2010

I have to say that 2010 has been a bit of an up and down year for me. Obviously there have been some great highs- James and I brought our first home together, I finished my degree, I got a proper job; these are all good and exciting things. Yet amid all of this I have struggled with unemployment for a time, I mostly hated the last semester of my degree and I have over stressed and worried about just about every decision that I’ve made. Grown up life is scary. And after writing that it sounds to me like it was the process of this year that I have struggled with whilst I enjoyed the outcomes, which is possibly a good description.

All over the blog sphere there are plenty of inspirational posts from amazing women who are reveling in the goals which they achieved in 2010 and setting themselves new ones for 2011. This is a laudable process and I truly, truly admire people who have the self discipline and will to make these things happen for themselves on their own. I am not that girl. I struggle with motivation and general all round laziness. I need a good kick up the butt from our old friend motivation to get me doing things.

Thus I have decided to make myself small goals. Achievable goals. But goals which I think will be beneficial to me none the less. Goals where I will have help getting there. A hand to hold on my way. I am guilty of not taking the time to care enough for myself, I get too wrapped up in working, stressing and letting tiredness overcome me, so my goals are designed to help me overcome these traits.

With this in mind my aims for 2011 are centered round the idea of happiness. I want to be happier. Less worried and more accepting of ‘what will be will be’. Not complacent. But to get a greater appreciation of the idea that there are things in this world which I cannot change and that worrying about them will not help. To be generally more at peace with the world.


Photo Credit

So without further ado in 2011....

1. I want to take the time to nurture my artistic side. I love drawing, taking photos and creating things. But this often takes a back seat. I want this to change for me and spend more time making myself happier by letting myself feel free to do this sort of thing.
2. I want to create myself some ‘downtime’ one evening a week. Some time just to relax and not worry about achieving anything.
3. I want to drink more water and exercise more.
4. I want to create myself a regular posting schedule on this blog and be more disciplined in my writing.

There we go. No where near as far reaching as some of the goals I have seen people try to attempt, but these are goals which I really think will help me be happier and more focused in 2011.

I hope everyone has a relaxing and safe New Years Celebration planned. As I am working tomorrow I don’t think James and I will get much further than a bottle of wine and some time on the sofa, but still, sometimes those evenings are the best!

Its been a pleasure to write for you in 2010 and I look forward to continuing this conversation in 2011.

Stay safe, Lindy xxxx

Bath time...

Apologies for my absence over the last few days. Christmas and then going back to work have monopolised my time pretty effectively. Stupidly I have volunteered to do a double shift this Saturday, so I'm working 1000- 1830 during the day and then 2200-600 in the morning over night!

In order to put a buffer up against this particular brand of insanity I'm off to have a nice relaxing bath with some of my new spa bath things (a thoughtful Christmas present), a favourite book and a specially made playlist.

Bliss.

Happy Wednesday my friends

Lindy xxx

7 Good Things Vol 5

Well I seem to be able to write about two posts a weeks at the moment. I'm going to try and aim for three in the new year, but I have so much to do between now and Christmas, that is a bit more of a long term plan!

So without no further ado, here are my 7 Good Things for this, and considering that it's Christmas week I have a little theme going on here.

1. Snow, snow, snow! I can't be the only person fervently hoping for a white Christmas can I? These pictures were taken on my way to work this morning. I quite like the blurry effect, and thus I'm going to pretend that it was a deliberate artistic choice designed to demonstrate movement in the landscape and the seasons. Yup. It takes an art GCSE to teach you how to write that kind of crap!



2. An abundance of Christmas puddings. Both my Mum and James' Nan have made us home made Christmas puddings this year which makes me very happy, as I love the stuff with a passion.



3. Fairy lights. So so pretty.



4. Christmas trees (see above!) And yes I hear you say, but Lindy you are yet to put an angel on the top and what is this, you haven't wrapped any presents to go underneath either? To which I can only reply that I haven't had a day off since the 5th of December so my mottos this Christmas go somewhat along the lines of, 'if it doesn't come from Amazon, you ain't getting it' and 'blerrg I have no time and need some more sleep!'


