shopping for men

Tags

dates, dating, dating app, love, online dating, shopping for men, Tinder

Recently I had a friend over for dinner and as we came to the end of dessert, and the bottle of red we were sharing, she decided she wanted to try Tinder.

Within minutes she was signed up to the notorious dating app and we enjoyed another bottle of wine while reading hilarious blurbs and swiping left and right. To be honest, there was many more lefts than rights, but a few matches were made and as the third bottle was opened a few messages exchanged – and we giggled ourselves silly in the process.

Now my friend has two dates this week and I have to admit it was a wonderfully fun evening. As my friends said, it was a little bit like shopping for men – and who can resist shopping from the comfort of your own home, wine and laughter included?

 

late birthday treats

Tags

Advent, birthday, celebration, friends, gifts, letters, love, post, surprises

It’s been a week since my birthday but somehow I have been surprised by treats every day since. Some letters in the post and a few stray parcels were just the beginning of my week long celebration.

Last night I spent a evening tucked away behind an inconspicuous black door in the Vintage Cocktail Club, sipping coloured drinks and eating delicious nibbles with four wonderful women I call friends. It was a chat-fllled night with lots of laughter and fun – the perfect way to end a long week.

Today a steady flow of drizzle has been dampening the mood but my neighbour and I spent the afternoon over some delicious cake and coffee, chatting and entertaining her adorable toddler. We even ended up in the park playing in the rain, laughing and enjoying a lovely November afternoon.

There has been something quite wonderful about making my special day last for a while, instead of one big party and a shower of love I’ve had a trickle of gifts and events, every day filled with moments of surprises and that warm hug of joy never quite went away.

But now it seems it’s time to put away my birthday, pack away my cards and let normality return to my every day life. Not for long though, as Sunday is the first of Advent and a month long celebration of my favourite time of year will have arrived at my doorstep.

Looking forward to decorating my tree in a few weeks – I do love all of my shoe decorations

 

 

shadow and light

Tags

feelings, life, memories, opposites, photo, photography, thoughts

Trying to find the perfect words and some good ideas proved to be more than a little tricky this morning. As I sat at my desk my mind kept wandering and my eyes drifted towards the window.

There was not much to see, except for the ever changing shadow of the birdhouse. As the sun traveled across the cloud speckled sky the play of light and shadow, on my whitewashed wall, tugged at my mind.

I couldn’t help but wonder about how without light there is no shadow, two opposites that exist in harmony. A bit like emotions that we have polarised: happy and sad, brave and fearful, relaxed and stressed. Without one we don’t really understand the other – true courage comes from battling your fears, relaxation fully appreciated in the knowledge of what stress feels like and pure joy felt in the realization that unhappiness is inevitable.

Now, that clouds have stolen the shadows away, my view has become less interesting, making me wonder what life would be like in a bland concoction of even-temperedness. No highs, or lows, to make us laugh and cry – memories created from emotion filled moments no longer an option in life.

So, while ideas still elude me today, I think I will go out and see what shadows I can find and what feelings my memories of today will be made up of.

Galentine’s, Valentine’s and feeling loved

Tags

daffodil, friends, Galentine's day, love, photography, photos, surprises, Valentine, Valentine's Day

Yesterday was Galentine’s day, Valentine’s little sister, celebrating the love between friends. (It was invented by the creators of Parks and Recreations back in 2010 and celebrates friendly love on the13th of February) And as luck would have it, even though it was Friday the 13th, I spent some time with a very good friend.

She even surprised me with a Valentine’s day gift – a pink bag filled with a surprise and a card. I was stunned and touched, especially since I didn’t have anything for her, and felt very much loved.

And when I looked out of my window this morning, there standing proud amongst the crocuses and snowdrops was my very first daffodil, a loving gift from mother nature.

bag of surprises

my first daffodil of the year

tears and tribulations

Tags

emotions, feelings, Leonardo da Vinci, quotes, tears, thoughts

Today one of my students had a bit of a cry. Overwhelmed by the stress of working, studying and running her first own home the emotions ran a little wild and trickled down her face in wet, unhappy tears.

