Moo has the chicken pox.  Luckily it seems to have peaked yesterday and she is on her way to recovery, although it seems to have barely affected her mood!  But we are all going stir crazy remaining indoors with this poxy child.  I cannot WAIT for this to be over!!

Holy blog update Batman! So I’m fairly certain my blog hasn’t gone ten days without update since I started it nearly four years ago.   The phrase “life in the fast lane” doesn’t begin to describe how packed life has been lately.  School work, house work, photoshoots left, right, and centre, final exam prep, our exploding business, time spent together as a family and with friends, and the absolutely gorgeous weather we’ve had lately have found me trying to catch my breath between activities and hunt down those rare opportunities to curl up with a book or maybe even just take nap.  It may be the sunshine, or perhaps the shift in season that’s lead to the beautiful blooms, or my current read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but I feel PUMPED.    My mind is racing with thoughts, ideas, inspiration and creativity is crackling at my fingertips like electricity. Our web development business is keeping us busy as it continues to go from strength to strength, and once my genetics exam is out of the way I will have the entire summer off of school, and shall begin pursuing my UK driving licence in earnest.

About this time every year I start feeling the power of Spring: new growth, new blooms, and gorgeous scenes with rolling vistas that will take your breath away.  The summer skirts come out of the closet and the windows start to remain open throughout the night, inviting in the gentle, salty sea breeze in the early hours of the morning.  The greatest pleasures are the simplest: curling up with moo on the sofa for a cartoon or two whilst I have my morning tea, or being able to read a few pages in whatever book I’ve got my nose buried in.   May has brought with it the Brighton Festival and the city is ALIVE, generating that same energy, a vibe you could almost literally RIDE like a wave.  I’ve been snapping thousands of photos, a few of which you’ll find below, and have three more shoots lined up this week.  I’m also currently in the planning phase of a cosplay costume and this time I will be the one in front of the camera.

I turn 28 in two weeks… and life is just about perfect.

Me.


Sarah and Daisy

The amazing bluebell blooms. 

Lately all of my free time has been spent playing this quirky and outrageously detailed space simulator, Kerbal Space Program.   KSP is an indie game still in it’s beta with one simple premise: build space rockets, go places.  Everything else is up to you.  You’re on the planet Kerbin, one of many in it’s own fictitious solar system.  From just getting your rocket off the ground all the way up to building space stations to refuel at on your way to distant planets, the scope of this game is HUGE.  And with over 40,000 community item submissions, anything you could ever want to build with is available.

But the flip side?  The game is HARD.  Like, astrophysics hard.   But that’s because it’s meant to be.  The developers of KSP employed NASA level orbital dynamics, among other complicated concepts, into their physics engine.  I’ve racked up 25 hours play time thus far and still have yet to achieve a stable orbit.   Yet each time I figure something new out, or make it just a bit further than last time, I’m hooked back in; eager to get a space station constructed so I have a method of refueling.  And then?  The Mun!

Kerbal Space Program is a brilliant game that will see many hours of play from myself, and it’s only £17.99 on Steam.

After spending the day working on my last genetics assignment of the school term, Mark and I picked Maddie up from nursery and made for the beach to enjoy this gorgeous weather.  A beer and a nice dinner (complete with ice cream for Moo) was just the thing to make the effort of an entire day of studying worth it.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

-T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land.

“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain.”  And rain it did.  Unexpectedly, Spring has come to Britain.  We decided to spend a lazy and terribly hungover Sunday afternoon in the countryside, marveling at all the new blooms which were nowhere to be found just a week ago.  We were off in search of adventure with nothing to do and nowhere to be, and we ended up at Ditchling Common in search of the illustrious bluebell bloom, which we found we were only just a week or two too early.   Yet even more special was watching the most beautiful bloom of all: a small little girl in a pretty little sundress twirling in the golden light.

Little Things Thursdays

My friend’s dog, Pia.

This, my friends, is a Russian GP-5 Cold War gas mask, and quite possibly the most sinister-looking gas mask ever devised.  I’ve been waiting weeks for this to come in the post, the last piece to a photoshoot I have planned.  How freakin’ awesome is this??

