Weekly Photo Challenge: Admiration

Tags

Admiration, family, friends, godmother, optimist, people, photography, photos, Weekly Photo Challenge, Weekly Photo Challenge: Admiration

At first I was a little bit stumped about this weeks photo challenge – admiration – who or what do I admire?

I have some very talented friends who I greatly admire for their passion in what they do.

Everyone who decided to have kids and give up so much of themselves I admire greatly, and especially those who reared them on their own.

Those who chose to step away from convention and stand up for what they believe in or do as they please I admire for their bravery.

But their is one person I have always admired for their optimistic attitude towards life and that is my godmother. And while I know she is not easy and we definitely do not always agree on politics and many another topic she always tends to look at the bright side of life, even when times are hard. Her fashion sense may be more conservative than mine but she is very accepting of my dress sense oddities and otherness.

So with that in mind I think my admiration goes to all those eternal optimists out there, thanks for all the smiles!

my godmothers blue bench

brisk binders

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binder, culture, entertainment, Films, hilarity, John Cusack, miscellaneous, Patrick Swayze, people, photos, random, Ryan Gosling, smile, wome in binders

With the US elections up in a few weeks time and voters debating the debates there has been no lack of jokes made about both of the main candidates. Since I can’t vote, being a non-citizen of the big United States, I can fully enjoy the fun. And since I don’t have much time to write about my extremely long day filled with teaching, cleaning, tidying, creating and just being I have decided to jump on the “hilarity-wagon” and spread some joy too. So enjoy my brisk binder blogging and maybe these will make you smile like they did me.

oldies are the best

but no putting Gosling in the corner

and who could say no to John Cusack

falling through the cracks

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cracks, cubist painting, downward fall, falling, falling through the cracks, gingerbread woman, mental-health, miscellaneous, people, psychology, random, thoughts

I haven’t been feeling quite myself for a while now, I feel as if I am falling through the cracks. I know what triggered this feeling of unease and anxiety I am just not quite sure how to stop it.

As the  cracks widen and become more and more like canyons I am running out of glue and sting to hold it all together. It’s not just that my surroundings are crumbling making way for a downward fall, it’s myself that is cracking, crumbling into pieces like  a gingerbread woman.

But then maybe stopping it isn’t the issue, maybe it’s about letting those cracks break open and let yourself fall apart, hoping you can reassemble yourself as best you can. Of course you don’t want to end up looking like a cubist painting by Picasso, your nose on your cheek and your ears and eyes anywhere but where they should be but maybe by letting yourself break you can change who you are and leave out the bad parts when you put the jigsaw of your life back together.

So maybe falling  apart or in between the cracks can be a start for something new, to find out something about yourself you didn’t know or discover a new way of looking at the world and your place in it. Possibly it can test your strength and make you confront your fears and desires, find out if what you thought was right really is.

Sadly at the moment all I can hope for is not to take to much of a wrong step and end up falling through the cracks to a place I can’t come back from, or breaking into so many pieces that I can’t put myself back together again.

I think for now I will go out and buy some superglue and string and hope the knot holds till I’m ready to fall.

positive party planning

Tags

Dublin, health, home, intense emotions, laughter, mental-health, miscellaneous, new neighbours, party, people, psychology, random, stress hormones, thoughts

Yesterday two of my lovely neighbours and I decided to turn talk into action and plan a street party. So we sat, talked, drank tea, ate cake and tried to figure out the least stressful and easiest way to get the ball rolling and the party started.

With so many new neighbours moving in to the street we decided that it is the perfect time to celebrate and get to know one another and what better way to do that than with a BBQ.  But while we where making decisions and chatting about flyers and food my mind wandered wondering how strange it is that we love parties so much. After all they only really have the fun part of function.

I imagined how odd it would seem to an alien to land on earth in the middle of a celebration of some kind: groups of people coming together to eat and drink, mostly the kind of beverage that makes you a little dizzy and ditzy, talk quite loudly at, more than with, each other and possibly make fools of themselves while they sway, jerk and twirl to loud music and laugh hard and long and lots.

But the more I thought about it the more sense it started to make. As human beings we tend to be able to express certain intense emotions more easily in groups of people. For instance we probably have all experienced pant-wetting and off-chairs and sofas falling fits of laughter when we are with friends but rarely, if at all, does hysterical hilarity overwhelm us when we are on our own. And as we all know laughter triggers endorphin production in our brains making us instantly feel better. But it does have other very positive side effects too: it boosts your immune system, lowers your stress hormones, relaxes tense muscles and makes your blood vessels healthier, so in essence laughing can prevent heart attacks.

With our plan positively done and a plan B ready and waiting in case the weather decides to pour down on us we left my neighbours kitchen with a few more items on our personal to-do lists. Feeling good about ourselves and looking forward to a celebration in the not so far future we went home excited and ready to party.

