c'est la vie

I love lists. I love paper and pens.  I love my iPad.  And I love lists.  The Apple iPen designed to work with an iPad, is a fantastic innovation.  My notes screen is filled with handwritten entries .... ideas for blogs, work reminders, lists etc etc. So even if it takes me a few days to get to something, it is written down.  So when we went away for a few days after New Year, I had my little list ready the week before.  However, making a list and then following the list, are 2 separate things.  And I usually do not depart without ticking off every last item. So having bundled the adult offspring x 2, off to the Kruger Park with a family friend, hubby and I leapt into the car, marvelled at how little luggage there seemed to be when it is just him and I (first time in a long time) and hit the road. It was a leisurely drive, quick stops here and there for coffee and such - it was New Year’s Day and the only things open and trading were the...

New beginnings are so important.  This is how we renew, reinvent, revive and reset ourselves.  These new beginnings do not always have to mean that you chuck up everything that you know and do and go off on a tangent finding yourself a new job, new car, new life and new address.  It does not have to be that complex. Just reset yourself where you are, in your current circumstances. I recently wrote about my aversion to New Years’ Resolutions.  I also do not tie new beginnings to the 1 January deadline for starting. Now my life had/has settled a bit again.  I stopped driving my daughter around when she finished studying and started working in CT.  I drove my son around right till Matric last year and after he got his licence last month, and got a car, he now gets himself around (but is not adverse to still sometimes riding with mom, or getting mom to ride with him).  So I started the year with nothing to worry about in the morning but me.  Getti...

📚📚📚 So today the much awaited (or feared) Matric Results for the #Classof2017 were released.   Now some students would have been waiting with great joy, some with great trepidation, some with great angst, others with complete confidence and others still with utter panic.  Every student would like to do his or her best. OK, maybe most students. Some have to additionally do their mother or father’s concept of what their “best” is.  Some have had no guidance or family life or had a lack of books and/or stationery and will fail as a result.  Others will have those same restrictions and soar.  The press and social media are full of success stories today.  From all spheres of life, all incomes, all family backgrounds.  I saw and heard and read of kids with distinctions from upmarket schools but I also saw my fair share of kids with that many distinctions from not such upmarket schools or very understaffed and underequipped schools.  I saw stori...

💛💜 So, how many of your New Year resolutions have you already broken?  It is, after all, already the 5th of January. I have given up with the resolutions thing.  What does it do?  Brings pressure.  Extra stress.  Huge expectations.  I have realized that if I need to sleep more, I need to do it now.  If I want to lose 10kg, I need to start now.  No matter whether now is Feb, June or September of a year.  The emergence of a new year gives us this false sense of a “starting point” - a belief that if you start on the first day of the new year, what can go wrong?  I am not knocking anyone for whom this works.  Just not for me. So let me cover the highlights of the years that I did try.  Let’s take food.  So on the 1st of January I decide that I will no longer eat chocolate or drink fizzy cold drinks.  At 11am the box of Quality Street chocolates from the previous year are staring at me.  They are feeling sad be...