sorrow no more

This song is one of my favourites and so lovely.  Today was a gloriously sunny day and I sat out at lunchtime in the garden , yes accompanied by a dog and butterflies, and thought just how lucky I am to be able to do this.  My heart was broken but while I can enjoy the sunshine I will always be able to find the joy needed to heal it. 

gratitude for platitudes

One of the things that helped me get well enough to participate in life again was a series of tools by Recovery Inc. I am a great lover of clear simple methods in doing anything.  Sometimes we just need to do what works and not over think it.  Today was one of those days.  I arrived in work and started to feel the anxiety.  It was happening for all sorts of reasons but that did not matter.  I needed to get through it and get my work done.  I needed to get through it just so that I could feel well.  So I remembered my tools, bare the discomfort to gain comfort.  So I started to do the little things that needed to be done.  I felt like I needed to lie down but that is not really am option at work.  So I opened my diary to see if there was anything inspiring there.  Smile, go slowly and BREATH it said, so I did.  I also remembered, do things in part acts so I did, I decided to empty out my emails , do some easy things just to get going and it worked.  Soon the anxiety passed and I was OK again.  All things will pass.  So today was a day of platitudes, they are so wonderful and so useful.  I love sean fochals and piseogs, old sayings and superstitions.  My favourite had to be a corruption of the old saying Nil aoi  tintean na do thintean fein, there is not hearth like your own hearth , basically there is no place like home.  

But this was changed while I was in school to :

Nil aon thoin tine na so thoin tine fein : there is no sore arse like your own sore arse, (pardon the crudity if you are of a delicate disposition).  But isn't it so true we all get so bound up in whats going on in our own heads that sometimes we cant see the wood for the trees.  So I am off to relax and read a little of the platitudes of Dr Low.  His stuff is kinda hard to read but its worth the perseverance.  Today I spotted acorns out onthe lottle oak trees across from where I work.  So many plants are cumming into seed and fruit.  Maybe this autumn will be another season of discovery. heres hoping it is.

So I am off to get the school uniforms ready as the return to school started.  

Happy Tuesday and apologies to all you scholars out there for my appalling irish spelling,.  

autumn season of mists and mmmmm

Ah the joys of it had a virus was not getting depressed again.  Wow am I relieved.  Back on track again yippee.  Autumn has always been my favorite season up to now.  Usually I love autumn but as it seemed to arrive so early this year I felt slightly cheated of the rest of the summer I had planned.  Today the smell of autumn was about, ripening blackberries, damp grass, moss, leaves and sea mist.  It was just glorious to smell it.  I started to think about how each season seems to appeal to one of the senses and I think autumn is all about smell, more so than summer.  Spring is about sound, birds singing their ubiquitous call - I want sex- is what I was told they were saying.  That particular phrase disturbed my listening to bird song for a few days until I realised some of them were in fact after mating and then that was just a tad too much info.  Now I happily listen to them going cheep cheep.  For me last winter was all about sight as I started to notice the seasons more and summer was all about taste, fresh fruit and vegetables, salmon, ice-cream and all the lovely summery things, it was also about touch , the feel of the damp grass in the morning, warm breezes on my skin, the touch of the sun, lots of hugs from the children, and the contrast between the warm air and cold sea when swimming.  Winter was all about sight for me as it was last winter that i regained my appreciation for the beauty of the world around me.  

I live in a really beautiful part of the world.  Close to the sea, beneath the hills, in a small town that was settled over a thousand years ago, although it existed for hundreds of years before that.  I was driving home tonight and again was taken by the sharp cold air, and the fresh smell of the sea.  