SO if you are in the neighbourhood in   few weeks from now, come and join us for some BBQ and lots of healthy laughter.

getting my hand dirty

Tags

Dublin, gardening, home, miscellaneous, people, photography, pink skates, plants, random, thoughts

My fingernails are looking quite grubby today, they are in desperate need of some TLC and possibly a professional manicure. As the sun came out to play yesterday and Summer seemed to be in the air  I decided to do some miniature gardening yesterday and made up two window boxes and half a hanging-basket.

Since I moved into my tiny home two years ago I have to admit that I do miss having a garden every now and then, today it’s more now as I would love to lounge in a deck chair and enjoy the rare sunny rays that beam down from our Irish skies. But I love my little house and window boxes will just have to do.

As my little cottage is in a bit of  a rough area I decided to buy cheap plastic window boxes and only a few plants, just to see if they would get nicked or trashed. So far things are looking good, my herbs are still intact and the hanging geraniums are nodding happily in the sun.

So yesterday I stood on the path outside my home and dipped my hands into bought dirt, un-potted and planted the few little annuals I bought and got my fingers filthy. While I dug, patted, tousled and watered, life on my cul-de-sac happened around me.

I met two new polish neighbours and a lovely dog called Fred, I  cuddled a few kittens and admired a six year old on pink skates. I watched the sky change colour and clouds float by. Heard the rumble of the commuter train and beats from a not too distant radio echo through the air. I watched a cat stalk a pigeon and children play some sort of chasing game. It really was the perfect summer afternoon and it made me happy.

But as I stood back to admire my handy-work I saw that I needed more, more plants, more afternoons in the sun and definitely more hand-cream.

my home, hoping for more flowers

a little colour till the flowers bloom

peachy roses

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deep freezers, Dublin, fellow customers, food, home, lidl, little old lady, miscellaneous, people, random, roses, shopping, thoughts

As I was wandering around Lidl yesterday, dragging that little blue trolly-basket hybrid (trolsket?) behind me, I couldn’t help but smile.  My fellow customers were just as dripping wet as me and obviously not very happy about it and as I listened in on some of the disgruntled conversations, many not about food and most not in English, it became quite clear that most would rather be elsewhere.

While I was picking out tomatoes, salad and other greens a little old lady wearing a pink plastic hood over her hair was chatting away to her much younger companion. She was listing a strange selection of food that she needed, I mean what kind of combination is condensed milk, sugar and onions? And as she pointed at different items she told the young fellow by her side how her husband use to love his oranges, a sad look passing across her face as her mind wandered back in time.

As I passed by the fruit an older gentleman was seemingly on a quest to find the perfect avocado as he stood impatiently and pressed each one muttering under his breath in frustration or possibly at the fruit itself. As I reached over to make my own quick pick I gave him a smile and he nodded and said with a wink “I need a pint after this.”

A mother standing beside the deep-freezers was giving out to her son in a language I did not understand but even to me it was clear that there would be no profiteroles for dessert that night, even if he had opened the box and bitten into one. The way she glared at her son and glanced around the store it was obvious she wanted to be anywhere but where she was.

At the yogurt section a little girl was counting the tubs and gave me the evil eye as I dared to add a few to my own shopping, I think I messed up her inventory and before I got yelled at I moved on to the cleaning products. But I couldn’t help but hear her whine “Mum can we go home?” as I turned my back. While dropping some washing-up liquid in with the rest of my goods I heard two girls debating about where they were going to go that night and as I turned around I saw that they were already all dolled up and ready to party, oddly out of place in the store but with potatoes, milk and bread in their arms.

On the way to the till I picked up some peach coloured roses, a small gift to myself to brighten up my day. While I paid a longing thought of a hot cup of tea and a piece of buttery toast popped into my head and I smiled at the cashier thinking sometimes there really is no place like home.

the point in disappointment

Tags

disappointment, failure, friends, mental-health, people, psychology, pulitzer prize winning novel, ramblings, thoughts, work, writing

Last week has been filled with disappointment for me. Things I thought were good to go fell through, people I thought about in a certain way changed in my eyes and even an important legal letter I sent was returned to me this morning, telling me to resend to different a address which will make the whole process even longer. As I shift through the dregs of everything that happened I can’t help but feel let down, rejected and stupid.

Of course I know that disappointment is a natural occurrence and actually very important for learning how to deal with difficult situations. If children don’t learn how to deal with failure it is much more likely they’ll be prone to give up and not try hard when adults. So is failure really such a bad thing?

In a world in which success seems to be the only thing worth talking about it is hard to see the point in being disappointed, in failing at something. But studies have shown that there is no correlation between success and happiness. People who strive all their lives to reach certain goals or work hard to earn a lot of money and climb the corporate ladder, often say in their twilight years that they regret no living in the moment as they were always looking towards their goals and the future.

Sometimes the reason why we are disappointed is that we have unattainable ideas of how something should be or our goals are beyond what we can achieve. This doesn’t mean dream small it only means that with big dreams we need to know it will take time and effort. So instead of being disappointed in not becoming an international movie-star over night, we can take joy in having the lead role in the community theater. Or our best-selling Pulitzer prize winning novel may take a while but our article in the local newspaper can be celebrated today.

