I’m a winner!

Hours I’ve been awake today: 2
Cups of coffee I’ve had today: 2
Episodes of Mentalist watched today: 2
Pages of a novel read: 37
Hours studying for Monday’s exam: 0

So I am not having a very productive day so far, in fact, I have not been very productive this whole week. That despite the fact that I have 2 exams coming up next week, I have a very disorganised lounge/dining room as my rearranging it did not work out the way I saw it in my mind and I have a weight loss challenge with my dad that started on Tuesday and I’m only now trying to work out a healthy eating plan for it.

The only sparkle in my week so far is that I finally received my prize I won from Masterchef SA, Nederburg and Le Creuset!

I have wanted to start my Le Creuset collection for a couple of years now but just could not decide what colour range to go with and now my colour scheme has been chosen for me by Le Creuset themselves; Cerise.

It feels so great winning something, especially when it’s things you love, like Nederburg wine and Le Creuset!

Celebrating a furry birthday

My little monkey turned 13 yesterday and we celebrated with a quiet lunch of her favourite take-out, sushi. She absolutely adores sushi and that is the one type of food where she forgets all her manners and doggy training and normally tries to grab it out of my plate or mouth when I eat it. Needless to say, she devoured her little plate in seconds.

It has been an emotional couple of weeks for me, when it comes to my little girl. Firstly, her mommy, Bambi, died in August. She lived with my dad and we always used to joke that his order of children goes me, Bambi and then my sister. She had a heart attack on my dad’s lap as he was driving her to the vet. She was almost 15 years old. She is still missed and our hearts still hurt when we talk about her.

Then about 4 weeks ago, my little monkey got sick. She had a bit of a cough and cold, like she usually gets in the winter or when it rains a lot, but something else was wrong too. She was acting in a way I have never seen before. So after rushing her to the vet, she was diagnosed with a heart murmur and her heart was beating at only 40% capacity, which means she was not getting enough oxygen. She was put on cronic heart medication and 2 days later already showed amazing improvement. When her antibiotics ran out, she still had a cough and had also developed this weird gasping breathing when she sleeps. So back to the vet I went and after having x-rays taken, my vet’s suspicions were confirmed and she was also diagnosed with a partially collapsed trachea. For which there is no treatment but I am also assured that she is in no pain.

Needless to say, I have cried more over the last 2 months than I have in years and having to face my little Thumper’s mortality has been very hard and not something I have really been able to cope with. 13 years of raising and loving one of the cutest, bitchiest, naughtiest, most unique doglets ever forms a bond and having to face that one day she will not be around is breaking my heart.

Living on a farm, we’ve had a lot of dogs growing up and I loved them all, but I have only had 3 dogs that were mine and whom I loved completely with all my heart. The first was Snoekie, a little min pinch cross I picked out of a litter when I was 4 years old. She grew up to be 18 and she died in my arms. Then came Bambi whom I had to leave behind with my dad when I went to college, but she was treated like a queen in his care and I have seen him break each and every one of his pet rules when he accepted Bambi into his care. And then came little Thumper, born on my bed, very early in the morning of my very first matric finals exams

And as I sit here typing this post, biting back tears and thinking of the wonderful dogs who were and still is, part of my life, how wonderful and different and unique they all were and how much I have loved each of them, I do not think my heart will be cope with the loss of another one. Even though, I know it is the cycle of life and inevitable, I cannot stand the heartache.

It’s more than just dust and music

Oppikoppi was definitely the highlight of August, and the rest of the month was lived in the shadows that are known as Post Koppi Depression. For a while there, I though I was going to miss yet another year because over the last 3 years all my friends had suddenly gotten “too old” for things like music festivals (even the ones younger than me). But I caught a lucky break in July, when I mentioned it to GB who was in exactly the same position as me. GB and I have been friends for a long time, but over the last few years, our friendship has morphed into 2 or 3 visits a year and a couple of phone calls. This is a perfectly natural thing when one friend starts having children, because no matter how anti-children they were before the baby comes, once it is here, it is the topic of 98% of conversations. But such is life, and that is a topic for another day. So after getting permission from his wife, we bought our tickets for Oppikoppi and the excitement started.

GB was so excited and he tried to plan everything, even though he has only been to the 2nd Oppikoppi, 18 years ago. This turned into daily phone calls (sometimes as many as 3 or 4 calls a day). It was insane, after a while I kept saying to him he should stop calling me so much as we didn’t even have anything new to talk about, he just laughed and kept calling and we would have the same conversation over and over again.  But eventually the 6th arrived and it was time for us to drive to Northam where our adventure began.