I started to think of all the things that make me go mmmmmmmmm apart from the obvious ones.  The smell of the sea, walking on warm sand, walking on wet grass walking, lying in the sun, drinking tea in the garden watching the butterflies and talking to the dog, (today's mmmm moment) .   stretching out on the sofa after completing a tiring or boring job,  lying in on a freshly made bed, that lovely moment of silence when everyone is suddenly out of the house and I am alone mmmm, walking up all lovely and warm after a good nights sleep and realising I don't have to go to work or get up mmm mmm mmm, sitting at the strand listening to the birds and the waves, smelling the  first honeysuckle of the year, and all the other lovely flowers, especially roses in the height of summer, Friday nights on the sofa with hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire, finishing a project, and of course the best mmm of them all squished on the sofa by the dog and my daughter, teenage one too old for that now , happiness is a a warm dog and a cup of cocoa, omg am finally middle aged.  Was reminded by my youngest today that Christmas will be soon here and it is time to cozyafie the house for the onset of winter.  Cozy is such a lovely thing, hot water bottles, fires, cocoa, stews, and cuddles mmm. 

So off you go and make your own list of things that make you go mmmm.  

Happy Monday . 

old patterns-stepping stones

My return to the world of work has been smooth.  Its smoothness created by my new found ability to communicate.  Part of my new job is to create a smooth transition for the restructuring of our organisation.  Recently my mood started to drop. Mostly I felt I was tired but then that is understandable.  So I thought about ways I can help myself gain more energy.  It is easy to fall into old familiar patterns in times of stress and tiredness.  It is important for me to recognise the difference between mental fatigue, lack of sleep, and emotional tiredness.  I am learning to stay with myself and not to be overly influenced by others and this is an emotional drain.  For me it is hard work to say no, to express my feelings, to be appropriate and not to share my crazy thoughts with everyone, to resist giving into my daughters when I know I should not, previously I felt that I should not find these things hard and berated myself for not being better.

It is important that I remember that I set things up for myself so that I could get through the low moods.  I found thing that work on a very basic level; a walk in the fresh sea air, a bath, aroma therapy, crochet, a funny film.  I suppose the thing that is the most effective is music.  I have a whole load of playlists set up each one chosen to change my mood, ones for relaxing, ones for energising.

When we are well it is important to plan for the days when we are not.  Planning ahead was something I abandoned during the episode, tow days ahead are about as much as I couls do.  Now I think it is time for me to put together a wellness recovery  action  plan.  so that I have laid out the stepping stones for myself across the troubled waters.  For me the best thing is to do for now is to accept the dip in mood, to to the important things, like eat properly, clean up, tell people that I am having a hard time, and accept my limitations.  Soon I will be back on form again and all will be well. 

So today I accept my limitations.  As they say "the man who made time made plenty of it".

Happy Sunday 

avoiding avoidance

Today I realised the extent of my very very bad habit of avoidance, so I decided to make a list of all the things I learned during the course of my episode which would help me overcome such a pointless pattern.  What finally worked was the Recovery Inc tool; do things in part acts. I had a job to do that I had previously found difficult and I was avoiding doing it.  I realised why half way through the task but carried on anyway, another lovely tool, bear the discomfort to gain comfort.  These tools are very powerful but so too are many others.  The key is to be open and to be aware.  It would not have mattered what tools I had in my wellness tool-bag if I had not recovered enough to be aware that I had a problem.  They say experience is recognising your mistakes each time you make them.  I think it will be important for me to work on avoiding avoidance.  Like any other process the first step is to recognise and define the problem and to quantify the extent of it.  By consciously recognising the things that I like to avoid and by floating through them I am avoiding less and less.  By building on the small successes I find it easier to work up to the more difficult things and soon I hope that I will deal with everything in a timely way.  My biggest problem for ages was the post.  This probably stemmed from the days when I received alot of negative post and I hate reading it.  Now I have a lovely letter opener and I stab the letters with it as I open them.  This helps to dissipate the negative feelings I have for opening post.  Doing things straight away is also very good.  Doing things when they needed to be done was something I very much took for granted, when I lost my ability to do that I thought it was gone forever.  It was only through acceptance of myself and my limitations that I recovered.  

Acceptance is the key to so much.  Accept yourself and free yourself from the constraints of how you should be.  You are exactly as you are no more no less.  I spent a long time saying to myself I am enough as I am and I finally believed it.  