Other times we are disappointed because although we seem to be working hard to solve a problem, to loss weight or make something happen we forget that in is not always about the amount of work we put in but about the quality of what we do. So without realising it we have been setting ourselves up for failure and won’t be able to achieve our goals. When disappointment kicks in, it can help to take a step back and readjust what we are doing, change our pattern and try again. This way failing isn’t something bad but a lesson learnt and the first step in the right direction.

Sadly disappointment can also occur for no other reason than life is not fair and bad things happen. This means that just because we want something doesn’t mean we are going to get it. But it does mean that as soon as we realise that we will fail at things or people will let us down, we can move on and put the disappointment on a shelf along with our other life-experience memorabilia.

So the point in disappointment is to learn, live now,  change and build up an impressive collection of experiences. There is no shame in feeling upset or being annoyed when you are disappointed, but the sooner you let it go the quicker you can enjoy yourself and what you have now.

With that said I am going to take a few minutes, drink my cup of tea and grumble but then start the week with a new hopefully can-do attitude.

knowing me, knowing you

Tags

friends, fun, memories, miscellaneous, people, random, thoughts

A few days ago the little blue speech-bubble on facebook told me someone had written to me. Surprise, surprise a face from my past popped up and greeted me with the words “Do you still know me?”

I was thrilled to see this photo of a man I once knew and a whole flood of memories invaded my brain of a few summers spent long ago.  My younger self had enjoyed his company and the time we spent together in and out of the theater.  I was a student back then with big dreams and a smaller waistline. My inner hippie was much more active and I had decided to try my hand at acting to varying degrees of success.

While I was skipping down memory lane and opening all those partially forgotten drawers filled with snapshots of the past and memories of happy times the five little words that started this trip struck a cord in me. “Do I still know him?”.

This harmless question got me thinking about how do we know if we know anyone, do we even know ourselves and do others know us? As my mind spiraled out of control and a whole slew of questions came tumbling down I suddenly realised that knowing someone may actually not be that much fun.

Predictability is a great thing but also a little bit boring. Yes, I want to know how people feel, think, interact and react but I also want them to surprise me. I love finding out new things about people I love and when my sister tells me she listens to this band or likes that person I enjoy that I can still wrinkle my nose in disgust and turn to her and say “really?” with a whole array of undertones. I cherish all the information people share with me about their inner most feelings and secrets, I lock them up and hold them dear but I also know there is so much more in their treasure troves of being for me to find out about.

Getting to know someone, even yourself, is like planting a tree and watching it grow. All the information you find out, all the times you spend together, all the memories you created in unison helps the tree grow and bear fruit. So yes, I still know him, or part of him anyway and I hope that the tree of knowing him that was stunted in its growth many years ago will receive new nourishment and grow up to be a bigger tree in the orchard of my life.

How to know yourself

Me, Myself and I

let the sunshine in

Tags

awards, friends, fun, people, random, sunshine

I didn’t see it at first but lovely NotLostJustWeird nominated me for my second award … yeah me and yeah  those who are reading me … not quite a month in and I am amazed at the positive response I am getting. So go and check out Mr Weird and the truly entertaining thoughts of his sometimes lost mind.,

And there are MORE rules to follow.  So here we go:

The Sunshine Award rules:

• Include the award’s logo in a post or on your blog.
• Answer 10 questions about yourself.
• Nominate 10-12 other fabulous bloggers.
• Link your nominees to this post and comment on their blogs, letting them know they have been nominated.
• Share the love and link the person who nominated you.

Here are some questions you might find interesting;

1. Favorite color? I have  a thing for green … all greens from vivid apple-green to the darkest forest green
2. Favorite animal? I think I would have liked the Dodos, just look at the drawings and you know they are a little bit stupid but so much fun
3. Favorite number? Have none, but one with 1/2 in it … always good to have that little bit extra
4. Favorite non-alcoholic drink? Tea, black tea, really strong with a drop of milk … otherwise water
5. Preferred Body Part? Have a freckle on my right foot that I enjoy
6. What Are You Passionate About? Shoes, laughing and my friends
7. What is the phrase or sentence you are least likely to hear? You are going bald
8. Favorite place? Anywhere near water, preferably the sea but a beautiful lake is also lovely
9. Favorite day of the week? Saturdays … everything and anything is possible on a  Saturday
10. Favorite flower? Love most flowers but have a thing for forget-me-nots, poppies, cornflowers and  Sunflowers … but any will brighten my day
11. If a rhinoceros is trotting across the Serengeti, and it rains while you’re standing near the river, what do crocodiles eat for dinner? crocodiles don’t do dinner, are strictly breakfast creatures

And here are my nominees … wonderful blogs I pop in on and that inspire me:

The lovely Miles

Gorgeous jotsfromasmallapt

Entertaining morezenow

Funny lilandjill

Readable Kate

The fabulous  Sorryiamnotsorry

Pink Suzy

Interesting 400days

Insightful Jen

Creative The middlest sister