aka R’acquel

Australia is a big country so it’s too hard to cover the lot, let alone the Blue Mountains which is the region where i live, so G’day & welcome to Oz to start off with!

No - that’s not the official flag of Australia, just my own one to enjoy for now. Just as the changing of our flag has been in question (as we’re not as advanced as our fellow Canadians scoring their very own one within 98 years), so has our national anthem. If you would like to view snapshots of what our land is like, the following video clips are done to songs which for some of us - tend to stir feelings of emerging patriotism. They’ll provide insights on our history, you’ll see aspects of the Aboriginal culture & also be introduced some Australian coloquialisms(jargon) with explanations of what some of our strange (but cool) use of words mean.

I Am Australian by The Seekers - you’ll see what i mean about the flag debate in this clip! (ships included)
I Come From The Land Down Under by Men At Work
Djäpana - by Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi. Djäpana means “sunset dreaming”, so you’ll see delightful moments of the sunsets and how spiritual the connection to the Australian sun is over here.

Waltzing Matilda - you’ll learn about our interesting use of colloquial jargon here.
I Still Call Australia Home - by Peter Allan. Pretty much the song i think of when a long flight from Singapore makes touchdown at Sydney airport. You’ll often here people cheering on such flights because they’re arriving “home”.

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My parents migrated from Turkey, but I was born here so that makes me a 1st generation Aussie. My mother’s side rooted with the Georgians, and i suspect that both sides of my family probably rooted with the Vikings at some point too. It could explain why my body prefers the cooler climate, why i am so tall (but of “average” height in Amsterdam) and why there’s quite a number of blue eyed blondes in my family, although i’m a brunette myself.

The following clips are songs that stir patriotic feelings towards my heritage and penchant for songs of war.

The Georgian State Dance Company - you’ll notice how there’s a sound very similar to the Aboriginal didgeredoo at the beginning of this clip.
Ceddin Dedden - A Hard Rock version of a Turkish Military song that always gets my blood hot as a bloody Turk. (ships included)

Bathory - A Swedish Viking Metal band i’ve always enjoyed! (ships included)

Leura (The Garden Village, coz like - the houses here have beautiful gardens every-bloody-where) - stands 985m above sea level, so we’re often “living in the clouds” and experience incredibly beautiful fogs, a lot! There’s trees every-bloody-where and the air smells devine on most days.

An unconventional non-tourist shot of the storms brewing in the neighbouring suburb Katoomba two days ago… this is not a classic Blue Mountains photo because it’s bloody raining, so you don’t see the classic bluey-green & orange colours. If you do want to go see a bog standard tourist shot of something like The Three Sisters during more favourable weather conditions, you can visit:

Please Take Me Too….

This is a fantastic site where you can do a virtual tour of the whole of Australia with great photography, and it will help you gain barings as to where i’m located. To find Leura - zero in on NSW and then you’ll see a link to the Blue Mountains, which will show you where my town Leura is located within the region, amongst other neighbouring suburbs and tourist sites. Near Katoomba, you’ll see “The Three Sisters” - so go there if you want to see the bog standard tourist shot of those three famous ladies chilling out on the mountain side.

Let’s go on a journey which will give you a very brief glimpse of the businesses that live in Leura, which is not only home to a lot of artisans, but more importantly - some very bloody good musicians. Introducing you to my husband’s business in Leura known as Oz Whistles.

Welcome to Oz Whistles!

…and now for the man behind all of those whistles - my husband Mitch, standing on our front verandah during a foggy day in Leura, holding the prototype of his first hand-crafted whistle.

Mitch claims that we have the largest range of whistles in the Southern Hemisphere, so this is one reason why we have….

…but this is the real reason why we have more whistles than you can poke a stick at! Introducing the actual Stick, who has been living as a member of our house for the last year!