I AM enough as I am.  

journey to my childhood, crossing the shakey bridge to my field of dreams

Part of my journey to recovery was huge amount of inner child healing.  Yesterday I went with my own daughter to the site of a place that I still have nightmares about.  I have a reoccurring dream of crossing a bridge which gradually gets smaller and higher and as I am just about to fall off the end I wake up.  Yesterday I discovered the location of the bridge.  We went for a walk in the park that my father used to take us to as children.  I decided to finally take my daughter across the Shaky Bridge.  I hated crossing this so much as a child.  My father could not understand why I was so scared of it and finally forced me to cross it when I was around 7.  I went across one way but when faced with the return trip screamed and screamed so much that he had to walk the very long way around back to the car on the other side of the river.  Yesterday I made it very successfully one way but when I turned around to return it was as if I was 7 again and I felt the first stages of panic rise.  I had shown my daughter how to make the bridge shake by showing her the best spot to jump on.  I had forgotten that I never ventured further than the middle even when we used to go there as teenagers to enjoy the sensation of making it shake.  Wow it was amazing to make the connection between that memory and my ongoing nightmare.   Awareness is a wonderful thing.  

Just had to add this when I came across it.  It gives a flavour of the wonderful Cork accent.  Mine is largely gone but does return when I get to speak to my fellow Corkonians.

I listened to one of the presidential candidates speak of the need for us to be in touch with our 5 senses as children and what a senses of wonder it gives.  Now that I have released the bad feelings about my childhood I can finally reconnect with the happy and scary memories.  I had a very horrifying revelation about my family when i was in my early twenties which made me think that all my life up to then had been a lie.  But now that I can put all that in context I realised that my experiences were happy.  I really did have the most wonderful childhood.  It is time perhaps to remember the good bits.  I met up with old friends from my twenties over the weekend one of whom was very shocked that I had scrummed to depression.  We used to have great fun in those days and I loved life with a great passion.  I now live life with great passion again and would say to anyone reading this its important to have dreams and aspirations and if they don't work out just find new ones. 

So I am off to build a new field of dreams and fill it with all the dreams I had all my life.  I was able to tell my little seven year old self that her dream of living by the sea and going to the beach almost every day came true.  I look forward to remembering all the dreams I had, the good and the bad.  The return of my memory is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.  It is even better than winning the lottery.  It is even better than when I learned how to express my feelings.  

steal away , putting my soul back together

had a very strange realisation today.  I was thinking about what my perfect world would be.  Reality therapy believes that there are three worlds, your world, the real world, and the quality world.  I started having the weird sensation again today where I know my brain is slightly overloaded.  This is very odd and I have learned how to run with the feeling, stay with it and work to uncover what I need to realise.  Generally the feeling precedes a realisation for me.  I don't know what but I need to prize it out as it is hard for me to focus when I get like this.  What I really need is to slow down, relax meditate, take a bath, play some music and be alone to let the feelings and thoughts surface by them selves.  Instead I am off to a barbecue and need to round up the posse and head away.  I started to have the feeling as I opened the windows in someones house.  I was helping him move and I opened the windows to let the air out and in.  I remarked that I like to leave a house totally clean when I leave because if I don't I feel like I have left part of my soul  behind.  And then it hit me.  The last time I moved I did just that.  I left no trace that I had been there.  But when my ex-husband had been looking after the previous moves as I had just had a baby, he did not.  I always felt that I had never fully disconnected with my former home and last night I dreamt of it and of some of the people I had lost contact with over my life.  It was a very odd dream.   Yesterday I was contacted by someone I had not met in around 15 years.  It was odd and triggered a load of feelings for me.  I was amazed that there were no negative ones as I had a different life plan 15 years ago than I have now.  In those days I was more concerned with my world and the quality world.  For the last year I was trying to find the real world for the first time in my life.  I no longer had any link to a quality world or even the real world for perhaps the last 4 years.  Now I realise that all three need to be in balance for me to be well.  So while in live my life in the real world I shall dream of the quality world.  For me it will be full of new things to explore and populated with kind and gentle souls who only have my best interests at heart.  If you expect the best then maybe you will get the best.  

