I hope you’re not all bored with this WordPress stuff, but…..

How can I put this?  All of you ‘Windows’ users may well be used to the issues of disappearing files and sudden loss of everything you have just worked on.  The delicately balanced platform that has to be treated with kid gloves, petted and stroked every inch of the way.  Be fair, it’s true.  While you’re all busy holding your breath and praying when you hit ‘Enter’, us Mac folk bask in the simplicity and ease of our work platform.  NOT ANY MORE! Well not me anyway.

WordPress has had me tearing my hair out, praying in desperation and working ’till the very wee small hours. I have never worked on such a delicate platform before.  I have lost my blog more than once, and last night, while you were all tucked up in bed, giving it lots of zeds, I lost my complete WordPress installation!  ZAP! GONE!

I finally got it all back up, thanks to cleverly backing up my complete WordPress folder.  At 5am I crawled into bed worn out!

Today has been spent, would you believe, just trying to get an image in my sidebar! A two minute job I would have thought.  Wrong!! all day long I’ve been messing with code.  Finally, thanks to Skype and Ana - again, it’s done.

I’m going back to Blogger!  Joke ;O)

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Tad-dah!

Here we are.  My new WordPress blog.  What a time I’ve had trying to get this done.  I want to Thank Ana for all the help she has given me.  Often on-line until very late at night working with me on this.  We even joined up on Skype and both logged in here, for joint sessions.  Thank you Ana.  Without you I could never have done this!

I would also like to Thank Kathy for her help!

Importing my posts has caused double signatures, but life isn’t always perfect ;O)

Please feel free to give me feedback.

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It’s Kathy’s birthday so Mo and I did this Voki especially for her ;O)

Get a Voki now!

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Here we go again!

JD at I Do Things has thrown down the gauntlet. Well I just had to rise to the challenge. Well didn’t I?

I said I would never show photos of me taken after the age of 40. This is a one off! Never to happen again! This photo was taken a few weeks ago!

I was asked to get a make-over on Taaz.com and post the results. Well here are the results. The first is way not me! I got a shot of Botox to make my lips fuller….hmmm…. I may really get some. They do look nicer.

The second one is me - after having had a decent haircut!

Never let it be said that I won’t rise to a challenge ;O)

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This is hilarious!

I got it via email a long time ago, so some of you may have also read it before. I just came across it again while clearing out my mail box. No matter how many times I read it, I still laugh out loud. I have no idea who wrote it, so I can’t give any credit.

Hot Wax is not our Friend

My night began as any other normal weeknight. Come home, fix dinner, play with the kids. I then had the thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next few hours: ‘Maybe I should pull the waxing kit out of the medicine cabinet.’ So I headed to the site of my demise: the bathroom.

It was one of those ‘cold wax’ kits. No melting a clump of wax, you just rub the strips together in your hand, they get warm and you peel them apart and press them to your leg (or wherever else) and you pull the hair right off. No muss, no fuss. How hard can it be? I mean, I’m not a genius but I am mechanically inclined enough to figure this out. (Ya think!?!)

So I pull one of the thin strips out. It’s two strips facing each other stuck together. Instead of rubbing them together, my genius kicks in so I get out the hair dryer and heat it to 1000 degrees (cold wax, yeah, right).

I lay the strip across my thigh. Hold the skin tight and pull. It works! Okay, so it wasn’t the best feeling, but it wasn’t too bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer eludes me! I am She-Rah, fighter of all wayward body hair and maker of smooth skin extraordinaire. With my next wax strip I move north. After checking on the kids, I sneak back into the bathroom, for the ultimate hair fighting championship.

I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet. Using the same procedure, I apply the one strip across the right side of my bikini line, covering the right half of my ‘hoo-hoo’ and stretching down to the inside of my butt cheek (yes, it was a long strip) I inhale deeply and brace myself…..RRRRIIIIIPPPPP!!!!!

I’m blind!!! Blinded from pain!!! OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!

Vision returning, I notice that I’ve only managed to pull off half the strip. CRAP!!!!

Another deep breath and RRIIPP!!! Everything is whirly and spotted. I think I may pass out…must stay conscious…Do I hear crashing drums??? Breath, breathe…okay, back to normal.

I want to see my trophy - a wax covered strip, the one that has caused me so much pain, with my hairy pelt sticking to it. I want to revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold up the strip! There’s no hair on it. Where is the hair??? WHERE IS THE WAX???

Slowly I ease my head down, foot still perched on the toilet. I see the hair. The hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I am touching wax.

CRAP!!! I run my fingers over the most sensitive part of my body, which is now covered in cold wax and matted hair. Then I make the next BIG mistake…remember my foot is still propped up on the toilet? I know I need to do something. So I put my foot down.