I was struggling to find a way to make all of the whistles appearing on the website to scale, and was using a ruler when i first started. One day, I couldn’t find my ruler and my husband, Mitch - found Stick lying next to the whistles during a photoshoot. He pretty much tossed Stick over to me and said,

“Here! Just use this thing!!!”

…so I did!

We’ve had so many adventures with Stick helping us out at Oz Whistles that he’s now become a celebrity!

Here’s a shot of Ian Stewart playing with Stick at the Gundagai Folk Festival last year.

Stick is so popular, that even the “Haggis” Whistles started to worship him as soon as they arrived!

Stick on location at the Oz Whistles headquarters!

These are the Goons that Stick had to hire because we had a pretty scary incident occur after the Irish FaeDÓG whistles arrived.

Stick got quite a fright by them. My husband had a very hard time in trying to reassure Stick that the shop was not infested with dawgs and that he wasn’t in any danger of being “fetched”!

Yes, we’re crazy - but we’re proud of it and you haven’t even seen the worst of it either! Mitch has been working like a dawg the last few weeks with the production of his own whistles, that have been catching the eyes, fingers & tongues of many professional musicians that have come in contact with them lately.

One of them happened to be a very famous Irish piper known as Paddy Keenan. He not only bought a Reviol but he also wanted to knab one of Mitch’s very own Oz Whistles too as the tuning was very impressive. As Paddy was touring to Sydney for his next performance, we had to organise my sister in law to babysit our son and drive up to Sydney to deliver it in person - so this means that we’re now going to the frigging pub to start partying!

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The beginning of my series on how to tackle procrastination. I’ll indulge my personal history with it in more detail another time, so for now - i’m starting with the technique that became the first most effective means of *beginning* to address it within my own life. This exercise is a great starting point if you’re currently feeling really overwhelmed, stressed & depressed - because you’ve got far too many things to do which have been left unfinished.

This sort of list is very different to your regular everyday to-do list, because it’s used to list all the moments in your life whenever you experience something like;

“I really ought/should to get around to doing(or finishing) that!”

…and then it leaves you feeling truly shitty about yourself because you STILL haven’t gotten around to doing it. That yucky feeling inside which makes you feel terrible, guilty, feeling really really bad about yourself. You might hear self-talk & judgement that says,

“I’m so lazy” or “I’m such a looser”!

As soon as your body experiences that yucky feeling with thoughts like that - you go to the “things to do later” list and jot down the thing/task responsible for making you feel horrible about yourself.

What you need is a landing pad to collect these “things” as soon as you start feeling bad. It can be a blank piece of paper stuck on a wall, you can use a chalk board or a white board marker on the fridge, a small note book. It needs to be a writing space that’s easy for you to access, with the least amount of obstacles as possible.

For example - you can use a word document on the computer, but common obstacles to something like this would be to turn the computer on or that it takes too long to open up the program. If you’re using a notepad or piece of paper and you can’t find a pen anywhere in sight - you’ll be surprised by how something so small like that can hinder you during this process! It doesn’t matter what method you use - so long as it’s really easy for you to “access” and jot it down, as soon as possible.

If you leave it for far too long - you will easily forget about it, beause it’s usually a VERY deeply burried item or task which you’ve been heavily procrastinating on. Something which has been far too easy for you to allow it lurking at the very arsed end of your priority list. That’s why it’s so easy for such things to be forgotten and left in the back end of your brain.

This has happened to me many times in the past. I experienced a “yuck” - but I didn’t get around to writing it down (beause i was too lazy, or i couldn’t find a pen, or because i was too tired) …and then it got forgotten, for a very long time. Don’t beat yourself up over this if it happens! It’s normal.

The upside in completely forgetting about the thing you’ve been avoiding for so long is that it will eventually confront you by biting you on the bum and make you feel really really yucky, again!

In my experience with it, when my life confronted a second round of confrontation with something that i had forgotten to list down before, my brain would speak the following internal commentary:

“Oh! That’s one of those things you were supposed to write down, but you forgot about it again. You’d better go write that down before you forget again because it’s really important that you finish that in order to feel much better about yourself!”