So I am off to ponder if this is what I am in the process of realiseing.  It was just things that got left behind and not my soul, what is the sense of loss that is coming out now I wonder, which part of my past is trying to release itself from my subconscious.  I hope its not the bad one that just surfaces but never becomes fully clear, I feel that I never want to know that one.  It is over 20 years since it first started to surface and I have no idea what it is.  Maybe one day I might but when it starts to surface I feel very scared and right now I am not ready for that on  a conscious level.  Perhaps I need to let it come out maybe it is not so bad at all,  So many things I feared never were scary in reality maybe this one is not.  Time perhaps to let the losses I do not remember resurface and give my head a little peace.  

Wish me well place and send me plenty of happy thought today, as I need them.  

This is the song that I heard today that triggered the sense of loss.  Maybe it is something as simple of when I lived abroad and huge sense of turmoil that was going on for me as I matured in my early 20s who knows but it is non the less a great song.  I did the endless trawl for a job in 1988 and went to London with so many others.  It was such fun but sometimes I wonder if I had stayed in Ireland and followed my heart what would my life have been like.  I do not regret my choice now as I accept myself bit think I need to put my choice in context and forgive myself for not knowing that I did not have to have all the answers.  Maybe that is what I need to realise I need to acknowledge that I might not have followed the great plan but not I at least know what it is to be truly alive.   

Happy Saturday, today I will be venturing forth camera less as I cannot find my charger , hope I know how to live without it.  

And here it is finally the realiseation.  I have healed my mind and now I need to heal my soul.  So I start a new journey to reconnect the bits of my soul that I have left all over the world with so many people, place and things.  It will be a fun new journey to piece it all back together.

This is the first thing that that comes to mind wonder what its all about. Omg hope I am not turning religious.

business as usual

I had a  life changing experiences and i am now a more integrated and complete person.  I accept myself.  I returned to work and found it such a different experience.  It was business as usual, no desk for me on first day, no computer set up.  It was funny to be back at all the normal stuff associated with work.  My self awareness has opened my eyes to the behavior of others and has given me a feeling of detachment.  I have had that feeling before in some jobs and always liked them but never realised until now that it was not the job I liked but it was myself at that time in my life, I could have been gutting mackerel or fixing the space station, the work did not matter at all just how i felt about myself.  How did I get so lost , how did I loose my way I wonder.  Was there are definitive point where I crossed from being overworked to over whelmed, what could I have done differently.  I suppose there is little point in dwelling on what went wrong, better to focus on what went right to get me to this comfortable place.  

I feel a sense of unreality about this.  I was so used to work being difficult that it is strange for it to be so seemingly easy.  I have worked at making life easy for myself and perhaps I should trust myself enough to appreciate that this new found ease is of my own creation.  Well done me.  

I hope I will always appreciate the how much I gained from what I thought I lost.  Sanity is a fragile state, so easily unbalanced.  

For some reason these songs have been rolling around in my head all day.  I love paul bradys songs , generally so nice and inspiring.  I have made my world easy.  And Aslan well they are awesome and also inspiring. 