I did my best to console but I couldn’t help but wonder about the demands this modern world puts on us all. Between working, paying the bills, shopping, cleaning, new projects, possible hobbies, friends and family we seem to have no time at all to take a breath and process.

All the ideas, thoughts, stress, anger, hurt and emotions cartwheel around inside of us, banging into each other, overturning logic and any sense of calm we may have had, often leaving no way of escape except through the tear-ducts of our eyes.

So maybe tears are just a way of making space inside of us for new trials and tribulations, allowing a moment of calm to clear up the mess and put things back into place and perspective.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

Leonardo da Vinci

stepping around my innerer Schweinehund

Tags

Annette Louisan, desk duty, innerer Schweinehund, music, songs, work

For a week now I have been working around the piles of unorganised paperwork and stacks of corrections that are towering around my desk. This unpleasant sight  not only invades my workspace it has now started to creep into my dreams, never a good sign.

So today I have decide, reluctantly and with a lot of inner tantrum trowing, to finally deal with my desk, tidy up and give myself some space.

While my intentions are good, I have to admit that I am struggling to get my procrastination off the easy-chair and into gear. In German there is a word for that inner battle between what you want to be doing and the inability to get a move on –  ‘innerer Schweinehund (inner pig-dog)’.

An ‘innerer Schweinehund’, is that metaphorical sloth, that lounges around and daydreams, it’s the absence of that ‘get up an go’ – it probably ate it for breakfast.

Some of us seem to only have a toy version of a ‘innerer Schweinehund’, it just yaps around their ankle and is easy enough to step over and ignore, other have reared a sizable specimen, a boar of hog, big tusks and loud grunts impossible to overlook and even harder to get around.

So to help me get moving and shimmy and shake around my bully of a ‘Schweinehund’ I have put on some music and this song by German singer/songwriter  Annette Louisan may just be my anthem of the day !

midweek musings

Tags

Anthony Hopkins, days-of-the-week, flowers, Gerberas, mid-week movies, monday-blues, photo, photography, psychology, quote, quotes, wednesday

Feeling a little blue I decided to treat myself to some cheerful Gerberas. As I put the happy flowers into a vase I couldn’t help but muse about the day that it is: Wednesday.

Wednesdays are funny days, they are half way through the week yet they often feel particularly long. Some call them ‘hump days’ and some studies even show that many find getting-over Wednesday harder than battling with the Monday-blues.

But a study done on day-of-week (DOW) productivity shows that Wednesdays tend to be the most productive day of the week, only slightly higher than Tuesdays. It’s no surprise that Fridays are the least productive, closely followed by Mondays, weekend hangovers and anticipation the most likely reason for this.

I wonder if that is why Wednesdays sometimes feel so never ending, we are too busy to have lunch and too tired in the evenings to do anything but stay home. Maybe that is also why RTE has their mid-week movie on a Wednesday night.

However, what is surprising, is that another study shows that Wednesday is the best night for dating, and if you don’t have a date, Wednesday is also the best night to pick someone up at a bar. In addition to this it seems that these mid-week bar-goers are friskier than their weekend counterparts and things are more likely to end up in the bedroom.

This is possibly down to the fact that people who go out on a Wednesday night tend to be more spontaneous, more extroverted and are looking to stay away from the crowds on Saturday and all those pesky out-of-towers.

And maybe the levels of productivity people have during working hours is just translated into flirt-activity at night and adds to the high success-rate on a Wednesday night.

Since I am meeting up with a friend for a film later maybe the two of us should stop in for a nightcap somewhere and see if the pubs in Dublin are sizzling with flirtatious energy. And if not at least I’ll have my cheerful Gerberas to come home to!

I like the good life too much, I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

Actor Anthony Hopkins

summing up the summer

Tags

42, bank balance, Berlin, daily chores, distant memory, divided by four, Douglas Adams, german capital, humdrum life, summer, summing up, time

With three weeks left until the new term begins summer is really coming to an end. The days are getting shorter and even though the weather is still warm and pleasant autumn is just around the corner.