DANG!!! I hear the slamming of a cell door. ‘Hoo hoo’?? sealed shut! Butt?? sealed shut! I penguin walk around the bathroom trying to figure out what to do and think to myself, ‘please don’t let me get the urge to poop. My head may pop off!’ What can I do to melt the wax? Hot water!!! Hot water melts wax!!

I’ll run the hottest water I can stand into the bathtub, get in, immerse the wax covered bits and the water should melt and I can gently wipe it off, right??? WRONG!!!!!

I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than that used to torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment - I sit. Now, the only thing worse than having your nether regions glued together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom of the tub…in scalding hot water. Which, by the way, does not melt cold wax. So, now I’m stuck to the bottom of the tub as though I had cement epoxied myself to the porcelain!!!

God bless the man who had convinced me a few months ago to have a phone put in the bathroom!!!! I call my friend, thinking surely she has waxed before and has some secret of how to get me undone. It’s a very good conversation starter.

‘So, my butt and hoo-hoo are glued together to the bottom of the tub!!’ There is a slight pause. She doesn’t know any secret tricks for removal but she does try to hide her laughter from me. She wants to know exactly where the wax is located, ‘are we talking cheeks or hoo-hoo?’ She laughing out loud by now…I can hear her. I give her the rundown and she suggests I call the number on the side of the box. YEAH RIGHT!!! I should be the joke of someone else’s night.

While we go through various solutions, I resort to scraping the wax off with a razor. Nothing feels better than to have your girlie goodies covered in hot wax, glued shut, stuck to the tub in super hot water and then dry shaving the sticky wax off!!!

By now the brain is not working, dignity has taken a major hike and I’m pretty sure I’m going to need Post-Traumatic Stress counseling for this event.

My friend is still talking with me when I finally see my saving grace…the lotion they give you to remove the excess wax. What do I really have to loose at this point? I rub some on and OH MY GOD!!! The scream probably woke the kids and scared the dickens out of my friend. It’s sooo painful, but I really don’t care. IT WORKS!!! It works!!!

I get a hearty congratulations from my friend and she hangs up.

I successfully remove the remainder of the wax and then notice to my grief and despair…THE HAIR IS STILL THERE…ALL OF IT!!!

So I recklessly shave it off. Heck, I’m numb by now. Nothing hurts. I could have amputated my own leg at this point.

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Late one night, back in the mid sixties, I saw a TV programme and it caught my attention. A woman was singing and there was something about the song that really tugged at me. I had never heard this type of music before, or seen singers like the three that this programme featured. Three singers that all had long black hair and played a guitar. This was ‘Folk’ music.

I went out and bought some of their recordings and I was hooked. I made a decision to go out and buy a guitar as soon as I could. My first guitar cost me £3. Well, I had to make sure I was able to play before spending a lot of money on one. I drew flowers all over it and it looked really cool. I drew flowers on most things in those days.

Joan Baez was my (absent) mentor. I would play along with her records. I learned how to finger pick like her, and decided it was time to get a decent guitar. My next guitar was a beautiful classical guitar. Later I would pass my ‘flower power’ guitar on to my niece Lynne (the illustrator).

Eventually I started listening to a lot more folk singers, both male and female - mostly American. I bought another guitar. A steel stringed Jumbo. I learned to flat pick and eventually found my own style, although I have been told that it’s very ‘American’ - that figures I suppose, since I listened mostly to American singer songwriters.

I went to every London performance of Joan Baez, and other folk artists. One day while practicing my pencil drawing, I decided to draw a portrait of Joan. I worked on it until it was the best I could get it. She was appearing in London and I went to see her with some friends, taking the portrait along. We gave it to a stage hand, who took it backstage for Joan. Later, when the concert was over, we saw Joan leaving with her son, who was carrying the portrait. Nice to know they took it with them.

I haven’t listened to folk music for many years now. I kind of grew out of it, although I still have some of the newer Joan Baez stuff that has a modern rock sound, along with some more modern Buffy Sainte Marie. Julie Felix didn’t last as a folk singer and slipped into children’s TV.

Look at Joan now - She looks good for her age, but it brings home just how many years ago that all was.

• Joan Baez: Public Domain
• Mature Joan Baez: http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/070502/070502_baez_vmed_830a.widec.jpg
• Julie Felix: http://www.retrosellers.com/images/jf3.jpg
• Buffy Sainte Marie: http://nativeamericanrhymes.com/women/images/buffy_sainte-marie.jpg

If you enjoy reading my fifties and sixties posts, you may well enjoy my eldest sister’s new blog - granny grimbles grunts. She is writing a series of posts of her memories of life and survival of WWII in war torn London. Please pop over to her blog and welcome her.