5. Christmas music playing in my office. Makes my day go a lot lot faster.



6. See this post. My heart has been ripped out by the generousity of people. I think Jenny and the commentators have given away nearly $20000. I could cry. In fact I did.



7. James' volunteering to do all the Christmas dinner cooking. Although this might have something to do with my inability to cook anything with out burning it, ruining it and generally making a once edible food stuff inedible, I am still incredibly grateful. A relaxing Christmas day is in my future (I sincerely hope).

Happy Christmas week!

Love Lindy xxxx

Christmas Spirit

Hi guys.

If you want to be simultaneously heartbroken, gladdened, saddened, angered by the injustice in the world and have your faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity restored please go and read this post and ensuing comments by the incomparable Jenny at The Bloggess.

I think what struck me most when I was done crying my eyes out (on a train no less) was the amount of people who were struggling because of medical bills or lack of medical insurance. Living in a country with universal healthcare has made me complacent when it comes to the great gift which Clement Attlee's government gave me in 1946. Complacency is dangerous, and reading all of those stories in the comments has made me far more grateful for what I do have this Christmas season.

I thought back to what one of my Sixth Form philosophy teachers once told me. We were debating in class about the problem of evil, and one of my clearest memories is him calling me naive for believing that people were inherently good. I thought that the majority of people operated from the belief that they are doing 'good' (whatever it may be that they define as 'good'), and it is this act of striving for goodness which fuels most of what humanity does and aims for. (No matter how obscured these aims can become with other trivial matters such as materialism etc...) My teacher through this was an incredibly naive perspective and lambasted me as such.

I have thought about this difference in perspectives many times since that day. The fundamental difference that there is in thinking that we are born good and strive to fulfil this intrinsic aspect of our nature and believing that we are born with the taint of evil upon us and that we spend a lifetime struggling against this to achieve good against the odds.

Across the years I have been confronted with the unjustness and pain of the world, and the anger which comes from knowing that most of this pain is unnecessary and man made. I have oscillated between what I believed at 16 and what my teacher told me was the true nature of humanity.

But this little corner of the web has made me look at things afresh. Thank you Jenny, today I am returning to me at 16.

Love Lindy xxx

Geekery

I think the words are bad, bad Lindy.

And I had been so good at posting 7 good things on a Monday as well. Then something had to come and ruin it. But kind, generous and understanding reader. This is not my fault. A man. A man has bewitched me with his words. With his anger. With his humour. And with his insight. Yet mostly I also blame my sister. She introduced me to this bewitching site. Made it rule my life for the last week. Made me forgo such things as getting enough sleep, making myself dinner, and even, yes even getting cups of tea. This site made me happy that my trains were delayed and cancelled so that I had more reading time. Made me happy to sit in the cold waiting for replacement bus services. It is this good.

My 7 good things this week all revolve around these two site:

Mark Reads

and

Mark Watches

Mark is an American writer who writes hilarious reviews of all the things I like. Like literally. The geeky fan girl in me has been having a party all week. Harry Potter? Big massive check. Firefly? Epic check. Mocking Twilight? He's there. Making the Hunger Games sound like the books I wanted them to be? He is all over this. Doctor Who? He will be as of next week!

And yes I'm sitting here in my hand knit Slytherin scarf as I write. Why do you ask?



Excuse me I have to go and geek out in the corner...

Lindy xxx

Imagine

Today is the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's death all the way back in 1980. In honour of this I though I would post some links to some of my favourite songs from him. Enjoy!




(The actual video is on Youtube, but is disabled for embedding. This is just such a good song, I couldn't resist.)


(Yes I know this is a McCartney led track, but i just couldn't leave it out!)



Truly one of the greats.

Happy Wednesday

Lindy xxx

7 Good Things Vol 3

After a beautifully relaxing weekend (mostly) off of work returning today was a bit of a jarr. But being so relaxed it doesn't take much to come up with 7 good things!

1. James, for making me laugh


2. Cups of tea for keeping me warm


3. My new shirt which was 90% off

4. New grey nail polish

5. A warm house to come home too


6. Finally having tidied up!


7. A Christmas poinsettia


Happy Monday my friends

Lindy xxxx

Saturday Steals- Vol 19

The last Saturday stealing opportunity of the year! How exciting! Being the thrifty kinda gal that I am it has warmed the cockles of my heart sharing all the great deals I have found with you this year.