When I look back over the past months I can’t believe how fast the summer has past by. I had so many plans and ideas about what I wanted to do, but somehow my clock and that of the season ticked at different speeds.

Berlin feels like a distant memory: meandering around the German capital snapping photos, sizzling in the heat and enjoying the thrill of the new all so long ago. But the five weeks of stepping away from normality helped me clear my head if not my schedule and even if I didn’t do all I had intended at the very least I had a chance to air out the attic of my mind.

But on my return my calendar was quickly filled with visitors and visits, catch-ups and chatter, parties and premiers but now I have to slow down, breath deep and try and get my routine back on track. And I need to not forget to carve out time to create beside all those daily chores.

I have to remember lessons I have learned,  the experiences I have gained and make sure I don’t lose them amongst the boxes and to-do-lists of my humdrum life. Maybe bring a little bit of Berlin to Dublin, mix up the capitals and create a cocktail to fit my heritage.

If I sum up my summer I think it was a success, more pros than cons and the have column is defiantly in the black. But with my bank balance tipping dangerously close towards the red I have to say the return of autumn also thankfully means the return of a regular income.

So if 60 seconds are in a minute, and the same amount of minutes to the hour adds up to 24 hours in a day, of which there are seven in a week, times four to create a month times twelve to get a year, divided by four to create a season can only mean that time is moving on and maybe Douglas Adams was right and the answer is 42.

fruitless favours

Tags

bad friends, failed friendship, favours, friends, friendship, girls day

I am having one of those days, my beautiful red polka-dot mug broke, I burnt my toast and set of the smoke alarm, my font-book on my mac is acting up and the-bride-to-be rejected the favour she asked me to do.

Many weeks ago she asked me if I could design the pamphlets for the ceremony and when she sent me the list of songs and order of service that is exactly what I did. We had arranged to meet this morning and go through the pamphlet, make changes if needed so that she could then print and staple them later in the day.

Well, that didn’t happen. I received a text this morning letting me that her husband-to-be had already taken care of it and there was no need now for us to meet up. Basically telling me all my work was for naught, a fruitless favour on my part.

Now, I do understand that getting married is a stressful time but I am so annoyed and feel quite used. What is the point in asking someone to do something if you are going to change your mind at the last minute? These kind of fruitless favours make the person doing the favour feel irrelevant, that their time is not important, nor that their help is. Fruitless favours are a main ingredient to failed friendships.

So with this Saturday starting out on every bad note possible, I can only hope that lunch and the following “girls-day-out” event will change today’s melody, allowing me to enjoy the tune of “Happy Birthday” at a friends party tonight.

cracked and shattered

Tags

broken pieces, cracks, hairline crack, hot tea, meredith brooks, mug, mug of tea, music, psychology, shatterd, transient nature

A few weeks ago I noticed that my favorite mug has a crack … a big, long one down the side. I got quite upset when I saw it, but the crack hasn’t opened up, it doesn’t leak and the mug is still whole.

But seeing the crack in my red and white polka-dotted mug every morning makes me think of all those cracks we carry within us. We have all lived through situations  when we’ve thought we would shatter, break apart. But somehow our inner glue holds us together and over times seems to mend the cracks. But like in pottery these inner cracks may be sealed, but they are still there, making us vulnerable.

Our first heartbreak makes us more cautious. Our fist rejection letter makes us more aware of our abilities. The first time someone we love dies, makes us understand our transient nature. But all these little cracks make us who we are, make us unique, just like my big red and white mug with a hairline crack running down its side.

And while I was pondering these thoughts, a song I loved back in my twenties came on the radio, it was Meredith Brooks singing ‘Shattered’. How apt.

So while I have a lovely but busy day today and the next five days will be filled with “things-I-need-to-do-before-Berlin“, I feel shattered, not just cracked. Hopefully that means I’ll make it to bed early and wake up fresh in the morning to savour some hot tea from my favourite mug. Sadly I know it is probably only a matter of time before the crack becomes a tear and then it will shatter. But when that happens maybe I can make something out of the broken pieces and it would be  great excuse to by a new favorite mug.

my cracked mug