Currently.

I haven't done one of these in a while so thought I'd revisit 'Currently', inspired by one of my favourite blogs, Sometimes Sweet's posts.

Watching:
This is almost as embarrassing as Toddlers and Tiaras (although nothing is as embarrassing as admitting watching The Shire), but my new obsession now that all of my favourite shows seem to be on a break, is Dance Moms.

I guess I can relate to this one, growing up as a total dance kid myself, I have endured nasty dance teachers (telling you if you don't pull your stomach in, they'll cut it off and eat it for dinner???) and some really ambitious and grasping dance mums.

Luckily for me, my mum couldn't bear the politics and was a failed dance mum, opting instead to slow down outside the studio long enough for us to jump out before gunning the accelerator and buggering off as fast as she could.

Smart lady.

Watching these talented kids and their delusional mothers is a guilty pleasure and certainly is helping fill the gaps until The Vampire Diaries/True Blood/Pretty Little Liars et al opt to grace us with their presence once more.

If you've ever danced or want your kids to dance, it's a must see!

Anticipating:
The smell of spring in the air! Toowoomba is renowned for its Carnival of Flowers and it all kicks off this weekend with it's Flower, Wine and Food Festival. Apparently some of the gardens featured are a must-see and I'm really looking forward to stopping and...well...smelling the roses. Stay tuned for what I'm sure will be some amazing pics.

Incidentally, the garden inside our work grounds has just had the most gorgeous orange flowers spring up this week which makes it such a pleasure to come to work...sort of.

Discovering:
Forgive me if this is old news, but I've just stumbled onto the miracle of Epsom Salts! I have heard about them of course for relieving sore muscles and tired feet but hadn't heard what a fabulous skincare product it could be. Reading a blog somewhere this woman talked about how she used it on her face and it was a nice, easy and cheap (always a bonus) solution so I thought I'd give it a go.

Living in Toowoomba, you are covered from ears to toes for several months of the year, which in my case resulted in needing to shed about a zillion layers of 'snake skin' now that it's getting a little warmer out. So I soaked in a lovely Epsom bath and then mixed the salts with my exfoliator and went nuts.

20 million layers of skin floating in the bath later and RESULT! And skin like a baby's bottom...hooray for me!

Since then, I've been using Epsom Salts every other day on my face, just mixed in with my cleanser. And it's made the most ridiculous difference, that I'm simply stunned. I have problem skin and issues with adult acne (which as someone who went through my teenage years relatively spot-free is kinda mortifying). Since using this, not only is my skin noticeably brighter, but my existing spots have cleared up really fast and no new ones developing...

Just magic.

On Monday, running late for work, half asleep and clutching much-needed caffeine in hand, I ran into a co-worker who commented that I looked 'bright and raring to go'. As I was sleep deprived and feeling brain-dead, I can only attribute said miracle comment to Epsom Salts.

The best bit is not just the soft and clear skin but also I didn't realise the magnesium that is absorbed, which helps raise your serotonin levels naturally. And God knows I'll take all the serotonin I can get.

And Epsom, if you're reading this, feel free to sponsor me as a lifetime of salts sounds pretty damn fine.

Although now I've discovered that I can buy an 11kg bucket for just $30, if I don't hear from you, I might just live.

Reading:
So I just finished the three 'Grey' books and I have to say I wish I'd stopped after the first. Number 1 was OK and I did grow to feel for the characters and was interested in their development, however by halfway through the third book I just wanted the story to be finished already and grew to actively dislike pretty much both of the main characters. The plotlines just rambled and the carry-on between the pair (and I don't mean in the bedroom/Red Room of Pain) was ridiculous to the point of stupid.

Apologies to the millions of women who are obsessed with Christian and Ana, but I wanted to gag and smack them both extremely hard.

Listening to:
A total blast from the past popped onto the random rotation today:

Pump Up the Jam, Technotronic.

OMG I so remember going (underage) to the Bond Uni pub with my sister and some friends and dancing with some old blokes (I mean, senior citizen old, not dad old) and boogeying down to this gem. There's a bit that tells you to 'get down' and then 'get up' - well these poor old blokes gave it their all, but I feared when they got 'down' that there might not be too much getting back up in their future.

The memories in songs...aaahhh.

Make your day...if only to laugh at the 80s hair/costuming and bum bag that goes sooooo well with lycra.

So there you are. Hope your week is travelling well! Personally I'm shattered after an all-day meeting so I'm off to feed my brain some junk food in the form of another episode of Dance Moms.

Have a good one!

xx

Fifty shades of wtf.

What a wonderful weekend of doing a bit fat pile of nothing!

A bit of housework, a food shop and a lot of sitting in the sun...magical. The highlight being my son taking me out to dinner last night as a belated birthday present. We aimed to go to La Porchetta, a wonderful pizza/pasta place that makes mouthwatering, out-of-this-world pizzas, however it wasn't open when we got there.

As we were STARVING, we decided to head across the road to....Sizzler!

Haha yes I see the irony, from an upscale seafood buffet one day to Sizzler. But it is what it is, and frankly the food ain't all that bad.

So harping on this age thing...it's probably a sign of old age maturity to get excited about your steam mop, yeah? God I love that thing, it's effortless and quick and makes me actually want to mop.

Now I'm hardly the perfect housewife and not exactly the most houseproud person (cue all my friends rolling their eyes at this news with a giant, collective 'duh'), so it's pretty weird for me to get worked up over any kind of cleaning apparatus. So when one comes along, it's time to sing Hallelujah!

Anyhoo...enough about boring cleaning...