When i first started this exercise, there were times when i used to forget to list things down 3-4 times. After gaining more experience & practise with this exercise, the second reminder was more than enough. The boost to my self-esteem that i experienced as the result of getting my “old” things finished began to grow, because i was eliminating the tasks & projects generating those negative feelings. It made my body very sensitive to such things getting me down after a while. I didn’t like these negative feelings at all, and that made me feel even more compelled to list them down - just for the sake of getting rid of them and out of my life, forever!

It may be a piece of “work-in-progress” that’s taking up residential space in your house somewhere. An unfinished knitting project sitting in the depths of a dark closet, untouched for many years. These things are the cobwebs in your life that need sweeping first. The more items you have and the longer they hang around untouched, the more dust they’ll begin to collect. The more dust you have living in your brain, the heavier it will make you feel.

Tackling the things that end up on this list, is very much like “defragging” your computer. The more redundant crap & bad sectors that you can clear living within your brain - the more efficiently it will operate. I’ve actually felt physical “space” opening up within my brain after finishing the things that end up on this specific list - it feels amazing! This list, essentially becomes one doorway towards hapiness.

The things that end up on this list can have a tendany to be really small & banal, like …posting a letter via snail mail. While my mind’s perception of doing something like that would say,

“Hey! That’s only going to take me just 5 minutes to do!”

The reality was that however small these things were on the list, it usually took an average of 6-8 weeks for me to confront many of them!

5minutes…. vs the reality of 6-8 weeks. This touches on how one of the key problems with procrastination is due to setting devastatingly unrealistic goals in the first place - so i’ll be writing more on this with another piece later.

Do a stocktake of the unfinished things living in your life. Review that knitting project (or other cobweb) - are you really going to finish it? Do you really want to finish it? If not - then make the decision to just toss the bugger out of the house. It’s perfectly ok to throw things out like that. When things like that are gone, they will no longer torment you! It’s finished because you’ve made an active choice to remove it out of your life, permanently. It’s gone - kapoof - nadda! You will never have to think about it, ever again!

There will be some things which you can’t delete from the list like this, but by finishing them off for good - you will be removing something in your life that’s responsible generating negative feelings, permanently.

I spent about 3-4 years using this system to clear the crap living within my life. I noticed the incredible benefits of it within the first year of doing it. I no longer need to resort to “the things to do later” list as much anymore because i’ve been able to address all of the items which were lying dormant & untouched for years. The experience of clearing those particular things out of my life permanently (or finally finishing them off) was incredible. Completed, gone - old doors from the past finally get closed and then i gained the space to start enjoying the opening of new ones.

This is the system that I currently work with at the moment with colour coded post-it notes. Each colour represents a particular branch in my life that needs attention. If there’s something important that needs my attention, but “life” is so hectic that it makes me push those things further down on the list of priorities - i make a note, and then stick it on the bottom of my computer monitor…

It doesn’t matter what system you use. While you may find present day items & tasks ending up on this list, the trick is in eliminating all of that accumulated baggage from the past, and putting it to rest - forever!

Like, just do it! Your brain will thank you for it.

NEXT anti-procrastination ARTICLE

Quit Procrastinating II - Tracking Your Recurring Obstacles

To all cruisers on the deck! Stay tuned for the port of Leura arriving at your doorstep on 31st March!

There’s nothing quite like a deadline to get things done hey?! I’ve been busy taking photographs, confronting my fear of approaching strangers during the process (as i don’t like being an “intimidating” photographer and perfer the introverted route where people can hardly see me)!

I have yet to confront my fear of being alone in the night with photography too - so i’m looking forward to the challenge!

