Lightening Online

Yes, today IS Valentine’s Day so what better topic for my Smiley Saturday post?

I know Valentine’s Day is one of those “overcommercialised” holidays that some people prefer to ignore.

BUT…

The sentiment is kind of nice isn’t it?

A day to celebrate love.

With all the horror that Australia has seen this past week, I think there is so much good that can also come out of this tragedy:

• The realisation of how fortunate we are to have our loved ones when so many are grieving the loss of theirs.
• The importance of telling our loved ones how we feel - for none of us are guaranteed a “tomorrow”.

Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be commercial.

One of the best Valentine’s I was ever given was a single rose from a home garden. Given to me by a guy when we were in year 12. Carried to school in an empty milk carton ( a clean one). All day, I was asked why I had milk in my locker. LOL.

What made it so special?

I think it seemed rather heartfelt and simple. In general, I’m not overly comfortable with people spending money on me (which is a pity really!!!) so it was meaningful without me ending up uncomfortable. And it was unexpected. And I LOVE flowers. So much beauty and promise - they always make me smile (although some also make me sneeze).

Sadly, the story didn’t end up with a happy ending. Most of my Valentine’s stories don’t have happy endings.

That doesn’t stop it from remaining a very precious memory though. I’ll always be thankful for the thoughtfulness of that guy.

Farmboy and I rarely celebrate Valentine’s Day. Our wedding anniversary is at the end of March so we tend to wait until then to celebrate. Not that we haven’t gone out for dinner some years and once he gave me my eternity ring (with 5 love hearts) for Valentine’s Day rather than waiting until our wedding anniversary (a great element of surprise that time!).

This year we’re having a couple of nights away in between Valentine’s Day and our wedding anniversary. When you’ve got kids it can be more about taking opportunities when they present themselves than worrying about a certain date.

Today I’m planning on making a Pink Cake in the shape of a love heart. Something the whole family can share and a way of showing them I love them.

Sometimes it’s the simple gestures that mean the most.

How are you planning on showing your love today?

Happy Smiley Saturday.  I hope you and your loved ones can find a reason to smile today and a way to say “I Love You”.

I was lying in bed last night beating myself up over every word that has left my mouth in the last week or so.

Every now and then I have a tendency to do that.

Usually when I’m over-tired.

But not always.

And it hit me quite calmly between the eyes.

I hate myself.

Sounds kind of pathetic when you put it in writing.

I mean, I’ve always known I had an unhealthy lack of self esteem.

A fact that I felt was warranted until more recent times.

You know, like I don’t “deserve” to have a good self esteem. I have no “reason” to have a good self-esteem. Stuff like that.

Last night was different. Unemotional. Detached.

A very quiet understanding of the facts.

“I Hate Myself”.

Well, that’s kind of STUPID.

But what do you do?

Is there some magic formula for “unhating” yourself?

*sigh*

January is a BIG month in our family for birthday’s. Singstar Princess on the 11th, Farmboy on the 25th and Lleyton on the 29th. So, as you can imagine, we EAT a LOT of cake!

Here is a look at our January birthday cakes.

It all began with a cake for Singstar Princesses sleep-over. Lleyton got to have 2 friends sleep over for his 8th birthday so Singstar Princess got to do the same. It’s not all that easy to try and arrange a sleep-over in the middle of the summer holidays but we managed. She chose to have it down the beach which worked out really well.

Her choice of cake for her sleep-over was an ice cream cake in the shape of a love heart. She decorated it herself, with the help of the 2 girls that were sleeping over.

I used vanilla ice cream and mixed smarties into it before moulding it in a heart shaped cake tin. Princess Singstar chose the decorations (although the candles were something I picked up during the year).

Her actual birthday was 2 days after the sleep over and fell on a Sunday so I made a slab cake for morning tea at church. Singstar Princess had a great time decorating it:

I drew the 8 into the icing but she did the rest. In fact, we had to stop her before the 8 became completely lost in a sea of lollies! LOL. She had fun though and enjoyed sharing a cake with our church friends, even if many were away that week (all the more for the rest of us!).

Of course, we couldn’t then have a family birthday tea without a cake. This is the one she chose:

She does love her PINK and her FLOWERS. A real girly girly!

I don’t have a ring cake pan so had to make 2 circles and cut out the centres. Trailer Boy and his cousin (who is also 5) had a great time icing the left over circles and COVERING them in lollies.