Now let me just say that even though the phone calls were way too much for me, and there was the Thursday of me being super irritated at GB for many, many reasons (all of them valid), the rest of the time we had a great time, we got along well and by Sunday, even though I could not wait to go pick up my little princess (the doglet), take a long hot shower and be by myself again, we were still friends, and after 2 days of phone calls, I am yet to hear from him again. So our friendship is intact.

Every one who has ever been to Oppikoppi will agree that there is just no way to describe how awesome it is. It’s like Oppikoppi is it’s own little planet where like-minded, yet totally different people come together for the love of music, alcohol, dust and a good time. Everything, from the minute you unpack the car and strangers come over to help you set up your tent, to jumping up and down in front of a stage with thousands of fans singing along to your favourite bands and finally having to pack up after 3 glorious days to return to the real world and saying goodbye to the strangers who are now new friends, is what makes Oppikoppi one of the best experiences ever.. 

A little lesson from Shawshank Redemption

I love the Shawshank Redemption and have watched it many times before, but this last time, something Andy said actually stuck with me. It was right after he did his 2 months in the box and he was talking to Red, he said “It is time to get busy living or get busy dying”. It’s quite a profound statement actually and it got me thinking about my current state of being.

I need to get busy living!

I was thinking what I love doing (besides reading) and the answer is dancing. I really like dancing. I used to do ballroom dancing, years back but gave it up as it was too expensive and as I hardly ever go to clubs anymore, I haven’t danced in ages. While I am not going to join classes any time soon (damn finances, and being super unfit), I have decided to look for my ballroom dance music and will start practicing at home again, just get into the swing of things. This will have a double positive influence as it counts as exercise and I will be doing something I love.

When I was young, I used to think being a dancer was the most fabulous thing to be, but then again it might have to do with all the feathers and glitter.

Dancers

This is my happy place

My favourite book: The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
My favourite author: Sir Terry Pratchett
My favourite genre: Crime

My happy place and my obsession and my passion. I love reading and have an ever growing reading list, that will never be completed even if I lived 2 lives. I also have a serious problem and cannot stop buying more books and cannot pass a bookshop without going in and buying something.

The beginning of the year I started out with 68 unread books on my shelve and while I have read 39 of them so far, I still have 60 unread books on my shelve! And I’m not even mentioning my Kindle here!

I have read my whole life and was read to before I was even born and I am happy to say that passion for the written word has never died. I will read just about any genre, you never know when you will discover a great adventure, so I do not believe in excluding anything, even though I have my favourite genre, author and book and they are all from different spectrums of the reading rainbow.

I also want no participation in the whole book vs e-reader debate (I am a fan of both and love them for very different reasons) and as long as people are still reading, I couldn’t care less which medium they choose.

 

Who am I?

Cups of coffee today: 3
Episodes of series watched: 4 and counting
Productive things done: 2
Fitness level: -10

I have been toying with the idea of cancelling my blog and giving up the whole thing, but then I decided I like Kaleidoscopic Chameleon and the theme, but I still wanted to start fresh and new. So, I cancelled all the past posts, categories and tags, and this is me starting over. In a way it is also symbolic of my life; you already have the foundation so you have to work on reconstructing and shaping what you have to become what you want to be. (Blegh, that sound soppy and preachy, but also true.)

It was my 31st birthday 20 days ago (but don’t tell anyone, as I insist on staying 30 until I have some direction in my life) and with that came the all too familiar feelings of a slight panic, suppressed by my insistence on  not having any emotions at all, because I do not know what I want in life or where I see myself when I think of my future. I obviously know that I want lots of money, even more books and all the time in the world to read the books (very unrealistic, I know, and that is part of the problem).

I cannot say that I am happy, or unhappy and I am not content either, yet I have no idea what or who I want to be and do with myself. I do know the one aspect of my life that I am unhappy about, and that is my physical self, which is probably the easiest aspect to fix, compared to my emotional and mental self, which is also messed up or I would not be feeling this lost or confused.  I am starting to cut down on coffee as too much of it gives me headaches, I am also trying to eat better, even though it is hard following the worked out eating plan I signed up with, and then I want need to start exercising again and work on my fitness, which is basically non-existant. I am sure once I start fixing the physical, the rest will start falling into place and I want to use this blog to try figuring out who I really am and who I want to be. I know I was happy once, even though I was still flawed then, but I want to go back to that, or even better than that.