And yes, I think I save the best till last!

This skirt.


I saw it in the staff reductions at work a while back- it was reduced to £3.60, a pretty good price for a skirt, but I just never got round to picking it up.

Then a few weeks later I saw this...



10p! How can I resist a skirt for 10p?!

I interrupt this post to point out that James decided to interrupt my photography session and colonise my time for a while. He also mucked around trying to cut my hair a little (and he succeeded) and put boot polish in my HAIR! I yelled, then chased him, then he chased me, and before we could get too Tom and Jerry the giggles over took me. Its really hard to win a fight when your laughing. But still. He put boot polish in my hair and this is an unforgivable crime! He must pay. Just not right now because he gave me a donut and some milkshake.



Back to the skirt. Sainsbury's were also having a 25% off stunt on clothing as well, so not only was the skirt 10p to begin with it was then reduced. Making this the grand total of 7p!

7p!

Defiantly my steal of the year. Now if only the temperature could make it out of the minus numbers and I could wear it!


Happy Saturday Stealing!

Lindy xxxx

Library Love

I think I may have mentioned before how much I love the library. In fact I love it so much, I even worked there for a short time and contemplated a career as a librarian. (I then concluded that those hallowed hall were not nearly so much fun when you weren't there to read the books, but hey, my love of the institution is unending.)

I love them so much that I braved the arctic snow conditions yesterday (hey I'm british, 3 cms of snow is a lot around these parts), and visited the library in the small town where I work. I had decided that the perfect antidote to staring at a computer all day was to have a little lunch time browsing, thus I went out in to the snow wearing heels. Yes, yes, your free to laugh at me too.

However, I did score some pretty dandy finds from a gentle browse of the shelves.

Number One: Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.



I had read about this book somewhere before and the title jumped out at me and had stuck in my brain. I'm about two thirds of the way through this one now, and its quite an interesting read. I have an ongoing interest in religious philosophy and the forms that religious experience can take so I was immediately drawn to this book, which I suppose is best described as a memoir of religious feeling.

Number Two: Called out of Darkness by Anne Rice.



There is a bit of a religious theme developing here, but this is Anne Rice's description of how she left 30+ years of atheism and returned to the Catholicism of her childhood. I had read about her conversion else where and was interested to see how she reconciled this centuries old unbending faith with her modern (post modern?) attitude to the last thirty years of her life. Particularly with regards to the fact that her son was openly gay, not a life that the church would endorse. I actually finished this book yesterday. For a writer who is as good, and as experienced as Anne, I found some of the prose a little clunky, like she was trying to express her childhood in terms beyonds the means of words. Over all an interesting read but she seemed to dismiss recent church history and events, happy to live in a state oblivious to the recent developments within the church- concentrating wholly on the sensual and emotional experience of religion. A sentiment that the rational me found difficult to accept fully.

Number Three: The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski



I picked this up mostly on a whim. I would seem to be a mix of memoir and history based on the fall of the Ethiopian government in 1974. This is an area which I know absolutely nothing about about so should be an formative experience to read when it comes to my knowledge of recent (well fairly) politics! I also thought it was slim so thus would be easy to carry to work!

Number Four:A Thousand Miles of Dreams by Sasha Su- Ling Welland



Again this is another random pick that I found whilst browsing. I was not after this book. I was however attracted by it title and the fact that the jacket describes it as a mix between a novel with a large dose of anthropology- my kind of book!


Number Five: Life in the Medieval Cloister by Julie Kerr



Continuing the theme of by interest in orthodox expressions of religion I picked up this one. I think it is a brief historical introduction. Most of which I (hope) I will already know as this formed a rather large study component of my degree, but, what can I say I was feeling nostalgic! The writing style looks to be clear and engaging and it will be nice to used those brain muscles once more!

All in all a pretty good haul! Things to keep me busy during the snow for the next few days!

I hope the snow isn't affecting your life to drastically, and people, drive slowly and safely!

Lindy xxx