Ten tips for a beautiful day

I just got this in an email from my friend Gavin. I thought it was really nice so wanted to share it with you all.

10 Tips for a Beautiful day

1. Only for today, I will seek to live the livelong day positively without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once

2. Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance: I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behaviour; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.

3. Only for today, I will be happy on the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world but also this one.

4. Only for today, I will adapt to circumstances, without requiring circumstances to be adapted to my own wishes.

5. Only for today, I will devote myself to 10 minutes of good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul

6. Only for today, I will do one good deed and not tell anyone about it

7. Only for today, I will do at least one thing I do not like doing; and if my feelings are hurt, I will make sure no one notices

8. Only for today, I will make a plan for myself: I may not follow it to the letter, but I will make it. And I will guard against two evils: Hastiness and Indecision

9. Only for today, I will firmly believe, despite appearances that the good Providence of God cares for me as no one else who exists in the world

10. Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness. Indeed, for 12hours, I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life

Our vege garden moves along

Our vege garden is moving a few steps closer. Over the past couple of weekends I have been staining the sleepers that will border the 3 garden beds. I've attached a few photos of the process.

A rough layout of the vege patch. Trying to see where all the boards go & whether the area is large enough. Looks like Paul will be doing a little more digging on the left side.
The design is for 3 beds with 2 narrow paths between them. The boards will mostly sit above the ground around the beds and the path end boards will be sunk down.

We have nasty ants in our lawn that really got stuck into me. That's why my posture isn't the best.

So that's the first lot of boards stained. Now I have to do the second set! It takes ages to do them as each side requires 2 coats. And you need to leave each side to dry overnight. So that's 3 days per board!! Guess what I'll be doing this weekend :-)

We have a videographer

Yay - we have someone to video the wedding for us. My little cousin Cameron (well - he's 17 /18 now so not so little anymore) is going to do it for us :-) Yay!! Paul and I are buying ourselves a new toy when we come to NZ next week - so Cameron will use that.

At this stage we're looking at buying a little JVC Everio GZ-M330. It's a hybrid digital video camera with a 30GB hard drive but can also save to a micro SD card. And it only weighs 360g!!! It uses MPEG2 compression and is very small and stylish. Yay! I'm very excited!!!

A review for it can ben seen here: http://www.techradar.com/products/cameras-and-camcorders/camcorders/camcorders/jvc-gz-mg330-258987/review?artc_pg=1

Book Club

Ok so I finally got around to doing something "social" to meet people in Brissy (apart from WYD stuff). A while ago I found this northern suburbs book club on the internet, so after I got back from WYD I emailed the group about joining. The group meets on the last Tuesday of every month at a restaurant in the northern suburbs area. Each month a person in the group is assigned with picking the book and the restaurant for the next month. However in July I ended up being off work sick on the day of the meeting and I also hadn't read the book as my hold hadn't become available at the library. So I didn't go to the July meeting. So in the end last night was my first meeting.

The book for the month was quite interesting. Definitely not something any of us would have picked up in the bookshop ourselves. However, once I got used to the writing style (no speech punctuation, often short paragraps etc) I really enjoyed the book and am very glad I read it. It was one of those books where you're not sure at the start, but by the end of the book you're really glad you stuck it through. It's definitely one to be read slowly! Reading the last page won't make you understand the point of the book - the "journey" of reading the full story is the "reward".

It is called "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. A plot summary can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road - but it does spoil the plot so only read it if you're not interested in the book. I definitely recommend it :-) If you do I would love to know what you thought of it too :-) So feel free to email me your "review" :-)

Next months book is The Lovely Bones which of course Peter Jackson is making into a movie. So I am very excited to read it. You'll have to wait for my summary on it though.

Happy 35th Birthday Becky

Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday dear Becky.......... *breathe*
Happy birthday to you!!

Winter's out and Spring is in ...

Well the weekend definitely proved to us that Winter has gone and Spring is here. Both days were lovely and sunny although Saturday was a little windy for my liking - think Wellington summer. Sunday though was a stunner - just enough breeze to make sure it wasn't too hot! Our themometer showed the outside temp got up to 26.7 degrees! Yes that's right - 26.7 degrees even though it is still officially winter for another week :-) *sigh* gotta love Brissy from Autumn through Spring.