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Our cooker started acting up the other day. The timer panel wouldn’t allow us to use the oven. After all that’s gone wrong with us lately, that was all we needed!

We found a cooker repair company and was given a quote for £200, and told we had to wait 8 days, as they had to order the part in. £200 is a lot of money for such a small thing, but cheaper than a new cooker, so we said OK.

Later that day my niece telephoned and said that her hubby would pop round and see if there was anything he could do. He is a fire alarm installations manager, so might be able to help. We hadn’t thought of him. He had a look at it and said we did need the part after all. He searched Google and found a company that sold cooker parts. Just what we needed at £82 inclusive. The deal was, we would cancel the other one and order the part for Gary to install.

This morning we cancelled and I went on line to order the part. Just as I sat down at my computer, a delivery van arrived. Mo collected the package, wondering what it could be and yes, you’ve guessed! It was the cooker part. So much for 8 days for delivery!

We telephoned Gary and he came round immediately. Six little screws and three minutes later our cooker was fixed. Now that company would probably pay around £30 for the part, so £170 was for screwing in six tiny screws!

So far we haven’t paid for anything. I wonder what we will be charged for the part.

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I worked as a designer until I was twenty, but the particular industry I worked in was not for young people. I looked around me one day and realized, everybody I worked with was aged about 50 upwards - and that was erring on the kind side. Now I know that 50, even 60 isn’t old now days but trust me, these people were old, in every way. Many were spinsters, and I didn’t want to join them. I made a decision that day. I decided to switch careers. Office work was probably the best place, I thought. So I went off to an employment agency in my lunch break, and got a job in a large publishing company in the West End of London. It was 1966 and London was swinging - I wanted some of it.

This move, although not far away from where I worked before, changed my life completely. It was in a very large building with at least a hundred people on each of it’s several floors, and heaving with young people. It was quite a social hub, and very soon I had made lots of friends. I even joined the company netball team! There was a lot of lunchtime celebrations, where crowds of us would meet at the pub. I loved working there, it was a social life, where we did a bit of work between having fun - and on a great salary too!

This was where I met Jim, my future hubby. He came to work in the adjoining office. He was a keen artist, played guitar and definitely (like me) did not follow the crowd. Whilst most men were still wearing white shirts and suits, Jim was in casual trousers and had dyed all his shirts bright colours. I don’t think he ever owned a pair of black shoes. Below is a photo taken at work, on my birthday. We are holding the birthday card Jim made for me.

It was now January 1969 and my life was about to change direction again. Soon we would be getting married.

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If you like great children’s books with brilliant illustrations throughout, you will be interested in this brand new blog.

“Sit on the shoulder of a children’s book illustrator and nosy into the ups and downs of my world. Find out how my books are created from your spy-hole inside my studio, see sneak previews of all my new projects, celebrate with me when books are published, and help me tear my hair when it’s not going to plan!”

It would be great if you popped by her blog and left a comment, to welcome her to the blogging community.

Here are just a few of her illustrations, taken from various book. As you can see, she is a very talented lady. Click on the image for more detail.

By the way, the artist smock Lynne is wearing belonged to my dad :O)

___________________________

On another subject…..

I am often accused of talking a lot (I wonder why?) and just to prove I do, I got this award from Drowsey Monkey for commenting on her blog a lot. Thank you Drowsey ;O)

Whilst on the subject of top commenters, I would like to thank all of my commenters. It really does brighten my day reading what you all have to say. Thank you :O)

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When I was growing up in the early 50’s, children were not very well informed, in fact quite the reverse. The realities and cruelties of life were carefully hidden from us. We grew up in a world where all things magical were accepted as fact. Where life was just one happy playground, and where any upset could be melted away with a kiss or word from mum.

There was no television broadcasting images of violence, and the radio aired all good wholesome programmes. We, as children, never heard bad language, never witnessed heavy drinking, and our parents were careful not to discuss anything of a remotely serious nature in front of us. We were totally protected from the ‘real’ world.

I can’t remember how old I was when I discovered that Father Christmas wasn’t responsible for the magic of Christmas, but it wasn’t a massive let down. The magic was still there. All that changed was the realization that my parents had been responsible for the magic all along, and that made it all the more precious to me.

Did we have a traumatic awakening, once we reached an age where we could no longer be protected from the world? No, we didn’t. Were we so ignorant that we ran into all sorts of problems? No we were not. It was a natural progression. Learning about the wickedness, tragedy and deceit that existed in the world, was all part of growing up it’s true, but nobody felt the need to force that upon us at a tender young age. Children were allowed to grow up in their own time.

Am I thankful? Yes I am!

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