For £100. £100!

Some of that is for future hosting & domain registration but some of it is for going over my data allowance for the month. I can’t afford that to host a blog, it’s not a commercial website and I don’t make any money out of it at all.

So I’m going back to Blogger and I hope that you’ll follow me.

http://live-love-me.blogspot.com/

Anyway, apart from that personal shout out right there, I have an important post to make. Important because it’s not all about me for once, but about something really important. I heart my body 2010. (Ok, I lied. It is all about me, but in a really good way.)

Carly, the wonderful creator and owner of WeHeartLife.com shared a post with us last week, it was about her experience shooting an article for an Australian girls magazine and how it had affected her self confidence and her view of her own body. Now because Carly is cool and such a beautiful person (seriously, go check her out, she’s beautiful inside and out!) she has asked us to help her support body love all across the internet.

So here’s what I love about my body.

My long legs. Seriously, don’t know where they came from, because I’m from a family of short-arses, but I seem to have developed some serious Giselle Bundchen style pins. I will never complain about them and in fact, I’m usually shoving them in people’s faces anyway, because I can’t help but to show them off.

My booby-doos. They might be small but they’re mighty. Remember what Shakira said, people. People definitely wouldn’t confuse mine with mountains, but damn, I love them.

My tummy. When I moved out at 18, I put on a lot of weight and lost said weight about a year later. My tummy has a few stretch marks, but they’re just reminders of why I don’t eat KFC every day now.

I wanted to share a semi-nude photo with you all, but I chickened out in the end, but you do get this nice one which seems to show off all three points above!

Happy “I love my body” day!

My house does not feel like my home. We have been renting a three bedroom house in South East London for almost three years now and I feel like I’m yet to make a stamp on it that makes it my own.

Maybe because the room that we use as a study had previously been used as a nursery and has been decorated with a frieze of teddy bear wallpaper – lovely, yes but for me, it’s just a reminder of things I’m yet to achieve. It doesn’t help that the study is being used as an office come holding place for our overflow of clothes and you can’t see the floor 99% of the time. Our bedroom needs a coat of paint desperately and don’t get me started on the bathrooms. Two words, mold central. The kitchen is not so bad, but there is hardly any workspace.

A year ago, I suggested to G that we try to redecorate as much as we could without spending a fortune. We asked the Estate Agent if we could re-paint some of the rooms in return for a reduction on our monthly rent. At the time, our landlord was in the process of transferring the ownership of his houses to his son and told us that his son would get back to us. A year later, we got a letter saying that any painting or decorating could be done at our own cost but also had to be returned back to its original state when we moved out. We nixed the idea straight away and left it at that.

Now I’m a blogger and I read some wonderfully amazingly creative blogs where people post pictures of their house and I wonder how easy it could be just to change a few things, put up a few pictures and voila, house becomes a home. I wrote out a list of ideas and I’ll be slowly crossing them off over the next few months as money allows – we are currently saving £800 a month towards a deposit for a house in a new development in Sydney – and of course I will share them on the blog.

• Order A3 prints of wedding photos, one of me, one of G, one of us together and one of the entire bridal party.
• Organize frames for wedding photos and hang personal ones in bedroom and group ones in lounge room.
• Buy a few prints off Etsy and hang on walls in spare rooms – well the office/study/junk room until our housemate moves out.
• Re-organize bedroom, sort out bed linen and buy new duvet and pillows.
• Work out how the heck to get rid of all of the mold in the bathrooms and then look at storage options for en-suite.
• Clean out bookshelves and re-arrange living/dining room.
• Clean out kitchen and re-assess what we really need in regards to crockery, cutlery and other assorted kitchen junk. Buy a new set of dishes, plates and more glasses (why the heck do I manage to break so many of those darn things!)

A big list and a pricy one too, with all of the purchases I’d like to make. I think it’s time to start thinking about asking for gift vouchers for Christmas for John Lewis and Marks & Spencer!

Are you renting a house and hate the way it looks or feels? I’d love some advise from those who have re-decorated rental properties on the cheap without painting or serious decorating being done.

All images from ApartmentTherapy.com.

When I go to bed at night, it usually takes a few minutes for me to relax and settle down and I usually have what seems like a thousand thoughts all running through my brain, trying to keep me from sleeping. Lately, they’ve mostly been about work but occasionally they might be about something I’d like to write about in this blog. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to think to myself, “well I’ll just write that up in Word tomorrow at lunchtime” and then by the time morning comes, the thought and the prompt to post has just disappeared into the ether.

