to share some Sydney holiday pics

On the school holidays (which seem like such a long time ago!) my sister and I flew down to Sydney and spent a week playing tourists. Was so much fun and we crammed so much in to our short time there!

We arrived mid morning and killed time wandering down to Circular Quay whilst we waited for our room to be ready.

The view from our balcony at night.

 

 I was so excited to be a part of the audience for Studio 10! (can you spot me up the back!)

We had lunch down at Darling Harbour afterwards and a school from my 'home' town, Toowoomba were playing as part of a big band concert series!

We saw Strictly Ballroom at the Lyric Theatre! It was SO good! If you are in Sydney...do yourself a favour and get along and see it!

The best all round view of Sydney from Centrepoint Tower!

Levels and levels of shopping!

 

Can you see him??

He's there I promise

 

We went Whale Watching and say 2 whales and had some dolphins playing along beside us!

 

 

 We climbed the bridge!!! 

It was such an amazing time to climb the bridge, we started at about 4pm so saw the view in daylight and then watched the sunset and then got to see the amazing lights of Sydney! An absolute MUST I think and worth every penny!

We finished our trip with brunch at Bondi! 

Some crazy crazy people were swimming and surfing in the cold!

Linking up with My Little Drummer Boys, Twinkle in the Eye and Ms Mystery Case this Wednesday.

to discuss fear

This week I must confess is being hosted by Ms Mystery Case and she has asked us to confess our fears.

I am taking a slightly different take on this and not just confessing my fears....

I am working my way through Kelly Exeter's book...Your Best Year Yet.. I am taking my time and really trying to absorb and fully take in Kelly's advice.

So Chapter 5 is called A different way of facing your fears. Kelly starts the chapter by asking What would you do if you weren't scared? which got me thinking about this week's confession prompt.

Sure I have my fears (snakes, spiders, mice, living the rest of my life alone being some of them) but what would I do if I had no fear!?

(It has literally taken me about 15 minutes to write this after typing that question...I fear of putting it out there, putting it in writing, seeing it on the screen, saying it out loud)....

If I had no fear, I would leave my job......

This is something I have been thinking about for a while, something that I know I have to do and something that I am working towards doing but if I really had no fear I would have done it a while ago, I would do it now. I have been working in this profession for about 14 years, it's all I've known...it's all I've ever really done, it's safe, it's secure, it's permanent..the holidays are great and the pay is pretty good as well. It's all of these reasons that have kept me doing it all this time. Another reason I have not been able to walk away is because I have no idea what else I would do.

But all these reasons are not reasons to stay.

In the chapter Kelly says...

A lot of the time, our fears can be boiled down to

what other people might think about us.

 I think this is so true...I fear that walking away somehow makes me a failure, that I will let people who rely on me down, that people will be disappointed in me/with me, that people will try (and possibly succeed) and talk me out of it, that people will think that I am crazy/stupid/irresponsible/reckless/and other things that really shouldn't matter to me!

So, step by step, bit by bit, one day at a time I am going to activate my wobbly courage and work towards leaving my job and having My Best Year Yet!

Image Source

Linking up with Ms Mystery Case for I Must Confess..

Your turn...What would you do if you weren't scared??

(PS...I will be working on a full review of Kelly's book shortly! Standby for that one!!)

to dream..

This week Kirsty is taking a break so we are linking our confessions up with Ann at Help! I'm Stuck! 
There was the prompt "Things I never told my parents", but with the fear that that could open a big can of worms I am confessing off topic this week...

I am going to follow on from last weeks prompt about sleep. I am confessing some dreams I had recently. Now, from my extensive Google research, apparently we dream every night and scientists don't know why we remember them some nights/mornings and not others. I think perhaps we remember the ones that we are meant to remember, the ones that mean something to us, or that are trying to tell us something.

I am always interested in the meanings of my dreams and if I am lucky enough to remember them the next morning, I try and write them down or jump on my font of all knowledge (Google) and check out their meanings.

I don't remember many of my dreams but while I was on a recent holiday in Sydney I remember my dreams from 2 nights in a row.

I'm not going to go into all the details of the dreams but needless to say I googled their meanings the morning after. When we were in Sydney (which I will blog about at some stage) I went there with the attitude that I was fully going to enjoy my holiday and not worry too much about what I was eating and I wanted to just enjoy the fabulous restaurants, cafes and chocolate shops that Sydney has to offer. At the end of each day I would fall into bed feeling absolutely full and like I was going to burst. I have been thinking for a little while that I need to kick things up a little bit in terms of my eating. I have been allowing myself a few to many treats later, I blame winter! Anyway the interpretation of my dream reiterated that and so I am getting back on track!!

The next night I had another dream that I remember. The interpretation of this dream indicates that I am looking for something new, that I am tired of something and ready for something new. Now I know this is a very general statement and interpretation could be true for just about everyone, but for me at this particular time and with some decisions that I have made recently, it couldn't be closer to the truth. I am excited about what is to come and I look forward to sharing it, when the time is right...