Yes, 3 cakes for 1 birthday - am I an AWESOME mum or what? ROFLOL (that’s “roll on the floor laughing out loud” for those who don’t “do” netspeak).

Farmboy was so impressed with my efforts making Singstar Princess an ice cream cake that I decided to make one for his birthday.

His favourite ice cream is cookies and cream so I bought some Oreo’s and some plain Chocolate Ripple biscuits and mixed them in with the ice cream.

This one was a lot easier because I was at home and had my electric mixer rather than trying to do it by hand like I had done with Singstar Princess’s cake.

You can just see that I added some plain vanilla ice cream to the bottom (which was the top when I was making it). With some crumbled flake and leftover chockies from another project, it was AWESOME!!!! (even if I do say so myself).

We had a bit of a dilemma with Lleyton’s birthday cake. He had already worked on his own design (all sketched out on paper) well before we knew we’d be away for his birthday. So, I got him to make his cake on the weekend before his birthday and we shared it with a few others.

We ended up with a truckload of lollies left over too!

As things turned out, our plans changed and we were home the night of Lleyton’s birthday. Well, you can’t have a birthday tea without a cake but I was feeling rather “caked out” by this point in the month. So I came up with this:

A Home Brand French Cheesecake I had in the freezer sprinkled with crushed Flake. Lleyton is a big cheesecake so it went over quite well.

All in all, we had some lovely birthday celebrations in January and not surprisingly, I’m rather “caked out”. Fitting into my jeans has been somewhat of a problem too! Ah-hem.

We got the dreaded email this morning.

Somebody we know was killed in the bushfires.

Why is it that when we’re personally involved, everything seems so much worse?

Like when the figures were just a number, they were tragic…. yet distant.

Now we have names and faces and someone to grieve, the tragedy rises a notch.

The figures don’t change. The tragedy remains the same. And yet it touches you in a new and heavier way.

It becomes PERSONAL.

I mean, I don’t get it. EVERY life that has been lost MATTERS. Whether I personally knew them or not.

And as it happens, this family that we “know” is actually someone Farmboy knows (not me personally). And yet, it somehow reaches to a deeper recess of my heart than before.

The human psyche is interesting. And complicated.

Australia is not a big place. I think over time everybody will know somebody affected. Or know somebody who knows somebody. A tragedy of this magnitude will leave it’s scars for a long time to come.

But we will go on. We will learn and we will fight. Our human spirit will allow no less.

If you haven’t had a chance to contribute to the relief funding being collected, you can find more details on how to do so here.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m back to boot camp today. Okay, not really “boot camp”. But I am going back to my personal training sessions at the gym today. After I’m not sure how many weeks off. Fortunately I haven’t had all of those weeks off of actual “exercise” but it’ll still be interesting to see how I pull up after the break.

Plus of course the lovely “weigh and measure”. Ack!

Anyway, I’m been working on a few goals etc for this year (as per a plan my trainer gave me at the end of last year). Being the “non procrasinator” that I am (*cough* *cough*), I finally got around to working on them LAST NIGHT. Not that I haven’t been thinking about them. I just needed to formalise my thoughts a little.

I’m figuring the place I’m least likely to lose them is by putting them on here . Plus, you guys can help keep me accountable to my goals for the year.

MY 2009 FITNESS PLAN

What is your fitness program like now?

Today my program consists of….

Exercising most days depending on weather, energy levels and time.

It makes me feel…

OK but not great. I feel like I would like to do more.

Write a vision (in the present tense) of what you want to achieve in 2009. Make it compelling - what you will see, hear, feel when you have it.

I have lots of energy and my body craves and enjoys healthy foods. I look forward to any opportunity to engage in physical activity and exercise on a daily basis. I can feel myself getting fitter and stronger each week as I continue to challenge myself to stretch my limits.

Write down 4 BIG goals which will help you achieve this vision:

1. Be able to run 6km (long-term goal: To be able to do a 12km fun run)

2. Be able to do 20 full push-ups

3. Get back under 70kg’s and stay out of the 70’s forever! (need to lose around 5kg to get there - same 5kg’s I tried to lose last year. *sigh* One can only keep trying - right?)

4. Be able to lift that weights bar thingy (yeah, real technical terms here) with actual WEIGHTS on the end. LOL.

What will your life be like if you achieve these goals?

Fun and Energetic

Healthy

What will your life be like if you don’t achieve them?

Frustrating

What are you going to do TODAY to start moving forward to achieve your goals?

