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We'll fix what ails you - with the help of the blokes next door.
On a Thursday night I like to settle in for an hour of Top Billing - a local magazine show with glam and the good life type stuff. It's like paging through House & Leisure - you see what everyone else is up to, the rich and the famous, bit of inspiration for small-scale my-life stuff, a chance to crit the weird things they spend cash on, and the rest just mindless entertainment.
Tonight the show was hosted from a small bachelor house that wasn't anything hugely special. Except that I noticed immediately some of my favourite paintings were on the wall. And a LOT of them. All surrealist type realistic ones depicting deserts and shipwrecks and holes in the ground and deserted buildings. Like this. In fact, EXACTLY like that. Except that it's not the house that was shown... THIS is. And my perceptions were shattered.
You see, years ago I saw that artist's stuff, lost the name and have been trying to find out who it is since. So I checked the credits online for tonight's show, and found a "interior decor staging company".... Space Energy.
Who apparently take a perfectly ordinary house and then fill it with their stock paintings, ornaments (saw that on the screen too!) and other things, and VOILA! you have decorator heaven.
Sies.
There go my shattered dreams that I'd finally found someone who had the artwork I love so much, in copious amounts, and who I could Google until I found out who the artist was!
And Sies on Top Billing too for showing us through a house that really doesn't exist. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling and the lights were put away, poor Mr Bachelor Luxury Jet Pilot went back to coming home to his normal, undecorated, rather sparse house.
Sies again.
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Both found (lucky 5c pieces!) and potentially made (should I choose to exchange solid copper for cash).
How's this for a new motivational strategy:
Unless I make X number of Rands in a day, I don't get to eat. (could backfire in that I may end up too hungry to work....)
Think it will be good butt-kick method? :-)
Thought I'd give Google Translate a whirl, English to Afrikaans.
First sentence - perfect. Second, not so good. Third: well....!
Yesterday, as we pulled into a parking lot to pick up something, I heard a funny hissing noise and smelt gas. We were in a hurry though, and I thought it had merely been the bottle of anti-freeze responding to a change in temparature... until I opened up the car again. I nearly choked! The interior was thick with an unbreathable cloud of something spicy and minty and as yet undefined.
Which led to a frantic mission to discover what it was, where it was, before it turned out to be some huge problem with the car!
Couldn't find a thing... until I reached into my bag.
Deep in the dark corners of that bag lurks a small canister of Liquid Bullet. I think I inherited it when Olivia the Landy arrived at my front door - it may have been somewhere in her (which means it was well-travelled!). Well somehow something had set this stuff off and it had half-emptied into my handbag!
We were in the middle of an installation - no time to go fannying about to get rid of the after-effects. All we could do was gingerly drop the still-leaking canister into the nearest bin. But the spinach and feta pie I had for lunch may have been a bit more spicey than intended by the baker.
Later in the day I happened to brush my left hand against my lips after handling my wallet. Hot Lips indeed. When I washed the dishes later, that hand burnt for hours. So yup, Sunlight Dish Liquid doesn't help. And we do know now that Liquid Bullet WORKS.
I have yet to clean out the handbag. I don't know what's been damaged or permeated. I do know that I was rather relieved when I put my sunglasses on and my eyes didn't swell shut. I'll get up the courage sooner or later to take a good look - but I admit it does have a lovely fresh smell to it once you get past the pepper.
Hey, it's not every day you can claim to have maced yourself accidentally! Better enjoy it while it lasts - and make it last long enough not to do it again.... :-)
I don't know if it's hereditary, or if it's merely the inbred voices of 37 years, but in the back of my mind there are whisperings...
You see, I'm slowly but surely putting a new project together - one that's been percolating for a long time, gaining momentum then sitting back to consolidate, exploring and planning, and now coming to fruition. It's not the next big money-making scheme, it's not the next big business deal. But it's something good and something that can make a difference. Big-time.
Or at least I think so.
And that's where the doubt starts to come in. I've been told so many times over the years "you can't do that, you'll never make it, you're a woman - what do you know". I spent a good few years working in a male-dominated environment that ground those kind of opinions into all their female worker's heads. Until you started to believe them....
Inherited come other thoughts, passed down from grandmother to mother to me. That a woman's place is there, not here, doing that, not this. Subservient, self-sacrificing, slave to all, not striding ahead to make big changes on your own - until somehow, some way, you get that spark of confidence that sends you out into success. You suddenly see that you are, in fact, very good at what you want to do. Naysayers be damned. I saw it change my mother, and I've seen it change me.
Yet still back there in the brain lurk the in-pounded observations that you can't actually accomplish your dreams. And now and then they surface, and then you get to beat them down.
I should have learnt by now to reverse those voices, to permanently still them. I've proved that I do, in fact, have a head on my shoulders that can think through things, come up with stuff that works (really well) and make a big success of a project against all odds. In spite of what the general public says.
I guess it's the pattern of self-doubt that comes with starting anything new. Wondering if you're on the right track, if you can ignite the same passion for what you want to do in enough other people to gain momentum, if it will work out how you envisioned it.
And there the trick is simply to dream bigger when the voices come. To imagine more comprehensively, work harder and smarter and better to reach those goals.
Do that, and the voices will quickly be proved very very wrong.
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Oak flowers spotted while Favourite Man was hanging off yet another roof sorting out an antenna.
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