dont fence me in , learning to live without anxiety

So here I am back home after a very not eventful morning at work, no desk , no boss, but all good.  Best day at work ever and am not being sarcastic.  Nice and gentle easing back into the world of work where everyone is preoccupied with their own stuff and I am incidental.  This is a marked contrast from my previous job where there would be a disorderly queue forming on my return from holidays or a day off.  I am just incidental and not the main attraction, just the side show.  It is very liberating being out of the spotlight and being fairly invisible again.  I did not like the scrutiny I was under, where my every movement was questioned and judged.  Amazingly wonderful to be able to go home to the comfort of my home at lunchtime to a happy family cared for by the lovely nanny.  I was visited by anxiety this morning but it soon passed.  I thought of how I need to learn a new way of being in the mornings now.  For years morning was a time to be anxious, what crisis would I face today, what problem would visit me, who would be making a complaint today, what irate person would shout at me.  I did not have the skills to deal with all that and now I do.  I learned not to try harder but to try easier.  I now ask myself how can I make this easier, how can I do this in a more gentle way.  Why not show kindness.  I am living life again.  There are so many people advising me on how I should be and what I should do now.  My episode had given me insight into why they are doing it.  I am tempted to tell them what they are projecting from themselves onto me but so few people are open or interested enough to want my insights.  I am viewed by many as being the same as I was before the episode but I am more like I was when i was 24 not 44.  I have reconnected with my soul.  My children are going through the is there a God phase, the nanny is bud-dist, their father is an atheist, i am non religious but raised a very strict catholic, their granny is Methodist, the other granny catholic, great granny is Church of Wales and I have had a few friends who are witches or whatever the politically correct phrase is for those people who heal with herbs and worship the goddess or the universe, not entirely sure what they do exactly.  Yesterday I was asked about the existence of heaven and I concluded that I could not live in a world where there was no heaven.  I suppose heaven represents hope for me.  The hope that there will always be something good to look forward to.  Having things to look forward to is what keeps us all going.  Planning nice family outings, thinking about the next lovely flower that will bloom, waiting for the sunflowers to bloom, and they did yesterday finally, all these things go a long way to keeping us well and contribute to our well being.  

Dont fence me in was the song rattling around in my head today as I walked into the new office I will work in.  We have a joke in my family, go to work for a rest as my mother found running a home far more difficult that having a full time job outside the home.  She lived in the days of the ban on married women working, wow no wonder she pushed me to have a career.  So now we live in an age where there are so many machines to make the job of running  home and caring for a family so much easier.  I shall miss being at home with my family but I will not miss the anxiety and depression that put me there.  I am now learning to live without anxiety and it is a strange habit to break.  I am surprised that I am expecting to be anxious and am thereby creating the anxiety feelings.  I read about this and realise that it is my thoughts that I need to change to change how I feel.  So I shall focus on how I am well and I have learned so much about myself and how to be alive.  Anxiety can become a habit if I let it in again.  So I am off to have a lovely cup of tea and wander back to my afternoon meeting with the director.  

We can all fence ourselves in.  We can all lock ourselves into those bad habits that do us no good.  It is up to ourselves to release us from our self made bondage and free ourselves to live.

So today go off and look at where you have fenced yourself in and ask your self what would my life be like lived without fences.

end of phase 2

Phase 2 of my recovery is over.  I am now on to phase 3; maintenance.  I should really be washing the ware and cleaning up but decided to live as I mean to go on and take life handy as we say here.  Tomorrow I will start work and I will be wearing shoes all day for the first time in a long time.  I love being barefoot.

When I was a child I always imagined living near the sea and wandering the beach barefoot.   I live by the sea and I do this alot (minus the permanently sunny weather I envisioned as a child) , also my childhood imaginings had me wearing the fashions of the early 70s, which are again in fashion and yes I do wander the beach barefoot in a multicoloured maxi dress on.

I suppose I revisited my early childhood memories as the multicoloured patterns of my childhood are back in vogue.  I was born in the summer of love and spent my very early childhood in the very unhippyish suburbs of Cork.  Strangely enough I have many memories of listening to the debates on workers rights, women's rights the start of the troubles in the north.  The last week has reminded me very much of that and the amazing cake I saw at a child's birthday party full of the peace and love symbols of my early childhood have made me wonder if we are entering a new and very significant period of change in the world again.  Perhaps I am just thinking this due to the huge change about to occur in my life.