You mean I actually have to DO something????? Bummer!

Well, I think I really need some better accountability for the foods I eat (or the stuff that’s not really “food”) and for getting back into the “habit” of exercising daily.

2009 IN 3 PARTS

In my mind, 2009 is divided into the following 3 parts:

Part 1: Before the “Big Trip”

Part 2: The “Big Trip”

Part 3: After the “Big Trip”

Here are my general thoughts for each part in terms of fitness, health, weight loss etc.

Part 1: Before the “Big Trip”

• Make daily exercise a habit so that it seems strange “not” to exercise (have achieved this before and have been struggling to get back on track)
• Lose 5kg so that I’m “under 70kg”
• Work on a gradual change in my eating patterns so that my body craves nutritious food and isn’t interested in “junk” (again, I have achieved this before and I’m struggling to get it back)
• Be able to run 6km comfortably

Part 2: During the “Big Trip”

• Maintain my weight (ie don’t GAIN weight)
• Maintain my fitness levels
• Focus on being as active and healthy as possible

Part 3: After the “Big Trip”

To be decided when we get back.

And that’s kind of my year in a nutshell. I’ll try and “report in” on my progress from time to time. Keep me accountable and all that.

I don’t often watch the news. In my experience, the really bad news travels so fast that you hardly need to watch the news in order to keep up. The rest of it I can really do without.

When the kids put the tv on a little while ago to watch a DVD, I happened to catch a snippet of news saying that at least 50 people had died in Bushfires raging across Victoria.

Thinking I must have read wrong, I decided to search the net for the latest news.

Oh my….

65 Dead, Hundreds of Homes Lost as Bushfires Rage Through Victoria

Hell On Earth: 65 Dead

Just a couple of the news headlines right now.

For the entire heatwave, there has been the dread of a life threatening bushfire. But I imagine no-one imagined anything like this.

It’s so shocking and awful and tragic that words fail me.

Please spare a thought and a prayer for those who are and will continue to be affected by this horrible tragedy.

I know there is tragedy every day, somewhere in the world.

But this…. it’s so close to home that I guess it hits home even harder.

If you’re someone who has been affected (directly and indirectly), I want to send out my heartfelt sympathy to you.

I feel so helpless.

I’m sure there will be appeals in the days to come.

A way to help us reach out and say that we care.

Cos that’s what us Aussies do best. We pull together in a crisis. No matter how near or how far.

It helps us to feel just that little bit less helpless.

I was recently browsing the FAIL blog so I thought I’d post a few of my favourites here for Smiley Saturday:

Bwaahaahaaa….I’m such a “clearance junkie” I’d probably still buy it!!! (okay, I wouldn’t really).

Please tell me they are NOT children in the back of that truck!!!

Why I’ll never drive over a bridge if a ship is coming through!

Words fail me with this one - I keep laughing too hard.

For more laughs, check out Fail Blog.

Hope you’re having a Smiley Saturday!

Feel free to join in by publishing your own Smiley Saturday post, linking back here and adding a link to your post into the Mr Linky below.

Remember a few weeks ago I mentioned a new website and magazine called Way2Go? At the time I said to stay tuned for another announcement. Well, the announcement is finally here (albeit a little later than we’d originally planned but here nonetheless).

Way2Go are running a special competition EXCLUSIVELY for Lightening Online readers. What that means is that you SHOULD enter because your chances of winning a prize are quite HIGH.

Prizes up for grabs are:

1. The five winning entrants will receive 1 x Rebel Sports voucher (valued at $100) and 1 x one year subscription to Way2Go magazine (valued at $35.70)
2. The ten second place entrants will receive 1 x one year subscription to Way2Go magazine

So, what do you have to do?

Simply sign up to the Way2Go website and use the code word “lighteningonline” in the section “Promotional Code”. Then submit your own travel story to the website. Winning stories will be selected by the Way2Go team (check out the Terms and Conditions for more details).

You can find my first article “A Dream Is Born” on the website which details a little of our background story to the Big Trip we’re taking this year. I hope you’ll pop over there and leave me a comment (make me feel loved) and then sign up and submit your own story. I know many of you have great travel stories just busting to be shared.

Competition closes at 9am on 3 March, 2009. Unfortunately, this time round, this competition is only open to Australian Residents (apologies to my international readers - you know I still love you *mwah*). You can view the full Terms and Conditions here.

