Oh no, Oh no, Oh no....

Last night I asked my son if he could help me make a banner heading for my revamped blog and he said no worries.

He use to be a web designer so I knew that he could do something great in no time at all.

Instead he looked at what I had done so far and as nicely as possible said "Mum, we can do better than this.You have over 30,000 views so it's time to get serious!"

So it looks like a whole new blog design is in the works.

So I finally have a million things to tell you all about and I am on hold for a few more days.

He has given me homework!

Find images for this, choose colors, fonts and designs. etc etc

So I've go to go because he can't start until I finish my homework!

I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so excited-The Pointer Sisters

Under construction!!!!

Hi everyone.

As you can see my blog is undergoing some changes that hopefully will be completed by tonight.

I cant wait to post my first story on the new layout!

See you then.

One day I'll fly away.....

I've had a terrible day today.

My nose has run constantly and I scraped the skin off the knuckle on my finger and it realllyyy hurts.

It's freezing cold, I have no chocolate and I just ran out of milk so I can't even make a coffee.

Think I'll just go to bed early with my marshmallow socks on and my hot water bottle held tight and dream in orange and yellow about floating on the breeze on a mild summer day.

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The Courage medallion....

I purchased a hand made Courage medallion necklace from Etsy six months ago.

I purchased it for my mum but never gave it to her as the time never seemed right.

As a recent survivor of breast cancer it seemed fitting and well deserved but at the same time....not.

No-one needs an explanation for the word Courage.
Every-one knows what it means and it's hard to find a substitute word as good as it.

If you say "that person has a lot of Courage" it is because they are about to or have done something amazing and awe inspiring.

Well she did. She went through 18months of hell.

So why haven't I given her the necklace?
Because it's the wrong word.

For the first time the word Courage is not good enough, not big enough, not understanding enough, just...not enough.

To give her the Courage necklace would be like saying "well done, you made it through, your alive, every things OK now".

And that's bullshit because everything is not OK.

I'm going to visit her on the weekend and when I first see her it's like looking at a stranger.

I'm not talking about the physical differences to her body or of her hair growing back different or her eyebrows, eye lashes and finger and toe nails still only half there.
I'm not talking about the fact that she has and will never have a healthy immune system and she feels like hell three out of every seven days.

I'm talking about the fact that the person who will rush out to meet me and hug me tightly and kiss me on the cheek is a stranger.
She just happens to resemble my mother.

This women is strong, demanding and opinionated to the point of harshness sometimes.
She is a take no bullshit from anyone person and if you asked her for some words of wisdom she looks like she would say "if you lay down and give up, you deserve to be stood on."

She is passionate, determined, angry, fierce, loyal, protective and so easy to talk to that after a year I still sometimes think "what the hell is going on"

This person loves me, unconditionally.
She has no judgmental words to say about my decisions in life or my childrens. She is supportive, encouraging, happy, friendly, approachable, loving, funny and emotional.

She is a contradiction.

I'm not saying that I had a bad relationship with my mother before she got cancer because I didn't. She was my mother and she loved me and helped me get through some terrible times and I know I could not have done it without her.

Do I love this new women who is my mother? Yes, she's so very easy to love.
The big question is do I like her? Yes I do. Alot.
She's my friend.

So do you understand now?
What word can describe a person who has told death to go to hell, knowing that to survive and come back to us meant that she would have to let the person she was die, so that the strong amazon women hiding inside her could fight for her to live?

What word do you give to someone who has to live with ill health and the frustration of not being able to do what you want before your energy runs out every day and knowing that it is like that for the rest of your life.

It has to be a better word than Courage.

When I see her on the weekend I will give a gift I found for her yesterday.
It's a long necklace with a facet cut stone and a mounted silver bird charm.

She loves birds.
So do I. I get that from my mum.

It's all in the eyes...

My eyes are green.
That sounds so ordinary.
What I should have said is that I can make my eyes change to different shades of green.
Some peoples eyes change shades when they wear different colored clothing and so do mine.
But how my eyes differ from other peoples is that all I have to do is concentrate and they will change from pale green to emerald green in about 15 seconds.