I am starting to wonder about poor old mum coming to stay in December though if it's getting to 26.7 already. Let's hope for her sake that we have a repeat of last year - spring was really hot but then summer seemed to lose it's mojo - phew!! I'm guessing she'll be stuck inside with the fans and/or air con on :-) Although she has said she's wants to just relax while she's in Brissy so maybe she won't have any option. Te he :-)

Right - back to work. Lots to do before I come to NZ next week. Plus Paul is off wiht the flu at the moment so that's not good :-( Fingers crossed I don't pick it up before our NZ trip as I so don't want to be sick for my hens party!!!

and then we found them

Yay - so you see, my prayers to St Anthony worked again :-) He isn't the patron saint of lost things for nothing!!

So Paul found my sunnies down the side of the arm chair. Whoops! They're a little bent but they still do the job.

But even better was Paul finding his own glasses! They were down the side of the drivers seat in the car. I'd checked down the side of the passenger seat but not the drivers seat. I'd forgotten that Paul drove from the supermarket to the bbq - I drove from home to the supy and from the bbq home.

Paul really has to stop putting things in his pockets! He always buys clothes with crappy pockets and then insists on putting things in them - only to lose them all the time!! But at least this time we have found the sunnies - and therefore saved ourselves approx $500! Phew!!

The disappearing sunglasses

Can you believe that on the weekend Paul and I both managed to lose our sunglasses - and on separate occasions as well.

On Saturday we got home from the bbq with my cousin and Paul couldn't find his glasses. This is a big deal as they're prescription sunglasses so will cost us about $500 to replace. And living in Brisbane without sunnies is not really an option! Especially since Paul cycles to and from work into the sun each day :-\ Hmmm!

My situation isn't quite so dire - they are around somewhere - I just can't find them. So on Sunday I had my sunnies while I was outside painting the vege garden edging (I have the sunnies marks to prove it - whoops). So I took them off when I went inside and put them down somewhere - and that was the last time I saw them. So they'll be in the house somewhere - who knows where though as a few through looks haven't found them :-( Maybe if I finally get around to folding the washing tonight I might find them under there. If we're really lucky then maybe Paul's will appear under the washing pile as well. I think there just may be a few prayers to St Anthony going on to find our lost items! (for those that are confused by this comment, mum always had this little prayer to St Anthony that we used to say as kids, to ask for help in finding whatever it was that we'd lost - it works too- I hope again too :-) )

Righto - off to work now.

A busy weekend

Well Paul and I had a busy but very good weekend. On Saturday we met up with my cousin Janell and her husband Alex at Gyatt Park in St Lucia (by the river) for a bbq lunch and a spot of cricket. They had invited friends and work mates along for the afternoon. It was a very Wellington summer day really (ha ha - and it's the middle of winter here) - it was about 22-25 degrees but quite windy (it's always windy at this time of the year in Brissy) which chilled it down a bit. Then on Saturday night we had a leaving party for our mate Joel whois off to the states tomorrow. He will definitely be missed! That's 2 out of 3 of the hodges who have vacated Brisbane in the last month - Sam & Joel are gone, only James remains. It's stink when you make great new friends and then they leave :-( Should we take it as a hint ;-) ha ha :-) I guess they're jus that that age really (Joel is 26 and Sam is 22).

After getting up at 10am and reading my book for a while (life is hard isn't it) on Sunday we had a day around the house getting a few things done. Paul painted up the little platform he has made to put his rain gauge on - he's going to attach it to the post on top of the deck. I started staining the pine sleepers that we're going to use as borders for our vege patch. Even though I stirred the can of stain quite well before I started whit an old knife, I obviously didn't do it well enough because the last two sleepers I stained are a different colour to the ones I started on. Not good! Fortunately that was only a 1 litre tin of stain and it's all finished. So tonight Paul and I are going to stop in at Bunnings on the way home from work and get some more. This time we'll get a decent stirrer and a 2L or 4L tin and give it a really good stir to get everything off the bottom and mix it in. I guess you live and you learn. I've only done one side of the sleepers anyway as you have to leave them todry overnight after you do the second coat. So the side I've done can just go on the inside of the vege patch rather than on the outside/path side :-)
Boy did the bull ants get stuck into me when I was painting! We have a major ant problem in our lawn. Next time it's forecast to rain I'm getting out with the ant powder and putting a lot of it on the lawn (it needs to be watered it but you're not allowed to water your lawns because of the drought - so we have to wait for rain - not so good in the dry season!). A lot of the ants we have are bull ants - they're like 4 times the size of an NZ ant and their bite really really hurts! I had these big red welts on my shin for hours afterwards and the bites ached for about 3 hours! Nuts aye! And they even managed to go through my trousers the rotton little sods! So now I have really sore legs as after they had a go at me I refused to kneel down, so I crouched for the rest of my painting - definitely not something my legs are used to :-) Ha ha - probably did me a lot of good :-)

I'm very excited about the vege patch - it's going to look fantastic when finished. Initially we were going to paint the sleepers green or maroon, but Paul's mum pointed out that they might look silly when the paint peels off. And I'm glad we changed out minds about it as they stain looks way better - especially against the green of the water tank and grass - wahoo :-)

Right - gotta do some work now :-) 2 weeks today and Paul and I come to NZ!! Sweet!!