So I finished Fifty Shades yesterday and I would like to say that it's Fifty Shades of f--ked up, however the author has already beat me to it, like 50,000 times.

I must say the characters were endearing which keeps you reading however if there was a drinking game based on Ana biting her lip, then I would've been paralytic before the third chapter. It got to the point where I really wanted to give the fictional protagonist a good hard slap of my own. Pun intended.

Seriously, author, whoever the hell you are, enough already.

It was entertaining enough but I really cannot see how this book has taken the women of the world by storm (which ergo then enables them to take their men by storm, hehe). I supposed it has introduced kinky fuckery into the vernacular and sex shops everywhere thank you for it.

So an uneventful and yet luxuriously decadent weekend of big fat nothings. Need more of em. Getting up for work tomorrow will be painful!

Hope you had a wonderful weekend :)

xx

Bayonets, Fifty Shades, Tiaras and the bizarre life of an assistant.

So another crazy week done and dusted and I'm feeling pretty damned pleased with myself, albeit exhausted.

Yesterday really highlighted the diverse and sometimes bizarre life of an assistant...from getting my boss ready for an overseas trip to following him to his private park to swap cars and unload his rifles from the boot...

Yes that was not a typo. Private park. Unloading rifles. You read it correctly.

It was the first time I've ever held a gun of any description and whilst they were all in bags, it was still surreal and somewhat terrifying. My boss also recalled a story of how he has purchased a World War I rifle that was never taken out of the box...when he opened it he discovered not only the rifle but a BAYONET.

For real.

I told him to walk around the office with it casually slung over his shoulder at pay review time. Watch productivity increase. Demands decrease. Problem solved.

I for one won't be pissing him off in a hurry now I know he's such a crack shot. And he is the proud owner of a BAYONET.

Fall in line, troops.

So a rifle is so much heavier than I expected. Unless I develop some guns (pun intended) tout suite, I would barely be able to lift the thing shoulder height, let alone take any kind of decent aim.

For the record, my boss does target shooting for sport, not anything with a pulse.

So there's a couple of 'firsts' that I don't think I'd ever experience in Brisbane! Probably not anywhere except Toowoomba! In what universe do you stumble into a magical garden just a few short blocks from the CBD??? My imagination is already planning all the parties we can have there...

So today we went to visit my fellow blogger Willow in her lovely new home, which is now sooo much closer to me...literally just a 2-3 minute drive...yay for me! I am in love with her place and if I ever get sick of my little abode I'll be evicting her and moving in myself. So happy for her.

Wonderful to see the kids all playing happily together. One of the nicest things about my old long-time friends is now most of us have kids of our own and they all play BEAUTIFULLY together. In some cases there's years between them but it simply doesn't matter. So nice to be able to hang with my lovely ladies knowing the kids are happy and occupied (and hopefully in another room).

So this afternoon I dropped E off to his first ever overnight camping birthday party. Laser skirmish, pizza, plenty of sugar, a huge tent...and did I mention 11 kids? They are much braver people than me although they assured me their earplugs are top notch, so perhaps that's the trick. I am looking forward to hearing all about the night's hijinks when I pick up an overtired, oversugared child tomorrow.

And then we're going to surprise someone...I won't say anything just in case they read this and it spoils it all but I'm so looking forward to it.

So I've just finished reading all the Fallen series by Lauren Kate. It's about fallen angels and I must say it took me awhile to get into them and I didn't really fall in LOVE with the characters but the storyline was really interesting so I had to keep reading to find out what happened. I've heard they're making it into a movie but I just don't see how they'll be able to do it convincingly...fingers crossed they don't make a total hash of it as per Twilight.

Speaking of, I know it will be crap but I'm still excited that the last part of Breaking Dawn is opening soon! Will be dragging Miss Willow along and she'll have no excuse now we're both living in the same town.

So I finished all the books and went trolling through amazon.com to try to find something new to read. I must say I was a bit uninspired and I'm up to date with most of my favourite authors so I have done what I had promised myself I wouldn't...

I downloaded Fifty Shades of Grey.

Oh dear.

I've heard it's really badly written and not at all a convincing portrait however everyone's been going on about it and my screen crush Ian Somerhalder is lobbying for the part of the main character in the soon-to-be-made movie, so I thought, why the hell not. If it's good enough for Ian and all that...

So if I'm engrossed in my kindle the next few days I'll tell you I'm reading something intellectually stimulating but in actual fact I'll be reading something else stimulating...er...or so I've heard.

So there we go.

Oh you'll see the depths of my boredom when I reveal something so horrifying and shocking and embarrassing that I did last night...

I've mentioned before that I've exhausted pretty much all of my TV shows and subsequently have been delving into fare I'd never generally watch in a million years (The Shire, anyone?).

Well last night I sunk to a new low.

I watched....(oh God I can barely say it)...

Toddlers and Tiaras.

Perhaps I picked a bad episode to start with, being a 50s theme with one FOUR YEAR OLD GIRL coming out dressed as Sandy and pretending to smoke. I'm pretty sure the cig was real, too. Not lit, but so not the point. And the little girl's mother is justifying herself all over the place saying it was just acting and she had to be authentic.

As if dressing your little kid up as some kind of bizarro-world adult/doll wasn't bad enough.

It was the most horrifying experience of my life.

And you can bet I'll be watching another episode as soon as I've finished typing this.

It's like a car crash, I just can't look away.

And as an aside...if you call your kid Destiny, what the hell is her stripper name supposed to be????? Wrong. Just wrong.

So there you are...I'll be tucked up trying to get warm on an unseasonably FREEZING night either getting naughty with Fifty Shades or naughtier with Toddlers and Tiaras.

Have a good weekend all!

xx