When I was twelve years old I noticed that whenever my aunt was angry or extremely happy her pale green eyes (that were identical to mine) would suddenly blaze with emerald fire.
I was transfixed.

I asked her how she did it and she just laughed and shrugged her shoulders. When I asked her mother (my grandmother) about it, she said that her eyes had started to do that when she was a small screaming toddler.

I was determined that my eyes would be just like hers and I started to practice.
My parents must have thought I was a lunatic as I would lock myself in the bathroom and would alternate between laughing hysterically and screaming like a mad person at the bathroom mirror for an hour every afternoon after school.

And nothing happened. My eyes stayed pale green.

After ten days of useless "practice" I was just so angry and felt so stupid that I ended up hunched over the bathroom sink crying. As I stood up I grabbed my hair brush and threw it at the bathroom mirror in frustration. I looked up in hopeless despair and stared in the mirror.
My eyes were blazing emerald fire.

All of a sudden I got it!
It had to be real emotion, not fake emotion.
That was what made my aunties eyes change.

The problem was I was twelve years old. I did not have the experience or opportunity to display real raw emotion so I had to think of another way.

I had heard somewhere that our brains had more power than what we were using so I thought I would try and harness my twelve year old brain power.

I went back to staring at the bathroom mirror.

The first day I stared at it for an hour and gave myself such a head ache that I was confined to bed and I missed school the next day.

Two days later I was back (secretly) staring at the mirror but again nothing happened.
Lying in bed that night I thought about the process and decided that I was still doing it wrong.
I was trying to make my eyes change when it was really the workings behind my eyes that would prompt the change, not the eyes themselves.

I decided to leave the bathroom mirror alone for a while and concentrate on my brain.
I had to learn how to make my brain tell my eyes to turn dark green.
That day at school I looked at a diagram of the inside of a human head and the workings of the eyes.
I come home from school and laid on my bed and closed my eyes.
I placed my hands on the sides of head at the temples and would slowly move them forward to the outer edges of my eyes and start all over again.
I thought that this would teach the inner workings of my brain to do what I wanted it to do.
(years later I realized that what I did was teach myself to meditate via a form of hypnotherapy)

Three days later I was again lying on my bed and 20 minutes into the training I felt something move in my head.
It was like a strong push to the back of my eyes.
It didn't hurt. It was just like a firm pressure.

I opened my eyes and tried again. Once again I could feel this firm force. I tried again and let it go a bit longer and it seemed to fill up my eyes with pressure but it didn't hurt.

I just tried to stay calm and took a slow breathe and I felt the pressure subside. I waited ten minutes and tried again and it happened again just as I wanted it to. It felt like a light in my eyes but from the inside out. I took a breathe and felt the pressure subside.

I knew that I was done for the day as I was so tired. I practiced for the next three days.
I could do it alot quicker and I could hold the pressure longer and I did not need to touch the side of my head anymore.

I thought that my eyes were blazing green but I did not want to feel the crushing disappointment if it was all in my imagination. I was scared to face the mirror.

On the fifth day I called my little brother into my room. He was eight years old and loved magic tricks. I told him that I was practicing a magic trick and he had to look at my eyes and tell me if they changed color.

I stared at him and willed my brain to push the thought into my eyes. He started jumping up and down saying "they are like stars, they are like stars".

I ran into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and they were blazing green emeralds.

After that day I never failed at changing their color

For years my eyes worked to my advantage and disadvantage.

When I was 15 I discovered by accident that I could pull back the color instead of enhancing it. This makes them go a strange sheer green, almost lemon in color that Beauty says freak her out as they look like a snakes eyes.

It's now years later and I can still change the color of my eyes with a thought.

Sadly this is not something I could teach The Knight as he has chocolate brown eyes.
Beauty also has dark brown eyes but hers change with her emotions to a pale honey yellow brown like a lions.

If only she would practice.

So why have I told you this story?

It is because now there is one other way I can enhance the green in my eyes without having to mentally eye zap people all day.
It's simple really. It's called Exact Eyelights eye color enhancing mascara.