Stump Grinding

Today Paul and I had a day off work as it's a public holiday in Queensland - for the Ekka (like the A&P show in NZ).

But instead of going and wasting money in big crowds at the Ekka, we took the opportunity to do some stuff around the house.

We had this big old tree stump right by the rear stump of the house - not good considering our neighbour has termites!!! So we had a guy come around today with his big stump grinder and he ground the hell out of the stump. So now it's just a big pile of wood chips. However we will need to get rid of those as well as even wood chips are termite heaven.

So now that that the stump has gone, we can really get going on our vege garden. We couldn't move any further on it as we knew the stump grinding machine would have to use that area to really get stuck into the tree stump :-)

Faith on Tap

Well last night Paul and I went to the launch of Faith on Tap here in Brisbane. It's based on Theology on Tap that has been running in Sydney for about a year now. Apparently they get about 600 turning up each month.

So what is Faith on Tap. Pretty much it's just an opportunity to meet & mingle with other 18-35 year old catholics and hear guest speakers talk. The Brisbane version has been launched as a post world youth day initiative which is fantastic. So after work last night Paul and I walked over the river to the Pineapple Hotel - which didn't look that nice from the front room but the side area is actually really nice & modern. We got ourselves a couple of yummy pizzas for only $10 (special for FoT folks) had a beer and waited for it to start. It's amazing how many people turned up - fantastic for the organisers as they had no idea how many people were going to come. But I reckon there was at least 60 people there! Paul and I met an interesting couple - Brett and Peta (girl) I think were their names. They were down from the sunshine coast for the day as they had been to the Ekka (like big A&P show) in Brissy and decided to come along. They sat at our table because there wasn't any space left and we got talking. Really interesting. The fella was in IT and was just about to start learning how to write web services (which I'm doing at the moment) so I had a big chat to him about that and told him about how I learnt it as I also had to teach myself them last year :-)

The speaker was ok- a good thing they warned us she's not that fond of public speaking. She just talked about her life really - comes from a family where none of them are practising catholics and don't seem to be very supportive at all - she was only baptised etc so that she could get into decent schools. At 16 she decided she wanted to learn more about her faith and started going to church by herself (pretty impressive thing to do at 16!). Then after uni she went overseas and was a nanny for a really really weathly family who lived in Brussels (think private jet, houses all over Europe, chefs etc etc). Did that for 2.5 years and felt like something was missing - so then she joined this group (can't remember what it was called) where she pretty much volunteered for the church for a year. She got sent to Krakow in Poland (she was a bit light on the details about what they actually did unfortunately, even when asked a direct question) but pretty much I think they just helped out lots of people. She got back to Aussie just before WYD so is now deciding what to do with her life. So yeah - she was interesting enough but nothing mind blowing.

However the next two months look like they'll have interesting speakers. A bit boring for some maybe but Paul and I thought they might be interesting :-) The following is what they're written on their facebook group page

8 September: Father Columbra, “A Monks Life”

Father is a monk of the Order of St Paul the First Hermit! Yes they exist! He is also helps run the 'Marian Valley' Monastery and is a Qld & NSW Police Chaplain. Fr was born in Forbes NSW and grew up on a wheat and Sheep station, studying for the Priesthood @ Wagga Wagga. He is also a muso and will be just back from Ireland when he speaks at Faith on Tap! So what will the good monk be wearing to the pub? Only one way to find out, be there!
____________________________________

***** 13 October: Allan Carlson, “Why Marry?”

International speaker out from the USA! Published author, International Secretary of the World Congress of Families and more! Catch Allan before he headlines the Family Association conference in Perth and have your family/marriage questions answered.