My mother , god bless her, had a whole list of things I should  to do before I returned to work.  Most of them involved cleaning and conforming but for who's benefit.  I see others who conform, who keep immaculately clean houses, who have the seemingly perfect life.  I see through the cracks in their lives and I know that for all the papering they do over those cracks they still exist, the secrets they are trying to keep weight them down.  I was too hard on myself for so long thinking that their papered over lives was what I wanted too.  But I don't want that for myself or my family.  I want the life of barefoot walks on the beach.  The life where I can be happy to be just as I am.  I have finally abandoned my quest for normality and embraced my quirks.  I am finding it hard to name the feeling I have about tomorrow but it is no longer dread or fear or even concern, I suppose the best label I can put on that feeling is curiosity.
Well we all know what curiosity did :-).

So I am off to wash up and enjoy my live of ease, in a land near the sea but not in a submarine. 

Today I went for a walk and this song was echoing around in my head for some reason.  I went out without my camera, dogs, children or anything.  I went out with my hands hanging as we say here.  No keys no phone, no handbag, just me ( i was clothed).

Tuesday will be my first day working for nine months, three seasons almost four have passed since my episode started.  It is now over and I am well.  It is strange to live again.  Yesterday I cooked dinner with a few new ingredients.  When the kids liked it and asked me to make it just that way again I realised I Could not so we had to guess what the secrete ingredients were in the dinner.  I usually say love is the secret ingredient in anything but actually it was mango chutney and milk in this case.  I suppose the main reason I started to ponder love is all you need is that love was missing from my life for so long, at least a feeling of love was.  Not the romantic kind or the sexual kind but the real motherly love kind needed to raise happy and contented children.  Motherly love was missing from me as a teenager and I did not know how to be a mother to my teenage daughter but it is no different from being a mother to a toddler or a baby.  I would not expect a baby to know everything so why did I expect he to know, indeed why did I expect myself to know.  So now I allow my self the space to love my children to say when I am feeling a little stressed.  to remind people that I am no longer superwoman and that role I played was just that I was never superwoman.  Now I am just me again.  I like to go wandering off down the track to the strand looking at flowers and insects and of course the bunnies.  I like to balance rocks when I need peace in my mind.  I have found a place where I don't have to worry and I am happy there.    There are good and bad days now.  I even get bored sometimes but I love myself unconditionally and I love my children without limits and expectations.  I connected with my mothering side last weekend as I listened to my own mother compare how my sister in law mothered her baby compared to how I mothered mine.  I listened to the negative comparisons mostly and realised that I needed to acknowledge that I am a good mother.  I might not be the most conventional one but thats ok.  I can never fit into the ideal of other peoples expectations and I no longer want to of try to.  I love being free to be myself and instead of regretting the lost months and years I will enjoy each moment of my life.  

Without the past there would be no present and without the present there will be no future.  Last night I finished the main part of my memory blanket.  I started a new colour completely and it is lovely.  All the remains now is to put on the fringe and find some suitable wool to complete the top section.  that may take some time.  I am starting a new crochet project now and looking forward to a new phase of life.  I am so glad I wrote this blog to help me recover.  I am now well and have reached my goal of returning to work.  I hope to enjoy a pleasant and fruitful time in this new phase of my life.  the first leaf fall occured here on Tuesday, the maple tree across the road shed some of its rust coloured leaves.  I felt a little sad to be leaving behind summer and spring and my time of peace and quite.  Then i spotted so many teenager creaturs this week, stoats, crows, heroins, swallows and realise that life is a cycle an in autumn we reap the benifits of a summer well spent.  I hope I do and i hope I stay well and remember all the lessons I have learned over the past year.  

Happy Sunday so off I go to recreate yesterdays dinner made with love.  Almost impossible but worth a try. 

not the dread pirate roberts

Working on identifying emotions takes effort for me.  I found that I could not label them all and seesawed between many and had loads of mixed up ones.  Recently I started to separate out the anxiety based emotional states.  Terror, fear, dread, anxious, worry, torment, what others I wondered, so I looked up Wikipedia and here they are :

Fear	Horror	Alarm, shock, fear, fright, horror, terror, panic, hysteria, mortification
	Nervousness	Anxiety, nervousness, tenseness, uneasiness, apprehension, worry, distress, dread

I would also include shame and guilt in the fear based emotions as I think they are linked very much to fear and not sadness as suggested in Wikipedia.  