As my eyes are green the mascara is a deep aubergine and the color reflects and enhances the green pupils. It's very clever and it works!

They of course do not blaze emerald green but they do stay a rich forest green color all day.

I have worn it for six months now and yesterday I went and purchased 4 packets and an eyeliner to place in the "pack for Italy box".

I find I can't live without it.

The wise women said....

The kitchen fridge....

I am not the type of person who sticks a million magnets, photos,notes, bills etc etc on the front of the fridge.
I have always thought that it just looks messy.
Also with The Knight constantly filming in the kitchen as he prepares our meals (he's a chef) for his youtube channel, fridge mess does not film great.
So this morning I went to get the coffee beans out of the fridge and suddenly realized that there was stuff on the front of the fridge.
When did this happen?

Skull and food magnets


Old photos of Beauty with black hair and me in a bad luck blue dress




Hand carved and painted wooden box that holds the dog leads, vintage wicker picnic basket that is now our first aid medicine chest. Lindt Easter bunny and a small red metal bird note holder.

The Italian language....

My father was born in Italy and immigrated to Australia with his family when he was eight years old.


That's my father on the left with his little brother

He suffered a great deal through his school years as being a little Italian kid with no English skills made him a perfect scapegoat for the bully's of the school. They made his transition from Italy to Australia a living hell and even though he tried really hard and finally grasped the language he never forgot what it felt like to be an outsider.

When he became older he met my mother. They got married and when his first child (me) was born he made the decision to not teach his children how to speak Italian as they were Australians. (he did not want us to suffer the bullying that he did)


My mother and father at 16 & 17 years old

How I wish that those times had of been different. My father is Italian and I cannot speak one word of the language. I'm moving to live permanently in Italy and I have to overcome this language barrier. I need to be able to communicate and besides it's just plain arrogant and disrespectful to expect to be welcomed into a country when you have made no effort to fit in.

So Italian languages classes it is for me. I have enrolled and start on the 28th February.
My father was here on the weekend to visit and I asked him to speak to me in Italian for five minutes. I understood about 10% of what he was saying. Mainly through commonsense but also through the familiarity of the words, as even though he would not teach me I still got to listen to him converse with his parents when I was a child.

Anyway when he was talking Italian to me on the weekend the small stress knot I had in my stomach about the language problem disappeared. The flow of his voice and the comfort I felt hearing the language made me feel like I was home. Not my home from when I was a child but home, deep inside myself.

So no worries, I can do this this.
I don't think I will ever be able to speak a million miles an hour like a lot of Italians do but I am confident that I will be able to ask the builder how much it will be to fix that kitchen wall that fell down last night.
To tell the chef at the restaurant not to serve me anything with poppy seeds as I have a bad allergy and will die if I eat them.
To tell the butcher that I would like my chicken without the feet as they are freaking me out.
To be able to understand directions when I get lost because I just had to see what was over the next hill.
To be able to tell some hot Italian guy that he has the sexy eyes of a gypsy, lips good enough to lick and a body made just for me. (wait a minute. I'm just writing that down in my notebook to ask my Italian teacher to translate that for me as that sentence is important!)

So I can do this. Learn a new language in six months. No worries. Piece of cake

.

Scent of a women.......

Lets face it.

Designer fragrance is a luxury item.

In Australia a small 100ml bottle of Beauty's every day Chanel Chance eau fraîche is $160.

The above photo of six fragrance bottles was taken this morning in our bathroom. The Chanel is Beauty's but I'm embarrassed to say that the other five perfumes are mine.

Some women wear one signature perfume their whole lives.
That's just not me.

I find a fragrance I like but then something happens.
I get used to it, someone breaks my heart, I find out that an arch enemy wears the same perfume, my child likes the taste of it, one day it suddenly smells like the bottom of a laundry basket full of wet towels etc etc.....

And so the next day I start the search for a new perfume.

So come with me down my perfume memory lane.
(It's not really a lane but more like a very, very long country road in France that travels through three Provence's!)

Violet Oil. My first fragrance was given to me by my great grandmother in a tiny glass bottle. I still love the fragrance of violets.