Sometimes, when I’m at work, I’ll be on a cigarette break and I’ll think of something and I’ll try to write a note in my phone to prompt me for when I get home. Usually I forget about the note and then weeks later, I’ll find a bunch of notes that seem cryptically impossible to understand.

So – the point of this? I have a bad memory and I’m a bad, bad blogger!

Anyway, I did actually have a really good thought this morning and I remembered to write it down. In fact, I even had five minutes spare to think about what I wanted to say and draft a post – it’s all about Privacy and the blogging world.

When I started blogging, many years ago on Livejournal, I used to write about my life, warts and all. I used to update every two or three days and I had a wonderful little community of friends there – many of them who still blog either at LJ or on their own site to this day. Because Livejournal has some wonderful security features, I felt like I could share a lot more than what I do here at LLN.net, for instance, I used to call G by his full name and I even gave out my mobile number to my friends there – it was all so easy when I had full control over who could and couldn’t see my entries.

But now I’m in the public domain.

I’ve already broken my original rules of blogging in public: no identifying photos of either my husband or I and no mentioning my full name.

I know a lot of bloggers out there are now turning back the clock on revealing their personal details – one blogger who originally had a public Facebook profile is now setting hers to private and setting up a Facebook profile for her website, another is getting rid of her domain all together and re-doing it – basically creating a new online identity, but can these people undo everything they’ve made public in the past? I’ve contemplated changing everything around here to remove my name and my personal photos, but it all seems like a bit of hard work if I pledge not to blog so personally anymore.

Is any personal information sacred anymore? Are you worried about the wrong hands getting a hold of your personal information that you put out there on the internet? If you’re a parent, do you worry about posting photos of your kids online for anyone to see? If you’re not a parent, what do you think about photos that clearly identify you?

Dear Blog,

I have really been neglecting you, haven’t I? The combination of long hours at a new job and not really wanting to log on to the computer is pretty much stopping me from even wanting to log in and check my site stats.

I promise to try harder, but you know I’m a bit of fair weather friend at times.

Love Jade

So apart from neglecting this place, I’ve been shopping.

I bought an Apple TV box for G. He wanted one and wouldn’t have bought it himself, so I just paid for it whilst he stood there with a look of shock on his face. I hooked it up and now I can blog or play my games on the laptop whilst he is watching his stupid Science Fiction shows instead of having the laptop hooked up directly to the TV and me sitting around with a filthy look on my face because I’ve got nothing to do. (I did try to convince him to let me buy my MacBook Pro – still haven’t got it, don’t think I will. At least I did try to buy a new battery for this one because it’s as dead as a doornail, but they didn’t have any in stock. Damn old computers!)

Tonight we are going to a friend’s house for dinner and tomorrow we will lie in and laze about the house.

What are you doing this weekend?

We did go out on Saturday, because G needed some things and I wanted to go out for lunch. We ate at Frankie & Benny’s which turned out to be a bit of disaster. Note to self: Do not go to popular family restaurant on Saturday for lunch if you have a headache. At least the noisy kids were cute and pretty well behaved.

After lunch, we hit the shops. I got two dresses that were quite heavily reduced in TK Maxx.

Jersey knit dress - really doesn't leave a lot to the imagination but it feels really comfy!

Silk mix dress - lovely and flowy and just casual enough to wear to work on a Friday

I love the top part of this dress, really excentuates my boobies!

Today we haven’t done anything – including getting dressed. It’s 4.30pm and I’m still in my pajamas. This would be why my spare room looks like a shit tip.

In other news, I updated my blog roll so it’s now it’s own page – you can click into Blog roll in the menu bar and it will appear!

The grey skies really matches my mood, slightly sour, and very bored. I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m not enjoying my new job. It’s not that I hate it, it’s just that it’s been very difficult to adjust from one institution to another. It doesn’t help that the team is probably more reserved (or unfriendly, as I like to say) than I am used to and had expected. I am sure it will lighten up soon – after all, they honestly seem like a nice bunch of people.

My husband is sick, he has a chest infection courtesy of a cold that I passed on two weeks ago. We had planned to go to a Champagne bar in Central London tomorrow, but I think we will have to cancel – or I will go on my own. I will have to get out of the house though, if only to run down to Sainsburys for groceries, just to stop cabin fever from setting in.

Today’s post is part of Lori’s Flog yo Blog Friday – it may not be Friday anymore in Australia, but better late than never, right? Please go and check out Lori if you haven’t already and the wonderful bloggers that have already flogged their blogs.

