh to the local pool tomorrow. I need to get up there that way anyway to get milk and stop it to collect a package that is waiting at the post office. I might even hire a few DVD's to while away some more school holiday hours. Kaylie's watched Harry Potter, all three of them, this weekend. Not to mention the way her and Josh's toys are scattered from living room through both their bedrooms. I just haven't been with it enough to keep up with them so the toys haven't been making it back to the toyboxes. Kaylie had her first toothfairy visit last night. She cut her first teeth at two months old so it's not so surprising that she's got adult teeth coming in already. The poor toothfairy noticed the costs of inflation. I got 20c per tooth when I was a kid and these days (I checked online) the going rate seems to be $1 or $2. The toothfairy left her $1 and she tucked it safely into her money box. She wasn't as excitable about the whole thing as I expected. It's sad but I've noticed with her school friends that kids aren't as in awe about stuff as we were when I was a kid. In those days losing a tooth was a big deal. Then again, 20c would have bought a hole big bag of lollies where as a dollar would get you a milky way but not much else. Deli's don't do bagged lollies like they did when I was a kid. Why not? I thought those bags were great. lolAnyway, time to get myself to bed. Not that I plan to sleep just yet. I've got more of my book to get through. Finally got back to reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. Nearly finished book 8 now so only two more to go after this. Still, almost a full book without mention of Matt and last we knew of him he'd had a building fall on him. He's a prime character so a building falling on him didn't mean he was dead. Ta'veren don't die that easy. If you haven't read the series, I recommend it. The writing is absorbing and while the array of characters can be a little overwhelming the primary characters are well developed and the plot is solid and well weaved. G'night and I hope the power out Mel and Tor's way is restored shortly. Poor Mel, must be going out of her mind trying to keep Tor entertained and her own hands from straying to his neck. I should have remembered to remind her that there are often a wave of babies nine months after a blackout. That's the best way to keep yourselves entertained when there is no power. |
| I don't know what it was about today, perhaps worry about Mel and Tor, or the fact that I couldn't have a proper breakfast because the milk was sour (4 days before date), or maybe a lack of sleep, it could even just be the way the stars are aligned, but today I've had very little attention span. Normally I can put my mind to something and be totally absorbed for hours. Today even putting my mind to anything for a minute was hard. Even writing my journal or watching TV, cooking dinner, rotating the laundry. I swear, each of these things not only got put off to the last minute but were interrupted because my mind wandered off to something else before I remembered I'd been in the middle of something. I had planned to write an article for BANG but I couldn't focus. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have some sort of brain functionality back again. Today's entry is going to be short. I'm running late because again, my mother visited and hijacked my computer for a few hours. Her new connection still isn't working. She sat there with a half block of chocolate in her purse the whole time. It was so hard to stick with my concious decision not to ask her to break it out. If I had she'd have gladly shared it with me, but on day three of my new Weight Watchers plans I'm not quite ready to throw the day away on a chocolate binge. The only reason I even wanted the chocolate was because it was there. It's not like I was particularly after chocolate. But I had to bury my head every add break through the movie I just watched. Kit Kat, Red Rooster, MacDonalds, KFC, Wendys, all these wonderful things flittering across the screen. It's not like I'm even hungry. Dinner, while rather mundane (because I'd blown points on lunch and did no exercise today) was at least satisfying. Of course the extra chicken I cooked that's sitting in the fridge for lunch tomorrow is still calling me. *sighs* All part of the short attention span too. The slightest thing will have me going off on a tangent. Meanwhile, it's time to head to bed. Hopefully by morning Mel and Tor will have checked in, either with their own power back or through CC. I haven't heard much in the news and I've been keeping my ears open for it today. I'm hoping that means Rita proved less troublesome than expected. Stay safe everyone and whereever in the world you are, enjoy your Saturday or g'night and have a great Sunday. |
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