Weekly Top Shot

Mark needed a headshot (BOOM!) for professional outlets, so I took this today.  So handsome <3.

Instagrams of the seafront at sunset.

“Quality of life” has been a major focus of discussion this year for Mark and I as we venture off into the great unknown with this whole new dynamic of being self-employed.   We’ve debated the topic on many long country drives and spoke in hushed, whispered conversations in the dark late at night.   Our lives have changed in so many ways, not just in how we earn our income but also in how we structure our day.   Now we approach a full month since Mark left his job, two since I did, and it’s been amazing.  Self employment?  Thoroughly good.  We spend more time together, both as a couple and as a family, and Mark has so much more time with Maddie than he used to.

Quality of life is a theme I’m trying to employ elsewhere in my life as well, such as time spent (read: time wasted) doing nothing but dicking about online.  After reaching my tolerance threshold for Facebook BS, I deactivated my account and I can’t really say I miss it.  Leading on from that, I took a step back from social media, neglecting to use Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest, and many other places where I lurk, and even cutting back on the frequency in which the blog is updated.   I removed the apps for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and my RSS reader from my phone, and suddenly I no longer have this device that is competing for my attention at every waking moment.  When I sit down to work I no longer have a few social tabs lining my browser, calling me away from work, begging me to spend just “a minute or two” checking Facebook.

Yet one does not simply DELETE Facebook, so I’ve merely deactivated, giving me the option of returning with everything intact, an option I know I will go for sooner or later because we’ve created a social network that relies so heavily on itself that we have little choice in the matter anyways: be apart of it, or fail to keep connected.   less than five hours after deactivating (which I did shaking with rage at 3am over yet another stupid argument with some fellow Facebookers) friends were texting me about it.  I realize that, as an expat, I have little choice in the matter: Facebook provides that sort of inane, day-to-day contact, the contact we take for granted. Facebook serves as that sort of contented pause in conversation where things draw to a natural close and everyone is at peace in the few, quiet seconds between the end of one conversation and the beginning of the next.   And even now the concept sounds alien to me, even though it’s something I’ve been an active member of for years.

A few nights ago as I was fighting off sleep and cuddling our daughter at 1am over what I assume was a bad dream, I had a knee jerk reaction to “status update” the fact that I was up at 1am with Moo and tired… but why?  I mean, we’ve all done it, we’re all guilty of it, but it was cause for immediate reflection.  I think what it comes down to is Facebook fulfills that human need to be social at all times, even when our lifestyles don’t.   It’s nice to be able to reach out with an inane idea and have other sympathizers, other people who know exactly what you’re going through, regardless if it is about being up at 1am with your child or something else entirely: there is something comforting in having the ability to send a thought out into the void and have people immediately at hand who can acknowledge that thought, sympathize with it, interact with you.  Yet as I cuddled my Moo and mulled over the situation I realized that that burning desire to share things, to share thoughts and life and activities isn’t nearly as strong as I once thought it to be:  I know I will eventually reactivate Facebook, I HAVE to, or else I choose to let go of so many contacts with whom Facebook is our only shared medium, but for now  I am enjoying the blissful silence of internet social media.

Running has also increased my quality of life, and this morning I successfully heeded the 6:30am alarm and completed my first morning run which, for me and my life / schedule, is infinitely superior to the evening run.  This morning the entirety of Brighton was cloaked in a thick fog, misting rain.  I ran down to the seafront, my only company being other runners who have said “screw sleep!” as well, people coming and going and eventually fading away completely into the mist.  I felt at peace, accomplishing exercise so early in my day, starting the day off right, energized.

Between gaming on my new PC (I might be slightly obsessed with Kerbal Space Program!) , reading a few titles off a “to read” list more than 200 books long, and hanging with friends for everything from drinks, to making pizza from scratch, to lens swapping for a week (look at the size of those lenses!)  I find my free time filled with more rewarding activities.  And while these activities and social media are not mutually exclusive, I am working towards finding a balance for everything that yields the most quality of life.  We’ve only got this one life after all…