Trinny and Susannah worship

I had the pleasure of seeing the lovely fashionistas in the flesh last week!

Style in The City in Birmingham was a three day event at which the Trinny & Susannah Style Academy pulled into town hoiking up bra straps and making trembling lillies of grown women who clearly didn't know any better!

It was fabulous!

I saw half a dozen badly dressed women transformed before my very eyes! I don't even care if it was a set up - it was truly marvellous hehe

They even divulged their own secrets to looking good despite short legs and baby bellies... It was so cool seeing them in person, they're TV royalty as far as I'm concerned! My only regret is that I was flying solo and only had the camaraderie of the mostly female crowd, it would have been great to be there with a friend but it was during the day when most people work and well, iIdon't have too many female friends in Brum just yet... But so as not to miss out on post-show euphoria I called several ladies who I knew would be greatly jealous not to have been there!

Having thought it through afters, while it was a compliment not to have been picked from the audience for a makeover, I should have 'dressed-down' to win a one-on-one with the fashion experts... pah!

beanbag riff

i recently invested in a beanbag for our flat...

while there's enough seating for us, when we have guests we need extra bum-space so a beanbag seemed ok cos it doesn't take up too much room in our bijou pad and doubles as a footrest if needs be!*

trouble is, i have had to replace this beanbag twice now due to splitting - the Achilles heel of any good bean-based furniture! And now i'm loathe to sit on number 3 so weary am i of it! we are now on day5 of the latest bean-bag and its okay so far... But really you'd expect the seams to be extra tight on such a piece of soft-furnishing!

i went into a fancy bean-bag shop in Dublin last year, you know the giant £500 ones, bet they don't bust after just a few sits!


*i'm sure the the joy of elevated feet is a wonder to only the over 30s amongst us, hehe

cesar superstar

Oh. My. God. The Dog Whisperer is the best TV show ever invented!

This gorgeous* guy tells dogs who's the boss and is on telly every day at the moment... I looked him up on the interweb and discovered there's already been 5 US seasons of this telly treat!

If you've not caught him before, he's on Sky Three (freeview) at 6pm weeknights and has a magic power over all dogs! ALL of them I tells you! he also has a strange power over me! hehe I can't get enough of watching him be 'calm and assertive' with dogs with behaviour issues only to turn to the owners and 'train' them to be a better pack leader - FABULOUS! haha

I've even tried using some of Cesar's 'sshh' and 'stance' techniques on the boyf and some certainly seem to cross over! Altho to be fair he certainly does calm and assertive tricks on me when i get over-excited about him not doing the washing up hehe...

we can't have a dog at the moment since our lifestyles don't allow it at the moment but I reckon its justa matter of time cos we're both big doggie fans, tho I'm not allowed a handbag doggie - no matter how cute they are! ruined! my friend R joined a dog-walking charity that gets volunteers to walk dogs for elderly or sick owners - maybe i should look into that for the time being, I'm desperate to become a great pack leader! haha

*he's only gorgeous since I've seen him do his magic with the pooches! haha

quorn extras

i had an unexpected dinner guest t'other week!

there i was tucking into my micro-protein when i came across this little fella...

now this happened a month ago and its still not funny! makes me feel all 'orrible to think of it...

poor old caterpillar joe was having a nice walk (does a caterpillar walk? that's a whole new blog...) when he fell into a batter machine at Quorn Towers and ended up in my tea!

i wrote to said company about this tragic accident and sent them the 'foreign body' as they called it, and pictures too... they said "we think he may have smuggled himself into the factory in an onion and here's a cheque for £5 for the trouble." Hardly generous given my emotional trauma but then if you will eat processed foods, you never know what you're getting do you?!

i'm not taking it any further, though i think perhaps they've not given much thought to poor old caterpillar.

there he was, going about his caterpillar business, checking out an onion for dinner, before he was rudely kidnapped from a field! he must've been a bit confused when he woke up in a factory that's for sure... and what if Mrs C was at home with baby caterpillars looking fwd to some onion soup!

it simply doesn't bear thinking about!

celeb family tree

at a gathering recently i asked the question: if there was a movie of your life, which actor would play you? the idea is they have to have some slight resemblance, however slight...

after much umming and ah-ing, i decided mine should be someone like Sandra Bullock but then my friend A topped me with Britney Spears! That's way more rockNroll than Sandra Bullock... I coulda had grunge grrl Juliet Lewis but she turned into a dodgy religious-type which just wouldn't do... perhaps i could have someone like Drew Barrymore, she's hot but kinda quirky right?! haha

but this got us to thinking, who's your celeb family tree? Celeb Mum would have to be someone unorthodox like Cher (my friend T thinks she looks like my mum ayway haha), Dad would be a rugged lovely like Tom Selleck, my celeb Bro would have to be Howard from Take That haha, or maybe David Schwimmer and even tho i don't really have a sister, my celeb sister could be Sandra Bullock! haha got her back in there... and as far as love interest goes... well that'd always be George Clooney (swoon)

i really have to stop wasting my life thinking about such guff don't i? haha

feel the rage and do it anyway

i seem to be becoming Mrs Angry...