Ok - this evening’s storm report - as many of you know that i’m such a junkie for monitoring the weather here! A sneak peak of the Blue Mountains by offering a view from Katoomba on the Scenic World route. As usual - the camera never does it justice and it’s much better to view it yourself. Can you believe that one of the lookouts was called “Landslide”!!! I’d like to confirm that the Australian drought has definitely broken, as it’s been raining *almost* every day this month but just take my words that preliminary climate change is on the way in Australia, for now. Rainfall is without exception - much higher compared to last year for this month. It could be a red herring, but i think the rains are seriously coming now. One can only hope (and then complain about it raining too much) soon!

I was rather scared driving up this road, because i was on the edge of some seriously steep f’king cliffs and I’ve acquired a pretty bad fear of heights ever since my son was born. I never used to be scared of heights before, EVER! These days - it can give me serious panic attacks where i go dizzy and need to time-out to get my heart rate OK on a bushwalk here!

To catch up on the International Cyber Cruise that’s taking the world by storm on the www - I leave you with the following links:

Looking forward to playing host in this beautiful town that is 985m above sea level!

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The captain saved my life last night, i swear.

DILEMMA: Planned visit to my parent’s place - i must bake something, but i don’t have the time to make a crazy cheesecake like dis ‘an dat! Don’t know what dis ‘an dat means? Then go visit the Irish Church Lady to find out!

LIGHT BULB MOMENT: Mrs.Lifecruiser’s Swedish Cinnamon Buns… perfect!

I swear man, these things rock. You really have to bake them and then feel really guilty for eating far too many of them afterwards. They sure do go nice with the morning coffee tho! {phwoar!}

Actually - i was downstairs working… thinking that i was going to go to bed, until i realised that my kitchen still needed cleaning up and then i faced this risen mound on my kitchen bench forgetting about the Swedish Buns!

They sat on my bench for a few hours and it was about 11C cold last night - so the rising action of the yeast was notably paused!

A few adjustments to the original recipe - i only had about 40g of yeast on me. I put a little more sugar compared to last time. Mrs.Lifecruiser measures her solids in litres so at 150ml - i’m just assuming that i fill my measuring jar with sugar until it reaches the 150ml line. I pumped it up to about 200ml - as the first ones i made could’ve done with a bit more sugar.

The next stupid thing i did was use less butter - 150g - i had that much butter left, so as i’m melting it - i’m thinking,

“Oh shit! There’s not enough nutella so how can i do the cinnamon one without any butter left?!”

So that’s why it ended up with only 100g of fat in it. I was scared it would’ve ruined the recipe, but it didn’t!

So - facing the need to address the dough when i needed to go to sleep!

My son asked if he could help me make them, and this is what he did straight after he asked that question…

It was thankfully a very discreet lick, barely touching the dough. *lol*

I clearly didn’t have enough Nutella for the job, but i smeared all the remaining contents of the jar anyway. Then i pulled out the blackberry jam and smeared heaps of it on top! Why not? Maybe it could work! (and it did!)

Last time, i didn’t manage to make as many buns as Mrs.Lifecruiser could, so it made me wonder if i rolled the dough the wrong way. Instead of up & down, i did it sideways, so i could get a longer sausage! I managed 15 from half of the dough, the other half is still in my fridge.

The dilemma of the cold dough was solved by tossing this lot into the oven while it was heating up, just to warm it up a bit and it helped to puff them up when i took it out of the oven!

This time, when i put them into the oven to bake them - i stood in front of the oven to WATCH it, beause my first trial - i didn’t believe these things could cook in 5-10 minutes and nearly burnt them. It actually took about 12 minutes to get them just-right for the second round - but my oven was at about 220C (as i was in such a rush to go to bed!)

The bowl just had to be in the shape of a boat huh?

Our car breaks down, so no trip to my folks place and there’s only 3 buns left at the moment. I guess they’ll just have to go down well with the morning coffee tomorrow!

UPDATE: …only one left for tomorrow morning!

