I am such an awesome fiance. This weekend, Jase is off with one of his groomsmen and another friend for a long weekend boys trip to Amsterdam. I was invited too, but declined because - well, it's a boy thing. We've both been to Amsterdam together previously, and I'll be visiting later this year too - so he's off roaming free with his friends. And besides, I've already had my solo vacation where I ditched Jase and headed to Sydney for a girls trip, so it's only fair that he gets a turn. We're a good couple like that.

So in the midst of all the partying and utter Amsterdam-ness that I'm sure is going on, he still manages to be the sweetest thing on the planet. I sent him a text this morning to make sure he was still alive after his first night there, and he replied with 'Currently in a diamond shop'. To that, I immediately wrote back saying something along the lines of 'Woohoo! What a great present, thanks!' - joking, of course. And what did he write back? 'Looking for wedding bands.' (He's a man of few text-words.)

So, I'm on this quest to be healthy, to lose weight and you know, get fertile.. eventually. And as well forcing myself to visit the gym a whole lot more, I've decided to learn to cook. I bought a few cookbooks I'd read good things about - and I picked a few of the first recipes in the book, and off I went. The first recipe? Fish.

I should preface this by saying I hate seafood. Seafood including fish. The only time I'll eat fish is if it's battered and with chips, in the traditional English pub fashion. Other than that? Nope. Never. Yick. The thought of it makes me gag. The boy always makes fun of me but seriously, the thought of eating fish freaks me right out. Even just the smell of seafood. And don't even get me started on the bones inside, because that just creeps me out.

Anyway, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go - because apparently fish is healthy (aren't most awful tasting things?) and I can't have the tastebuds of a seven year old for the rest of my life, can I? (Probably. But that's a whole other blog post. You can make fun of me later.)

So, here's a quick picture recap of my first adventure into cooking - Smoked Haddock parcels with Coconut Rice.

As much as I dislike most vegetables, I love how they look chopped up. Colourful!

Fish buried in vegetables. And lime for flavour.

Today is my lovely fiance's birthday. I've been teasing him about how OLD he is getting for the past few days now. In truth, he's hardly old, and it's hardly something to tease him about but hey, I'll take what I can get!

As well as presenting the boy with a few token presents of a new electric shaver and some clothes, I got up early to make him breakfast this morning before he headed off to work. I also wrote out little mini cards in envelopes and scattered them around our apartment and he'll have to find them all when he gets home this evening. Unfortunately I started hiding them yesterday and he managed to discover half of them already - so I spent this morning giving them all new homes. The little scavenger hunt consists of twenty eight different reasons why he is awesome. (He really is, you know. Awesome.)

If he finds them all, he'll get a secret gift - another little present bundle that he doesn't know about yet. As well as that, I'm cooking him a nice dinner, complete with a soup starter and main course. Today also saw me putting on my baking hat and making a huge mess in our kitchen as I attempted to bake red velvet cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. Unfortunately, my red velvet cupcakes turned out kind of peach-coloured. As for the cream cheese frosting? I stirred it with a spoon with red food colouring left on it, so it changed colour - and since it had already started changing, I decided to make it red too. Except, you guessed it, it didn't turn red. It turned pink. Like, super pink. He'll be getting some pretty er, manly, cupcakes with candles on top.

Sigh. Well, at least I'm trying, right? And as long as they taste good...

I love birthdays! Even when they're not my own. And especially when they are celebrating someone as kind and sweet as my boy. I can't top the present Jase organised for me last year - the surprise birthday/engagement trip to Prague - but I can do my best to try and put a smile on his face.

So, happy 28th birthday old man, and may this next year bring you so much joy.

I can't believe that it's Friday - my first week as a lady of leisure and it's over already. I've already made some progress with my goals, and since my gym membership got renewed on Wednesday, I'm at 3 from 3 visits. Go me! I'm thinking I need to make my own little star chart, just like the motivated and super-awesome Britt.

Being back at the gym is eerily strange. The same people are there, and once again, I'm the biggest person there working out. The whole self conscious thing will fade after a few weeks, it always does - but ugh, I really hate feeling this way. I know, I know, nobody cares, it's a gym. And losing weight is why I'm there, right? 

And so, I walk. I walk it out and I get into a zone, and that's what works for me. Every time I visit, my goal is to walk for at least 20-30 minutes at the beginning of my routine, before I switch to what suits me that day. I'm trying to switch up my days with arm weights & leg weights, and I plan to hunt down some classes that suit me too - but that takes a little bit of time for me to get comfortable with too. Once I get my fitness levels back up, I intend on braving spin classes again and I'm really keen to try out this Zumba phase that seems to be all the rage right now. I really wish that I had a buddy I could drag along with me.. ah well, bygones.

