Today was better.

Work was busy but bearable.
The torrential rain even went off for a while.
Out for dinner with faithful travelling companion to our favourite local Cantonese restaurant, and rather wonderful it was too.
I'm off to put some tunes on my iPod now and then watch a bit of "Wallander" before bedtime.

Nighty night. :)

Purple boots!!!

I might have mentioned before on this or another one of my blogs, that my favourite colour is purple. Which is quite fortunate this year as many of the shops are full of various purple items this late summer/autumn season (my favourite time of year for clothes, actually). I'm now building up my purple wardrobe and the latest addition today is a rather fab pair of purple boots which I bought during my lunch break.

They might just go nice with those skinny jeans which I bought the other week. Yes, skinny jeans (!) I may just be having a midlife crisis as I'm more a bootcut kind of girl, but having lost quite a bit of weight over the last few months I thought I'd reward myself with something I'd never even have considered before. The only problem being that I'm not quite at the stage where they're fitting comfortably, but it's heading in the right direction.

Seagull-sized butterflies

So tomorrow morning is the first of my six presentations to a training group. This is a little follow up to the training course which I wrote and ran back in April, so now I have to do this little speech about the training course, on six occasions to different training groups between now and the end of November.

It shouldn't be too bad now I've finally written a little script for the thing. I've still got butterflies (the size of seagulls ha ha) in my stomach, which isn't helped by the fact that I have an upset stomach tonight anyway :( Still I'm feeling much better than I was during the last couple of weeks, and am now getting over the quadruple-whammy of chronic fatigue, recurring knee trouble, a mild depression and that old favourite "circumstances beyond my control".

Still haven't decided when to bring EuropeCrazy back. Maybe next week, but it's now looking more like 31.08.09 at the very latest. (And of course this week I'm too busy watching the World Athletics to be doing much else!)

Off to bed soon - need to get the beauty sleep for tomorrow :)

The other end of the week

I must say that I am very very happy to be ending the week with two less things worrying me than what I started the week with. Both of them are work-related, one is the end of a task and the other is a presentation which, it turns out, I've been needlessly worrying about for the last couple of weeks when in fact it should be short, sweet and straightforward.

And now it's the weekend :)))))))

I felt like treating myself to some Yankee Candle stuff today, so I'm home with a few different new aromas to fragrance EuropeCrazy HQ, starting with Island Spa, which has a nice lemon sherbet-y vibe going on. It's burning as I type this and there's something wonderfully fruity and summery about it, quite appropriate for such a lovely bright sunny night. We haven't had much of them for the last 3 or so weeks, so we'll enjoy it while we can :)

More to follow....

Weight-watching update: groundhog day

Stayed the same again this week, that's about the umpteenth week in a row....anyway now that I seem to have hit the dreaded 'plateau' I've decided to shift the focus from weight loss to toning up in time for my holiday in five-and-a-bit weeks' time, so it will be exercise all the way from now on. The only problem is that my recurring knee problems are back, so one must be very careful.

How do I feel today?

Unfortunately between the last blog post and this one, there was a further stint in the dark tunnel, which should probably account for the lack of posts across my three blogs over the past 7 days.

I've been in a little depression lately, most of it due to the following, some of which are beyond my control:

• work stress;
• something work-related which I have to do over the next 3/4 months which I can't get out of and am quite frankly dreading;
• the most important one - feeling frustrated that I can't do anything about my mum's continuing poor health.

It's been a really tough time over the past couple of weeks and I don't really want to go into detail about it, but I'm trying to pick myself up again. There was some good news today as I finally booked my summer holiday, and I'll have to go a post over at EuropeCrazy about that too.

I'm not really promising anything about the extent of my blogging over the next 6 weeks, as whenever I promise posts I never deliver (e.g. the Eurovision 2009 review: maybe I should post it 6 months after the event!) but I'm planning another blog-break-week starting 31.08.09 where I'll totally take a break from posting. Am going to do this every couple of months just to keep things fresh.

I'm hoping that things should pick up on EuropeCrazy during the autumn.

It's been quite a busy year at Planet Salem, but I think that little blog will be taking a break for at least a couple of months after the middle of August - as the man himself will also be taking a well-earned rest with only a couple of gigs here and there. That's unless there's more news to report?

I still enjoy blogging though, so don't worry I won't be going anywhere :)