Do you remember your dreams? What do they tell you?

Linking up with Help! I'm Stuck!! for I Must Confess and One Mother Hen for Open Slather!

 

to put my single girl ranty pants back on..

**Warning - I am about to get my single girl ranty pants on...just in case you want to exit now**

I'm single....I think by now we all know that.

I don't necessarily want to be single...I think we all know that as well.

But what I do want is to be OK with being single, and for the most part I am trying to be. I even wrote a blog post on Valentines Day about why it rocks to be single! I am cruising through life doing my thing and trying not letting my single status stop me.

So what I think I really need, and what I think would really help "people like me" is if society was OK with me being single. Of course I don't mean 'me' specifically but women in their 30's. I think if there wasn't so much focus on it from others then I would be handling this stage of my life a lot better. Each time I meet someone for the first time it's only a matter of moments before they ask me if I have a boyfriend/husband. I can almost guarantee it will be one of the first 5 questions they ask. I was at a friend's wedding last weekend and met some of her other friends for the first time and one, who happened to be a male and had taken full advantage of the bar tab (much to his girlfriend's distress), appeared quite dismayed that a (and I quote) "hot girl like you is single, what's wrong with you?"... bang...there it is again!! And I'm suddenly thrown back to a place in time when I question all that I am and wonder "what is wrong with me??" (Like I don't get emotional enough at weddings!!)

Even friends who I may not have seen or spoken to in a while ask if I've met anyone, and while I know that they do it out of love and concern (or whatever other reason) I really wish there wasn't such a focus on it and wonder if I would be so bothered by it if I wasn't asked about it so often. It's easy to say 'don't let it bother you', but it does, sometimes more than others but on the whole...it does.

What I want more than anything else in the world...believe it or not, is not to be married or even to be a mother, what I am realising is that what I want more than anything in the world is to be OK if that doesn't happen...to not feel like I have failed somehow or that there is something wrong with me.

And pics like this that pop up on Facebook from time to time, do not help!

I know I've ranted about this before and you're probably wondering what's prompted this latest whinge. Like 172 465 other people I follow Mamamia on Facebook. I find some of their writing thought-provoking, some informative, some annoying, some head-scratch worthy and then some downright frustrating. Like an article that popped up in my newsfeed over the weekend. Now like any good tabloid it's the headlines they use that usually sucker me in... The open letter to Prince Harry we all secretly wish we'd written , now while I know this 'open letter' was written in jest and cheekiness it does put the sting that because Harry is a couple of months off turning 30 it's time for him to settle down and "find some princess-wife material" because you can't possibly be in your thirties and single these days! So what if Prince Harry is 30 and single? So what if he doesn't find someone worth marrying? Is that the worst thing that could happen? What's so wrong with him being single? I get that he's a Royal and all that but William's got the whole heir to the throne thing covered, give the guy a break! 

Now if you have been living under a rock over the weekend you will also know that the BIG news (*cough..whatever..cough*) is that Ian Thorpe has announced he is indeed gay. Now this again is something that I responded with a big fat "SO WHAT?" whenever another tweet or status update was written about it. Again, while scrolling through Facebook I came across another article on Mamamia with the headline "Why it matters that Ian Thorpe came out", my first reaction was to yell..."IT DOESN'T", but thought I would give them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out. In the article Mia Freedman talks about how easy it is for straight people to say "it doesn't matter" if people are gay because we don't have to worry about the negative impact and struggles that LGBTQ people have to face every day.

Again this feels like society is constantly saying it is wrong to feel or be this way. I didn't watch the interview but this article speculates that the reason Ian did not come out earlier was perhaps because he feared being ridiculed by the media and the public, that perhaps he thought he would not be respected by the public despite his AMAZING athletic ability. If either of these is even remotely any where near the truth then that is a sad sad fact, but one that I am, sadly, not surprised by.

I have since read some of what Ian had to say about why it took him so long to reveal his sexuality. One of the statements I read was that he was first asked if he was gay when he was 16 years of age....again with the questions people....

Here's my hot tip to society.... (and I am not speaking from experience with most of these so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!)...

• The single girl in her 30's (or any age really)...doesn't want to be asked why she's single!
• The couple doesn't want to be asked when they are getting married
• The newlyweds don't want to be asked when they are having a baby
• The childless couple don't want to be asked why they don't want kids
• The newbie parents don't want to be asked when they are going to have another baby and so on
• The single guy doesn't want to be asked if he's gay 

So stop asking and mind your own damn business! *sigh*

Is there a question you wish people would stop asking you??

(And to all my friends, if I have asked you any of the above questions I am sorry and I promise to never do it again!)

Linking this rant up with Essentially Jess for IBOT.

to sleep

This week we are confessing tales of sleep, which is a little ironic as I posted this on my facebook page this morning...