Righto - better do some work now :-)

Have a great day!
Ange

The wedding dress

Yes folks - that's right - on Saturday afternoon I met Debbie in the city and I tried on my wedding dress. My actual wedding dress - not just some floor sample (that was literally twice my size - mine is 8 and it was 16). Exciting aye! I can't wait till the wedding when I actually get to wear it!!
Debz and I also found my jewellery that I'm going to wear too :-)
Although now we have to nervous wait on my dress for things like getting the hem taken up (they better not ruin it) and getting it steam pressed when I arrive in NZ (once again they better not ruin it). But still very exciting! All I have to do now is find some shoes - harder than it sounds as a) I hate shoe shopping and b) the fashion seems to be super duper high stilettos. If I wear shoes with too high a heel then we can guarantee that I'll prob put my foot through my dress and probably trip myself up as I walk down the aisle! Now wouldn't that make my wedding day something to remember - te he.
Hmm - why did I pick a church with such a long aisle!! Maye I should come in the side door instead ;-)

Actually there's a really sad story about the dress that I tried on in the store way back at the start of the year. Apparently a girl came in and tried it on, loved it and decided to order one herself. Then apparently she became really sick with the flu, went to hospital and died a couple of days later. So then the family asked the store if they buy the floor sample as her fiance wanted her buried in it. Sad aye! So that the actual dress I tried on is on some dead women :-( So sad! Must say lots of prayers so that it's not a bad omen :-) At least she gets to wear her fabulous wedding dress forever aye :-)

Right - better do some work now :-)

Hair Mission

Ok - so I very recently sent out an email asking for advice on hair dressers in Wellington. For those that weren't on the email list who really want to make sure my hair looks fantastic on my wedding day - here is what the email said. Feel free to help me out :-)

--------------------------------

So ... I have a mission for you all :-) As you all know I am getting married in Wellington at the end of the year. And as you may or may not know, I am paronoid about people cutting my hair and therefore hate going to hairdressers. Unfortunately no-one knows how to cut thick wavy hair into a "low maintenance" hairstyle!

So the mission? When I'm in NZ in a few weeks I have to decide who I'm getting to do my hair for the wedding. This is a big decision for me! To put it in context - more important than picking my shoes - although I hate shoe shopping so that's not really comparing apples with apples is it! Maybe it's as important as making sure we have enough booze - nothing more embarassing than running out of booze at a wedding now aye ;-)

So this means over a couple of days I have to go visiting the potential hairdressers to see if I like them, getting prices and asking them what they'd do etc etc. However I don't know very many hairdressers - so I need your recommendations pretty please (with cherries on top)! Those of you have been married in Wellington (or know someone who did) - who did you go to and did you like what they did? Did they treat you nicely on the day etc etc?

I would like a hairdresser who will also do my makeup so I guess that'll shrink the list a bit.
They also need to be in central city so we can walk there - unless they're so fabulous that it's worth driving there on my wedding day :-)

The big question is; who would you recommend?

Please help me guys? A chocolate fish to the winner ;-) te he

08.08.08

Ok - so on such a day I have to put up a blog posting :-)

However, unlike 07.07.07 last year, I don't have a wedding to go to today :-) But I'm sure there are lots of people out there getting married today :-)

I guess the other reason today is so popular is that it's the start of the olympics. Seriously - could I be any less interested in the olympics! All I think about is that for the duration of the olympics there is nothing on tv here - all the normal programs have gone on holiday! Even Home & Away for crying out loud! Maybe it's because I'm here in Aussie so funnily enough you never hear about kiwi athletes. Or maybe it's because for the past 4 months or so the olympics have been thrown in our faces something chronic! All I can say is the sooner it's over the better. Mean aye ;-)

Well all that muttering aside, I will be proud of any kiwis who do well at the games. Maybe it's a good thing - I'll sure get lots of wedding planning done in the next few weeks :-) Ha ha!

Well hope you all have a good weekend. Debbie and I are going wedding dress organising tomorrow and are then off to see Mamma Mia - sweet :-)

Ange

The slackness continues

Yes yes I know I said I'd update my blog - but things just won't slow down :-) Although I do intend to put up some posts this week about my time at world youth day - its not happening now. I'm still at work and need to finish some work off so I can go home and go to the gym - and it's already 5:40pm! In the past 6 weeks I have turned into a blob due to being busy, sick and away - not good with the wedding coming up!! I must now be good for the next month! If I'm good for the next month then I can eat, drink and be merry and my hens party. If I'm not good before then then I don't get to do that as much :-) See ... bribing oneself always works ;-)

Anyway so what made me suddenly post something was a comment in an email I just got from Rachel, one of my world youth day friends. It totally made me crack up :-) Be warned!!

"Ange, you are like God, you are everywhere, Google mail and now Skype… I better be careful "

See - what did I tell everyone :-) te he he

Have a good one
Ange