4711. My mother used to wear this and I would always splash some on when she wasn't looking.



Tabu. My first teenage fragrance. Everyone wore Tabu.



Maja. I loved this soap. I wore this instead of perfume for a while. I had never smelt anything so exotic and the packing was so elegant and foreign.

.

Yves Saint Laurent-Rive Gauche. My first fragrance as a women. It was my first job and I was filling in time on my lunch break by sampling the perfumes in the pharmacy. The assistant sprayed this on my wrist and I caught my breathe. My weekly wage was $79. The perfume was $74. My mother did not speak to me for quite a while after I bought it because of my irresponsible waste of money and lack of judgment. This was a powerful scent for a sixteen year old but damn, I would pull the top of the tin canister and the smell would hit me. I would spray it and I felt invincible. Through all the years, it is the only fragrance I have worn where complete strangers would stop me in the street and ask me what fragrance I was wearing. The father of my first child was one of them.

Yves Saint Laurent-Paris. A soft light fragrance that I wore for many years. A young mothers perfume.



Dolce & Gabbana-Sicily. This perfume had me in it's grip and I never wanted it to let me go. I was never more Italian than when I wore this fragrance. I was in heaven. Then it became unavailable in Australia and I will admit that I cried.



Viktor & Rolf-Flower Bomb. Beauty gave me this as it was the furthest thing from Sicily that she could find. She was trying to snap me out of it! It was beautiful and totally different than anything I had worn before. A very rich, full fragrance.



Chanel-No 5. I finally decided to try it and my children brought me a huge bottle for Christmas. I loved it but The Knight told me that it smelt like "old ladies perfume" on me. Moving on...



Marc Jacobs-Daisy. Fresh, clean, summer, light all day fragrance. I still wear it a few times a week.



Viktor & Rolf-Eau Mega. This was a hand me down from Beauty. She won it in a Madison Magazine competition but as she only wears one perfume I scored it. A night time fragrance.



Versace-Crystal Noir. Sultry fragrance. Rich manor house garden mix of tuberoses and cherries after a light rain on a still night. Serious sex night fragrance.



Gucci-Guilty. I have wanted this for a while and Beauty gave it to me in my last Christmas stocking. I love it. Strong, clingy, feminine, sultry. It will get more use in the colder months.

Issey Miyake-L'Eau Bleue d'Issey Pour Homme. Yes, this is a men's fragrance. I was doing tester smells trying to find a light fragrance for The Knight as a Christmas gift and it was just so refreshing that I purchased it for myself.

So after this long list could I live without the last five that I am currently using?
Oh Yes!

You see my heart will forever belong to another as I still dream about the lost days without my D&G Sicily.

And I will be honest and tell you that once a week I take the cap of my hidden YSL Rive Gauche blue tin canister and close my eyes and breathe it in. I have 5 seconds to get the cap back on before the memories come.

Time Passages......

I was thinking about the post I did yesterday, the one about the green Alfred Meakin china and it reminded me of the lyrics in the Al Stewart song from the late 70s called Time Passages.

Yes I know that this was written about a women but the principles are the same.
Over time things change.

What was once important has slid down the cherish line to become just a memory and sometimes I wonder why it was important in the first place.

I have been thinking about the green china all night. It took me years to collect all those pieces. I must have told alot of people as I remember a colleague rang me one day and said "Hey, I'm at an auction and there is a piece of your china here do you want me to buy it for you?" Another time a customer brought me in a tiny milk jug in my green china as she had seen it at a garage sale on the weekend and knew it was my pattern".

The problem is if I saw a piece of that once cherished china tomorrow I would walk pass it and never give it a second look. I look at the photo now and it just looks so........SAFE.

So yes, my taste in decorating color and styles has definitely changed.
No more soft and safe.

In my new home I want to be surrounded by color, texture and glamor with quirky collectible treasures and original art.

I haven't been miss country cottage for a long time.

It's the gypsy boheme life for me.

