A Win is a Win…

Last night’s EuroMillions Lottery jackpot was £111 million, so although I’m not a regular lottery player I tend to play every now and again when it’s for really big bucks, so thought I’d take a punt just for fun… I mean, you have to be in it to win it, right? I picked up my standard Lucky Dip ticket, where the numbers are chosen at random for you, and my ticket (bought online) cost me £2.50.

This morning I was sent an email to say I’d won a prize, so with the sweet smell of success tickling my nose I clicked excitedly on to my online lottery account to find out exactly how much… And apparently I’ve won the princely sum of £2.60, giving me a whole 10p profit on my initial stake! OK so not really a life-changing lottery win for me, is it, but never mind, a win is a win… 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Cent/Scent/Sent

Selfie

This week’s Photo A Week Challenge is ‘Selfie’ and today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt is ‘a picture from wherever’ so here I am with a kind of amalgamation of both… It’s a selfie of me taken last Saturday, sitting in my back garden.

I used to be far too self-conscious about seeing photographs of me, but as I’ve got older it doesn’t bother me nearly so much. I’m 58 years old, turning 59 towards the end of the year, and I am what I am. I used to worry about my hair and my skin and my weight and my clothes, about looking acceptable to the world by what I perceived to be the world’s expected standards of appearance.

And now? Now I see how image obsessed social media has made us all with its fancy portrait filters rubbing out every potential skin blemish, and I worry about my three lovely young granddaughters growing up in such a surface-judgemental environment. So here I am trying to live up to what I tell them about life – always be yourself, you’re beautiful just as you are, and don’t ever let the world tell you otherwise…

And in my selfie I’m sitting in my back garden, in my own little oasis of nature, wearing a flowery dress while relaxing on a traditional-style wooden steamer chair and enjoying the sunshine while it lasted… Oh, for me it’s definitely the simple things in life that make all the difference 🙂

Prompts Coming Together

Sometimes I take my hat off to the spectacular synchronicity of the WordPress gods – it’s already 8pm and a bit late in the day for me to be looking at my blog for the first time today, and what do I find? The Word of the Day challenge is ‘ebb’ and the Ragtag Daily Prompt is ‘flow’ – perfectly matched! 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Hat

Not Thick, just Less Able…

When we were young judgemental kids growing up we were always cheerily quick to point out someone else’s inability to do or understand something we found relatively easy, and as kids do, we would scornfully label them as being ‘thick’.

Mum always remonstrated with us not to be so hurtful with regard to the inabilities of others, and that if someone was struggling with something it’s not nice to call them ‘thick’, as it’s not their fault they were simply ‘less able’ than others. We had it frequently drummed into us – it’s not ‘thick’, it’s ‘less able’…

So of course me and my sister and brother took this edict as gospel and ran with it in the extreme, having ‘less able’ soup with a ‘less able’ slice of bread and the like, driving mum nuts with our complete exclusion of the word ‘thick’ from our childhood vocabulary in all contexts, regardless…

Even now, in our late fifties, any one of us can still break into a childish grin with a wicked glint in our eye at the mere mention of ‘less able’ foodstuffs… 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: A phrase you grew up with

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Too/ To/ Two

Too many times I wonder about what to write for my Stream of Consciousness Saturday post, yet at other times it’s a case of two shakes of a lamb’s tail and it’s done, just like that… Boom! 🙂

New Shoes

How do you like my new shoes? I love Vans, they’re usually such great fun to wear – these have denim at the toes, patterned canvas on the inner sides and the tongue, corduroy across the heels, and furry leopard print on the outer sides so I guess I’ll be fine unless somebody asks me what colour my shoes are… How exactly would I answer that one? 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: How

Tipping Over the Edge…

Emotionally, I often live my life teetering right on the brink, precariously balanced, far too often constantly on edge and seriously super-charged stressing about stuff of no consequence. I really don’t like being that way, if I had a choice I would choose to be chilled and relaxed and take things easy, but it seems I am simply not built that way. Sometimes my balance is reasonably good and life feels safe and sound and stable, but at other times I see-saw back and fore, flailing wildly in my attempts to remain solidly in place. At times like these it doesn’t take much to tip me over into emotional free-fall, tears pricking hotly behind my eyes and feeling myself in a blind panic over the silliest of things outside of my control… the bus hasn’t turned up as expected and I have a 10-miute wait until the next, only semi-skimmed milk is available when I was looking for skimmed… It’s at times like these I know I’m holding on too tight, but have no idea how to release my vice-like grip and reduce my heightened anxiety… And then all of a sudden with no rhyme nor reason the panic starts to clear and I regain my balance and all is well again – at least until the next time…

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Tip

SOCS: April A-Z Challenge

I usually love to take part in the annual April Blogging from A-Z Challenge, but this year I’m just not sure if I have the mental energy to give it the thought and time it deserves.

Life has become quite complicated for me lately and blogging has inevitably taken a back seat while I attend to the real life family issues unfolding in the background, so if I did attempt to take part I’m really not sure I’d be able to complete the entire challenge?

I suppose I could always reduce the complexity of it all by choosing a far simpler theme compared to previous years? One that needs far less forward planning and much less research? After all it’s not a competition, and it might be easier just to compose shorter daily posts on the fly?

I’m not sure yet what I’ll do, maybe instead of signing up formally I’ll just wait and see what April brings, and take it from there, day by day? 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Comp

Diarise

I still like to diarise my life the old fashioned way. I always have a handbag-sized week-to-a-page diary kicking about that records my work shifts, my husband’s work shifts, school holiday dates, birthdays, anniversaries, medical appointments etc.

When I used to work as an office administrator I always liked to have a hardback A5 page-a-day diary where I wrote my daily to-do lists – it kept everything together in one place and I liked the efficiency of it as a personal system of record-keeping.

The addition of multiple post-it notes where necessary can sometimes give the impression of a scrap book rather than a diary, but it works for me! 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Page

Christmas Tree

It’s Saturday again and time for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness post, this week with the prompt of ‘tree’. All of a sudden (or so it feels) it’s two weeks today until Christmas and my Christmas tree is still currently residing in the loft along with the other decorations. Probably time to take it down and do some decorating. But this year everything feels so ominous, with the Omicron variant of Covid spreading like wildfire and no-one knowing what 2022 will bring for us all when it comes to this never-ending pandemic. Family-wise we have some serious ongoing stuff going on, so the thought of putting up a tree feels a bit irrelevant and trivial in the circumstances. But I’m going to do it anyway and mark the end of the year the way we always do, with the familiar rituals of the festive season getting us through the dark days of the winter solstice and hopefully on to brighter days ahead…