 The one I recognised in others recently was dread.  The dread of going back to work after holidays.  Next week I return to work after my episode.  I will have been off a day short of nine months, a significant gestation period for the reborn me.  I noticed a few people talking about the dread of going back to work and remembered the awfulness of the Sunday evening feeling and wondered if I would experience it again.  then it hit me we create our emotional states and just as I can drive dread up from a vague concern to a full blown panic attack I can also change it into something else.  I have control of myself and my own life.  I have been tackling a few things that I did not think I would be able to do, in fact one thing that I have always dreaded was working out my budget and keeping track of it.  But I changed what I called it, now instead of saving I am accumulating wealth and instead of buying groceries I am acquiring consumables.  I do my working out of finances on graph paper as this represents maths to me.  Now it is dread free.  I love the princess bride and I love the scene where the dread pirate Roberts turns out to be none other than the hero and love interest in the film, not actually a scary person.  The reputation of the dread pirate Roberts had been created years earlier and was now a very effective pirate franchise.  

So I just need to remember the reputation of the Monday morning dread, it is not more real than the dread pirate Roberts.  So live life without dread and as you wish it to be.     Happy Wednesday.

living life and loving it

I attended a family function this weekend.  In previous times I would have felt inadequate when I returned home as I feel I never used to live up to the expectations of my family.  But this time it did not matter what their expectations were , this time it was all about me and my children being ok being there as ourselves and not conforming to the expectations of others.  I have tried to raise my daughters to be them selves, but at the ceremony this weekend the priest reminded us that children live what they see.  It did not matter how many times i told my girls that they were ok just as they were, they saw me contorting myself to try to please others and they followed suit.  This week my daughter asked me what she should do if a particular member of the family disapproved of her outfit and I finally realised how I had passed on my feelings of inadequacy to her.  So I told her- sweetie if they don't like us we will leave, why would we want to spend time with people who are not ok enough in themselves to be ok with us as we are.  And so we went and we stayed.  So what, she has blue hair, so what, I went off to watch the bats feeding at the lake to the amusement of the relatives and their neighbours but I had a good time and I am sure that my children did too.  And I am sure that my family can explain to anyone who questioned if we were all crazy that no we are not and I have a letter to prove that.
so what if you are a little odd, so what if you look a little different , go off and live your life for yourself because when all is said and done there is only one person in your life whose opinion on you really counts and that is your own.  Its nice to live life as myself again and whats more I am enjoying it.

Happy middle of the night on Monday night .  

snap happy and moth porn

Another fun hunt from

http://postcardsfromthepp.blogspot.com/p/scavenger-hunt.html

AUGUST'S SCAVENGER LIST:

• a boat
• a festival or funfair
• a fountain
• a picnic
• a sport
• bread
• fabric
• market
• mountains
• something ancient
• something bizarre
• street food
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  When I first lost my memory I started to take photos every day of nice things so that I would have some record of my life during my episode.  I then discovered the joys of having instant pictures and started on my epic flower identification outings.  Today I was accused of being a moth pornographer by my daughter who spotted the colony of brunet moths at the strand near us.  I have captured them at various stages of their life cycle and had spotted a few of them mating so I had to go home to get my camera to capture it on film.  There are so many there it is amazing to see them all zooming around.  

not so sure this would be the easiest positions to hold

yummy fennel growing wild

the strand with the tide out 

 beautiful brunet moths at White strand 

autumn is arriving early this year , most sour sloes imaginable

First Haws of 2011

the bog , starting to turn autumnal purple

cant wait to see the babies!

first blackberries of 2011, very early this year 

I am lucky to live in a truly beautiful location a few hundred yards from a beach and tiny salt-marsh full of all sorts of lovely flora and fauna, and wild bunnies.    Life may not always be easy but a walk to the strand and the bog and some contemplation of the latest flower quietens the nosiest mind and lifts even the most jaded of spirits.  

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