I really hope you’ll take the time to support this competition as the more successful it is, the more likely we’ll be offered other exclusive giveaways in the future. The total prize pool is in excess of $1000 which is obviously something I couldn’t offer on my own. My thanks go to the Way2Go team and James at Zing for offering this competition to my blog readers.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get over there! Oh, and don’t forget to come back and let me know about your story so I can come and give you some comment love too!

I’ve started a discussion on the 2009 Bloggies and related Blog Awards over on Lightening’s Blogworld. I hope you’ll come on over and contribute your thoughts to the discussion.

I’m closing comments on this post so that all discussion can be kept in the one place.

Please pop over and add your thoughts.

Cold Feet

I had an interesting experience while we were in Adelaide. I got COLD FEET about our upcoming “Big Trip”. In my defence, we’d left home at 3am to avoid travelling in the heat of the day. The kids were mostly awake instead of sleeping and therefore were tired. We’d been out and about in the 40C+ heat, visited family whom I love dearly but wear me out quickly, tried to go shopping in a Centre that was without power (therefore no shopping and NO air con for about half an hour) and then took the kids swimming (which they loved but they also love jumping all over me) while Farmboy set up in the caravan park.

To top it all off, the bathroom nearest where our van was was the closest to the pool and had been overused, undercleaned and was not only hot but STANK!!! The joys of a large caravan park in a heatwave!!!!

So while we were away I had a couple of “can I really live like this for 3 months?” moments.

The good news is that by the time we left, the heat wave was easing, people in the park were once again becoming friendly (no doubt feeling the relief and becoming more sociable once again) and I was ready to head off there and then. I think it was a good experience because if it happens while we’re away, I’ll know that I’m tired (seems to be a direct correlation between feeling tired and wanting to go home) and that it will pass.

Keeping Cool

We did manage to survive the extreme heat while we were in Adelaide, despite power outages and being out and about in the heat most days. We were EXTREMELY lucky to get a site right next to the pool (the closest in the park I’m sure) so it was mega-easy to go for a “cool off” dip.

The air conditioner in the caravan worked REALLY well. We had a number of people asking us how we were finding it in the heat (in the caravan park that is). We had no problems sleeping (which is always the biggest issue in a heatwave I think) although the ends did get a tiny bit warm for sleeping in during the day (with the sun on the canvas).

We spent the entire day Saturday in the caravan park (with the exception of going out for a nice lunch) which is something we always SAY we’d like to do but end up too busy doing other things to actually get around to doing it. So that was a welcome break!

The only issue we struggled with was trying to get the caravan fridge cool. The caravan had been unplugged all day Friday while it was being serviced so the fridge was quite warm and it struggled in the heat to get the temperature down (and therefore chill our water etc). Farmboy ended up buying some ice and adding that to the fridge which really helped it along and once it was cool, it kept nice and cool.

Warm Fridges

Speaking of warm fridges, we came home to a bit of a disaster. A power outage caused a surge overload and flicked out one of our fuses while we were away. When I opened the fridge, it was warm inside and everything was spoilt. The milk had curdled so much that it was completely separated!!! Ewww…..

AND the freezer had defrosted.

We lost about $500 worth of food.

What a waste!!!

Fortunately, we’re covered by insurance (for all but $100 of it). But to arrive home at 3am in the morning (we travelled at night coming home as well) and have to deal with all of that was simply delightful! (NOT!). Now I have to write up a list of everything we lost and try to estimate a value so that we can claim it on insurance. *sigh*

This wasn’t the way I’d planned on decluttering our food supplies!!!

Oh Well

We’re home. We’re surviving the heat wave and at least now the nights are a lot cooler than they were.

Lleyton got the all-clear on his post-op check-up but it looks like his Podiatrist appointment will be costing us for a while to come - he needs orthotics for his shoes ($650 a pop plus podiatrist fees). Still, it’s a small price to pay if it will help reduce his knee injuries. And we’ve suspected for a while now that he’d need something. Unfortunately, his feet don’t turn in the same so he really does need the custom made jobs. And double bummer is the fact that our Private Health doesn’t cover ANY podiatry costs! I think I’m going to need to review our cover and see if I can find a more useful policy out there!

And now I’m going back to bed. Farmboy is finally asleep (he decided to stay up the rest of the night rather than get 2 hours sleep before having to get the kids off to school) and I’ve had about 5 hours which really isn’t enough.

I’ll try and catch up on responding to your comments and visiting your blogs soon.