AL STEWART-TIME PASSAGES

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Well I'm not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don't last
Well it's just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There's something back here that you left behind
Oh time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn
Don't know why you should feel
That there's something to learn
It's just a game that you play

Well the picture is changing
Now you're part of a crowd
They're laughing at something
And the music's loud
A girl comes towards you
You once used to know
You reach out your hand
But you're all alone, in these
Time passages
I know you're in there, you're just out of sight
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

I'm such a pansy sometimes...

I'm sure that many of you have asked yourself the following question.

If the house was on fire what prized possession would I grab first?

Five years ago my answer was easy. I would have grabbed my three overflowing photo albums and run for my life.

Now five years later those 3 photo albums have developed into 24 beautifully scrapbooked photo albums full of mementos, photos and generations of family history. It would be impossible to grab them all in a hurry and make a run for it unless I had 6 toga wearing, strapping, strong, male Roman slaves and a pack mule.

This got me thinking and I made the wise decision to copy everything onto 3 USBs and I have left them with my mother for safe keeping.

From now on whenever I complete another scrapbook and add it to the overflowing bookcase, I place it on a new $6.00 USB and post it to my mother.
It's the best insurance money could buy.

The reason I broached this subject is because yesterday I nearly burnt down the kitchen.

I was stupid...I was wiping the dishes...got distracted...placed the cloth on a stove top that was still hot and WOOOSSSHHHH!
The tea towel was on fire and I'm standing there doing the "oh shit, what do I do?" dance.

Anyway I mentally slapped myself, pulled it together, put the fire out, knocked the smoke detector of the ceiling with the broom handle (as I am too short to turn it off) and ran and grabbed my pansy plate out of the cupboard and hugged it tight.

Five minutes of deep breathing go by and a it finally dawns on me that I'm clutching a plate.

I open my arms and look in amazement at what I'm holding. It's a plate I have not used for at least 5 years. I didn't even know where it was! (obviously my brain did)

I placed it on the counter top and as I stared at it the memories come flooding back.

I first found this plate at a farm clearing sale years and years ago. It had belonged to an elderly English lady and she had told me that it was the only piece left of a large dinner set that was given to her as a wedding gift. I owned an antique store at the time but it never made it to the shop, instead I took it home with me, gently washed it and placed it on the plate shelf in the kitchen.

At that time I lived in a renovated weatherboard cottage with very uneven floor boards.

An artist drawing of my little cottage

Every time a door would slam the kitchen buffet that held the plates would shake.
I was so proud of the restoration work I did on it. It was antique huen pine and I'd stenciled folk art cottages and hearts along the shelf edges (as you did in the 1980s) I was collecting vintage English Alfred Meakin green china and I had found 23 pieces.


The pansy plate looked odd with the green and gold china but I loved it. Two weeks after it found a home on the china cabinet a huge gust of wind slammed the kitchen door so hard that it shook the floor boards and the plate cabinet toppled over. Every single piece of Meakin china broke. The pansy plate was buried under all that broken china but did not have one mark on it.

Once again I gently washed it. I knew it was a special plate. The pansy's were so delicate, yet their colors so vibrant. I use to think that if I rubbed my finger along the flowers on the plate that they would have that smooth velvety feel like all pansy's do. Most of all I think I loved the plate because it reminded me of home.

No that's not true. I loved the plate because it reminded me of my mother.

It reminded me of her love of pansy's and the many punnets she would plant in abundance every year. The "fresh from her garden" pansy and violet posy's she used to bring me when she'd visit. And the way she taught my son and daughter to run their fingers along the petals so they too could feel how velvety smooth it was. Just like she did was I was young.

So there I was in a smoke filled kitchen with tears in my eyes. Not because of the smoke or the fire or the mess but because I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten about pansy's, about the memory of my mother and about that damn plate.

At that precise moment Beauty arrived home. She walked into the kitchen, looked at me, surveyed the damage and walked over to stand beside me. She noticed the plate next to me on the counter top and softly runs her finger over the purple pansy's petals.

She said, "I love this plate"
I said, "Me too. If the house ever catches on fire we have to take this plate"
She said, "Deal. (she pauses) Whats for dinner?'
I said, "Blueberry Cheesecake"
She looks at me, shrugs her shoulders, smiles and simply said, "Ok"