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As promised - completion of the initial design for my son’s Easter Hat Parade at school next week. I didn’t think i could make it this far today, so cheers to the Crazy Hat Parade deadline that helped me to progress this far! It’s not very crazy yet, but you can probably feel the spirit of the mad-hatter living within it already! Stay tuned for next week when the crazy hat is completed!

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Received an email from the Abuse Administrator from Hostgator and a formal DMCA complaint has been forwarded against the sites listed here.

A formal DMCA complaint has also been forwarded to Google via postal mail as well. So far, so good, although it’s taken me over 4 hours to press forward with it. Have i wasted my time? Who knows what will happen next.

I set myself the goal of trying to keep my kitchen tidy for 30 days way back in October last year. The experience certainly changed my habits to a fair degree, and if you want to indulge the long journey - you can follow it up over here at NM.

What happened around February was that I had the tidy kitchen routine down pat fairly well, so it was time for a new goal - to get out of bed at 5am in the morning for 30 days. That too was a really incredible experience, which shifted my body clock forward by about 2-4 hours, turning me into a morning person when i’ve naturally been such a night owl for the last 3 decades of my life.

My husband thought the getting out of bed at 5am routine was really draconian - but it pans out that being draconian seems to work well. I’ve now set myself the draconian goal of trying to keep the entire house clean for 30 days.

It is too hard to keep everything clean 100% everyday, so i have a smaller goal embeded into it to atleast have most of the house in good condition once a week, so i’m using the TIT to check in.

This morning, i woke up to this….

With so many clean mugs to choose from, it was very enjoyable to make the morning coffee whilst half asleep. The other night, i was facing this corner of the living room that was in a state of work in progress…

The laundry was packed away, another load on the run - and i also had to work on my son’s new giant snake. His occupational therapist recommended that we considered the use of heavy weights to help his body “settle” & calm down, so i have plans to stuff it with heavy filling of somekind.

I managed to achieve this the next day. Sorted through another 2 rounds of laundry and the basic construction of the snake was completed. I haven’t measured the creature yet, but i suspect that he’s longer than 3 metres atm!

This too was stressing me a fair bit for a while since my husband’s return from the Blue Mountains Folk Festival for his business Oz Whistles. It was one of the first things i tackled today during my journey of trying to get the entire house in relatively respectable shape by the end of today.

…and this is pretty much what i enjoyed tonight, by being able to eat dinner at the table again with my husband & son.

The house is in pretty good shape atm, so I’m feeling pleased with my efforts as there were no “guests” involved to motivate me. I am rather tired atm and look forward to sleeping soon tho!

I have another unconventional project that I’ve chosen to take up in my life which is pursuing my long lost love for taking up fashion design. It was one of those really strong callings that entered into my heart during my early teens - but one of those things where my parents didn’t exactly encourage as a serious career because they were affraid that i would never make any money out of it.

I haven’t exactly quit my day job in graphic design, but as i’m now predominantly working for my husband without pay - it’s not really something that gives me as much of a lift as it has for me to take up the sewing of formal garments in the last 2 weeks.

SPECIAL OFFER!
I’m currently in search of material from around the world, as the fabric stores here haven’t been able to provide me with enough inspiration. I have a very special offer to anyone from around the world who could help me out by making a custom-tailored outfit (of your own style & choice)based on your own measurements, in exchange for double up on the material. I have a strong passion in designing for “other-bodied” women and would like to use this experience to sharpen up my skills on custom-tailoring outfits for the individual. Please visit my R’acquel!’s Boutique post to for more details if you’re interested in taking up the offer.

For a snapshot of my first preliminary pieces, you can find some living in my suitcase that i had to pack for the crazy & amazing Cyber Cruise adventure that i’ve had my head stuck into lately. I have a crazy hat to design for my son’s Easter Hat Parade at his school in April, so although i probably won’t be able to finish it by tomorrow, i’ll be posting the draft for the Crazy Hat Parade anyway.

Happy tackling until next time!

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