As I've gotten older I seemed to sleep in less and less. A 'sleep in' for me was sleeping til about 7am and that I was grateful for. I love the weekends when there is absolutely no reason to set an alarm and just wake up when I am ready to, not when my alarm starts screaming at me. A sleep in til about 7 on a weekend was still great and I would bound out of bed feeling restless and get stuck in to some exercising, get the washing on and have a lot of my home jobs done and dusted by 9am, ready to hit the shops and do my downtown jobs! I would usually then hit a wall and need an afternoon nap at around 2pm.

But these holidays for some reason that all changed. It could have had something to do with the fact that my favourite tennis tournament was on during the first week and an Aussie was doing so well in it that I was staying up until ungodly hours of the morning to watch it, which then meant sleeping beyond 7am most of the time. I think it's also because of the weather, Toowoomba has been so freaking cold and our unit is a little on the cold side, that it is just way too hard to get out of my comfy, cosy, warm bed, especially if there is no reason to.

Whatever it is, it's been great to just sleep until 'whenever o'clock' but sadly that has all come to a alarm screeching halt! It's back to school time again which means getting up pretty much before the sun and driving to work with the thermometer in my car tell me it's freezing degrees and me wishing I didn't have to leave my bed.

Are you an early riser or do you enjoy a good sleep in when you can?

Linking up with Kirsty at My Home Truths and Alicia at One Mother Hen...check em out!

for my third book review

I am now officially half way through my Australia Women Writers Reading Challenge!!
This is book 3 of 6 and once again a country romance novel.

Image Source

I had never heard of Barbara Hannay before but saw this in my local Big W store, read the blurb and was immediately intrigued, and it was on sale (I'm not going to lie). Barbara lives in Far North Queensland and the book is set in Queensland which I think also drew me to it, like I could actually know the people that she was writing about as the places she wrote about were so familiar to me.

"There must be some mistake" Zoe tells her Mother "You and Dad can't both be O blood type"

"Why not?" her mother asks, "Because two O parents can't make a B baby."

And that was how Zoe found out her father was not really her father... Even her Mother hadn't thought it possible that the handsome farmer from Far North Queensland whom she'd had a fling with could be Zoe's father but the blood tests don't lie. Zoe, a chef running her own catering business in inner city Brisbane, immediately starts to research he biological father who runs a large cattle station in the Gulf and before she knows it she has applied for a job to be their new camp cook, sworn to secrecy by her mother.

Out on the muster at Mullinjim, Zoe meets brooding cattleman Mac McKinnon. Every instinct tells Mac that Zoe is hiding something, and as the pressure to reveal her mother's secret builds, Zoe fears she must confide in him or burst.

Another book that kept me turning the pages because, despite predicting correctly how the story was going to end, I wasn't sure how it was going to get there and I was not disappointed.

This book also produced one of my favourite lines from a book that I've read in a long time:

"I've spent my life drifting with the currents, rather than steering my own course"

Love that line and it really resonates with me at the moment!

If you want to check out my previous reviews click below:

An Outback Life - by Mary Groves

Poppy's Dilemma - by Karly Lane

Linking up this review with Essentially Jess for IBOT and at the Australian Women Writers webpage

Am also keen to get some suggestions for my next book, something a little different perhaps?

to confess

What would be the hardest thing for you to give up?

I am sure there are much harder things for me to give up if I really really thought about it but I must confess...as soon as I saw this prompt by Kirsty at My Home Truths, my first thought was:

CHOCOLATE!!

Through all my rounds of 12wbt and my Bootcamp chocolate has been the one thing that I have not been able to go without! When I was sticking strictly to the 12wbt eating plan I would forgo my treat meal on a Saturday in favour of a small white knight chocolate bar. Mish talks a lot about willpower being like a muscle and the more you use it the better/easier it will be, but for me I just love sitting down at the end of the day with a nice cup of tea and a little bit (ok a lot) of chocolate. I wish sometimes that was all it was but I often find myself reaching for a little choccie bar at work as well, we have an amazing chaplain at my school who keeps a tin in the fridge stocked with those mini chocolate bars and who always just seems to know the right time to offer me one!, when work is really stressful I often joke that there is not enough chocolate in the world to get me through my day!

This works right??

I think if was told tomorrow that I could no longer eat chocolate, my life as I know it would essentially be over (alright I could be being a little over dramatic there)...

What would be the hardest thing for you to give up?

Linking up this Monday as usual with My Home Truths and One Mother Hen

for some pics of the twinnies!

If you follow me on Instagram you will know that I spent the weekend cuddling, kissing, photographing and Instagramming pics of my twin nephews Fletcher and Bradey. They are just days off being 7 months old so capturing a picture is becoming harder by the day as they start to become more active.

Linking up with My Little Drummer Boys, Twinkle in the Eye and Ms Mystery Case this Wednesday (late again...!)