Image Credit

We got to talking with G’s Aunt who’s been at our house this weekend after two weeks in Greece (lucky cow) and I told her about Mia Freedman’s latest Sunday Life piece on Alphabet Baby Names. I had to admit that I was quite surprised at how many other Jades there were there posting on Mamamia, as I had always assumed it to be an uncommon name. After all, I could never find my name on those personalized door plates and such at theme parks and other assorted junk stores.

But what surprised me even more is how many people are going the traditional route these days when it comes to naming their kids. After reading the section in Freakonomics about baby name statistics, I was certain there would be lots of MM readers that had some unusual baby names. Nope! I was totally wrong!

After we talked about Mia’s article, we talked about names that we’d all like to name our children – or in Aunty K’s case, what she would name her children if she could still have any! Here’s our list:

• Yvonne Lee (Shortened to Yvie – pronounced Eeeeevie)
• Laura Jean
• Isabella Dawn
• Emma Cait
• Louis Martin
• Thomas David
• Edward Walter
• Brody Lee

A lot of the names have family connections, Lee was my maiden name and Yvonne, Martin, David, Edward & Walter are all names from our family tree.

I remember years ago thinking about what I’d name my child, and I was all for names like Jaxon and Saxon and probably would have even named it Braxton Hicks if it was at all appropriate – in fact, I remember a conversation with a friend that was eerily similar to the kitchen table conversation Kath & Kim had when they were trying to decide to name Eponnee Rae.

Thank heavens I didn’t have a kid back then, because that poor thing would be getting ripped at school today!

What’s your favorite name? Do you want to keep your baby names “in the family”? Any really crazy names like La-a (that’s pronounced “Ladasha” by the way) out there in your circle?

I recycled last night’s outfit and added a thermal vest, a scarf from GAP and of course, a statement necklace.

I love the fruit & vegetable man. He always explains what is in season and lets us buy jumbo free range eggs for the price of medium.

The fruit and veg man’s wife runs a chilli, jam and chutney stall. We could have bought loads more from her but alas, the farmers market does not accept Amex!

Here is the healthy part of our roast dinner. It was not so healthy once I covered it in olive oil and baked it until it was nice & crispy. I didn’t get a picture of the chicken in all it’s glory because everyone swooped on me for their dinner as soon as it came out of the oven.

Even Jackson got into the spirit. He does love his Sunday roast.

You might think this is sparkling water served in a champagne flute. It is not! It is Elderflower presse. I wish I could buy it in Australia, because I know my Mum would really like it. I might have to bring some bottles home when I visit in December.

Now that the day is coming to a close, I am going to watch Rendition with Jake Gyllenhaal  and Reece Witherspoon. I was really sad when they broke up – they would have made cute children, cuter than Reece/Ryan offspring. After that, I’m going to relax in the bath with a book and another glass of Elderflower (much better for you than wine).

I’ll admit I am a bit of a blog whore and I’d like some more followers. If you aren’t following me, maybe you should be. Also, I am posting over at We Heart Life tomorrow morning, so please check that out and make Carly’s day by letting her know what you think of the new layout.

Tonight, G and I invited over Aunty K for our customary monthly Scrabble Saturday. I am not very good at Scrabble but I contributed “Jams” and “Seeds”. Clearly I am meant for Scrabble greatness (or my unborn children are destined for not being able to spell-itis).

and here is G mastering a superior round of Scrabble (is that what you call your “turn”, a round?) Notice our pink fluffy fairy pen. We like pink and fluffy in the LLN house.

I am channelling all the little twit-flits about town by actioning a nautical theme for the evening. Except their nautical is usually Chanel and my nautical is Primark and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Since we missed August’s Scrabble Saturday, I made up for it by providing wonderful libations – if I had mango juice, I would have attempted to recreate the Mango bellini that I had at B@r 301 in Shoreditch on Friday night for my friend S’s birthday. To quote Faux Fuchsia, it was 11/10 yummy.

It was also 11/10 boozy and I did wake up with a bit of a nasty hangover this morning.

Since it is past my bedtime, I am having a cup of tea in my most favourite cup and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Tea is the drink of champions. Truly.

In other news, there has been an unauthorised biography of Carla Bruni that has been released. Apparently it is quite controversial and has tidbits about Michelle Obama in it too. I am sorely tempted to pick up a copy when I see it at WH Smiths at the train station near my office.

Speaking of my office, I don’t like my new job. I got a very negative first impression. More on that later.