On sunshine

This week, the sun came out in full swing, and there was much rejoicing in the land.

I took some holiday days this week, which I spent with my youngling out in the garden soaking up the rays. Sometimes, we just need some downtime. My next holidays will be spent in Paris, hopefully, as the youngling and I are planning a quick week-end trip to Paris for Lollapalooza in July.

I have had many thoughts this week that I planned on blogging, but I am still working through them and structuring them in my head. But it is all about best moments and nostalgia. We so often look back and glorify the past that we forget to live now, but I feel like this right here is the best moments of my life so far.

And I leave you with this lovely picture of our neighbour’s cat, Jazzy, who visits on sunny days and allows us to pet him and love him and give him belly rubs. Almost all of the benefits of being a cat slave without the responsibility.

Return of the blogger

It has been such a long time since I’ve blogged here. I am not promising a revival either.

I didn’t even complete my own 52 week challenge, because, you know, shit happens. And I suck at challenges. Sometimes, writing in public spaces puts pressure on for a certain kind of content, and, once one starts gaining readers, the pressure to continuously deliver content is hard. It also, for me, removes the ability to write freely. To work around this, I simply blogged, albeit sporadically, somewhere else. I’d like to reclaim this space again, but, no promises.

The last post I made here cryptically referred to it being my last trip to Cape Town. I left my best ever employer at the end of November after a series of decisions made in possibly the wrong frame of mind. I returned to best ever employer at the beginning of January after a series of apologies and possibly better decisions. This means I am travelling again, but not quite as frequently as before. Since returning, I have been to Cape Town three times, Lisbon (Portugal) once, Abuja (Nigeria) once, and I am currently in Seattle. I am feeling a lot more positive about everything, even though I kick myself on occasion for making the decision to leave in the first place. Sometimes, we need to make bad decisions to appreciate the good moments.

Our best friends left us at the end of last year for different shores. This changed a couple of things in our lives. For starters, it meant our friends were no longer a couple of blocks away, and time with them have moved into a virtual space. I am forever grateful for Skype and WhatsApp.

My bestie left South Africa a long time ago, but it was manageable, because we were already interacting more online than in person before she left. So while I miss her terribly, I could deal with it. Our other best friends we saw weekly in person, so their departure has been hard for both my husband and myself. It has reopened discussions about possible relocation to European shores, and I think we have pretty much decided that we will be pursuing this actively in the near future.

My beautiful boy, Frank, left me for the big catnip patch in the sky a few months ago. My heart is still hurting every day.

I think this is one of the reasons it has been so hard getting back into blogging, especially photo blogging. Because at least 70% of my photos are of him, and I ache every time I browse my photos.

Saturday 8:37

It kinda sucks that blogging has become a little bit of a chore. I know I started doing the Project366 thing to get me to blog more often, and so I will see it through (only 65 days to go), but it has reduced blogging to a bit of a chore making me feel rebellious. I won’t do it again next year, and will rather revert to my random blogging moments and blog about stuff that really matter. Although, it has been nice to take pictures regularly. Maybe I will do a project52 next year, and blog weekly rather than daily. But let’s get through the next 65 days first

I feel like I am in a bit of limbo at the moment. While waiting for the house to sell, we cannot really plan the next step, as we are not really sure when it would happen. Oh, we have ideas and dreams, but turning them into plans has to wait for that offer to come onto the table. So, in the mean time, we are spending a fair amount of time thinking about next year’s trip and playing games.

I may have mentioned that we will be going to Wacken again next year. We’ve decided to also visit the UK in the same trip. Our tentative itinerary looks like this:

20 July 2013 – 28 July 2013 – London and surrounds
29 July 2013 – 1 August 2013 – Etelsen, Germany
1 August 2013 to 4 August 2013 – Wacken

Dates and locations may change a little, but at least I have a framework to work with. I was happy to discover that there are some hotel packages for Wacken, so we will not be camping again. Instead, we will be sleeping in clean, warm and dry beds every night in a neighbouring town and take the daily shuttle between the hotel and the festival grounds. This makes the idea of attending Wacken a lot better in my head.

I am also looking forward to seeing sights in London and surrounds. In particular, I would like to see/do the following:

• Sherlock Holmes museum
• Harry Potter studios
• Stonehenge (a little bit further than London and surrounds, I know)
• Piccadilly circus
• London eye
• Buckingham palace
• London bridge
• London tower

I am sure I can easily add to the list, but this is what comes to mind. Of course, the Doctor Who experience in Cardiff would be lovely, but I think my quest would rather be to seek out some Discworld and Monty Python locations instead.

In the mean time, here’s hoping to a solid offer on the table soon, so we can move and move on.

Full circle

I was sitting thinking this morning about this blog, it's lifecycle and it's various incarnations over the years. Odd to think I have been blogging in one way or another for over 14 years now, and using this domain for 12 years.

In the beginning, there were very few free blogging hosts, and we had to make do with the likes of Diaryland (or is that Dairyland?) and - oh gods - Geocities. By the time I registered this domain, my little net addiction had led me to a new career in IT, and, as a sideline hobby, I picked up a little bit of coding knowledge and wrote my own website. I discovered the joys of Blogger's Blog this kinky, which allowed me to quickly publish articles and thoughts, and integrated that with my own website - because blogger allowed for a self-hosted option where it would FTP the bits you published to a server of your choice. I worked at a ISP/hosting sp at the time, and arranged for a staff web server with *cough* no selfish motives whatsoever.

When I changed jobs, it was time to find a new host. By this time, blogger had evolved into what we know today and I no longer felt like maintaining code, so it made sense to move the whole enchilada here.

I have had some difficulty in the blogging arena recently. Not because I have run out of things to say, but because I have been too conscious of what I say and where. One of the drawbacks of gaining years, I suppose. Also one of the drawbacks of multiple platforms. Too many tools, not one of them a hammer.

The main purpose of this post was to try out yet another new tool, yet another android blogging app. Guess I got carried away, which means this tool feels comfortable in hand and may lead to future use.