i always thought of myself as quite a sunny personality but lately i've been shouting a lot... and rather worryingly, not at people but inanimate objects and/or myself! haha

the kitchen seems to be feeling the brunt of my rage mostly... this is probably because it's quite 'bijou' (another word for tiny and completely impractical!!!) and i keep dropping things when using the miniscule work surfaces (where do i chop my vegetables, i ask you?!) but more alarming is the shouting at myself!

surely this is not healthy! any head doctors please advise! haha, but am i alone? my man got a new playstation game and i gamely took part as player2 only to discover that my misspent youth didn't give me very good brain to hand co-ordination! haha (come to think of it, what skills did my misspent youth offer?!) i was so angry at myself, it was so frustrating! this is why i don't play computer games! i'm no good! and i hate being no good! i'm not a very good loser (the head doctor could have told you that!)

i'm also partial to a bit of shouting at other drivers when they behave in a ridiculous/ dangerous/ selfish manner! but that doesn't count, they're idiots, i'm allowed to shout at them... or so i thought... my man was a passenger in the punto of love recently only to tell me i was a very stressed driver... but have you ever driven in Birmingham? it's insane! haha

but having shouted a lot lately i'm trying to chill out... why am i shouting all the time?! i probably just need more zeds!

cc rage!

i got one of those 'cc' emails today, you know, a 'someone is trying to blame you for something' cc email?! haha

well let me tell you i wasn't laughing at 5.27am when i got it! i'd go so far as to say it really pee'd me off for a good hour! haha

i'm over it now, but boy oh boy email has a lot to answer for in human communication breakdown! surely if the person had just picked up the phone and had a chat about it, nobody would have been CC'd in!

a CC is hardly ever good news, i had another CC email situation only a few weeks ago and thanks to another email absolving me of any wrong-doing still sitting in my sent box i was able to reply with a suitably haughty tone haha, but its so ridiculous that this all goes on at all!

email is quite a rubbish device for any communication other than dates and times since tone can't be judged and a simple statement can be interpreted as anything!

once again today i am absolved by my electronic sent box, thank goodness for an untidy outlook account! usually i'd delete everything but in days like these i keep everything or get accused of all kinds!

ah, the job of the middle man (or woman) is a thankless one...

17,192,569 minutes and counting!

wow! if you look at your life from a different perspective for just a moment it can really make you blink! what have i done with my 17 million minutes in life?!

of course by the time i'm done here i'll have spent another 15 minutes updating the world wide web of my thoughts for the day, but i was sent this age calculator thing on an email today... i filled in my birthday and among other stats and personality traits i discovered i'd lived a whole lotta minutes!

i knew that, obviously, but not exactly how many! that's got some serious wow-factor don't you think? and it's inspiring, i want to make all of my life's minutes worth while! i think i'm going to appreciate my weekend a whole lot more than i did last week...

how about this then, my top 5 things to do in a minute:

5 eat a portion of my home made apple and plum crumble. takes around 45 minutes to prepare, but approximately a minute to devour! haha

4 have a hug, only take s a minute but feels good for a whole lot longer - how slushy am i today?! haha

3 brew a nice cuppa tea, you should always try and brew your teabag for at least a minute, it makes for such a nicer cuppa!

2 is it just me or does an extra minute in bed in the morning feel like a lot longer at 4am?!

1 telling your partner, friends or family that you love them, only takes a few seconds, but defintely the best thing, and most worthwhile thing to do with your extra-scrutinised minutes today!

go on, make someone smile today : )

have a great minute appreciating weekend y'all!

don't cry over spilled yakult

there's a strange noise coming from the walls in our apartment... and frankly its freaking me out! haha

i am not a subscriber to the supernatural so i'm more than happy to have it explained away by some kind of technological reasoning... you know its the lift mechanics, or perhaps the neighbours have a fish tank next door with an eletric motor making that ungodly whining noise but until i know for certain what it is it just sounds too darn creepy!

together with the graffiti strewn walls of the stairwell its making our home not so happy to come back to! and while teenagers will be teenagers, can't they go the library or something constructive instead? haha they can't even spell properly and i have so far resisted making corrections to their scrawlings! haha...

but back to the disturbing noise... it sounds very much like an unhappy animal, but its quite regular which makes me think it can't be, but i have to have the TV or the radio switched on all the time or it freaks me out, what could it be this strange whining thing...

i'm not happy!