I don't just walk, though. I boogie. I boogie-walk. You know when you're walking and you hear a song with a decent beat, and you change your walk to match that beat? That's what I do. And if that means I sashay while I walk, so be it. It gets me pumped. I like to imagine that I'm strutting down a runway, America's Next Top Model style. Except that I'm wearing joggers. And I'm sweating. And huffing. A lot. I can only imagine seeing me from behind (although I think that I'm being discreet.. of course) - and I certainly don't want to know. All I know is that I like to boogie-walk.

Do you have any quirks that get you through your workouts?

For this post to make any sense at all, you'll need to hop off your feed reader and mosey on down to my actual site so you can see my lovely new design in all of its magnificent glory and hope and wonder.

The next venue was one I've been to before, as it was actually the location for my high school formal/prom. It is another older house and has some very pretty gardens - but it was very basic. I was hoping to be shown a few different room options in the venue, however was a bit disappointed that the room they decided would be 'right' for our numbers was exactly the same room where we'd held our formal!

It was a pretty basic room in the daytime, though we were shown photographs of the room set up at night and it's amazing what a difference a few fairy lights can make! This was the cheapest venue option by a long shot, so I kept it on our maybe list just in case.

I'm going to throw in an extra shout-out here to my partners in crime, my Mum and the lovely Miss Kirby, who found themselves dragged along to view nearly all of the options with me. Look, aren't they wonderful?

Our next drive was a little terrifying, being that the venue was an inner city hotel and we had one panicking driver on our hands. It didn't help that our GPS Navigator tends to be a little delayed in the city, so it ended up having us drive over the Harbour Bridge twice! Let me just say, as nice as our famous bridge looks from afar, it's actually an express-way and it's really, really difficult to navigate its million changing lanes and tolls.

That venue ended up being a stuffy boardroom with a view of.. get this.. an air conditioning unit out the back, so I refused to take any pictures. It was that bad.

We then headed out into the Ku-ring-gai Chase region, which is a beautiful area north of the city. It's very green and really lush, and I had high hopes for our next visit. We drove into a big old underground car park and caught the lift up to the main reception entrance and I was blown away - it was modern, spacious and had beautiful gardens.. looking good.

Unfortunately, things went downhill from there - the first room we were shown was tiny and had a massive pylon in the middle which cut the room in half, and the second room was a HUGE empty ballroom with no windows and all artificial lighting. Was a shame too, as it could potentially have been a very nice venue. They did have beautiful floral arrangements, though!

Taking a break from the contemporary designs, I had chosen another heritage house to visit - and it was beautiful. It had a much more laidback feel to it, and everything was family run which was lovely. I loved this venue as you weren't just getting one room - our guests would have access to the entire lower level of the house, including a separate dancing room, bar, and formal lounge as well as the traditional dining room.

The flaw with this one? The owner wasn't a very pleasant person. I'm sure he runs events well, but the idea of having him as my sole wedding co-ordinator was a little iffy. It was close to the church that I loved though, so we kept this on our potentials too.

I'll interrupt my flowing commentary to throw in a little bit of trivia for you - most of these venues I had found through either recommendations from friends or through searches online. It wasn't all ME ME ME though, as everytime I would find a new potential, I'd show Jason and he would very kindly pretend to be interested in it.

There were a few he wasn't keen on which we ruled out, but for the most part, they were my choices. In one random Bridezilla moment though, I threw a bit of a tantrum that went something along the lines of 'Why is just ME doing all of this.. Wah Wah Wah - YOU try finding a venue that fits out budget, this isn't easy you know, Wah Wah Wah.' Imagine, if you will, a real stomp at the end, just for effect.

And so the boy begrudgingly did a search of his own and came across a clubhouse in a lovely golf course, and deemed his job done. Of course, I promised to view it as a potential while I was home. And so we did.

While the grounds of the course were lovely, unfortunately the clubhouse was just that - a clubhouse. It had horrible beige carpets, and just wasn't.. wedding-y enough. Sorry Jason!

And so the search continued...

If you've followed me over since my old blog, you'll probably notice that I don't tend to refer to that blog by name anymore. It's actually incredibly hard not to use it/type it here - I used it for years, after all - and every time I log into my main email, or my Facebook account, or any of the online groups I'm a member of, I'm reminded of it. The whole point of moving everything to an anonymous blog was to avoid popping up in Google searches and to have a little bit more freedom to blog; something I just wasn't able to do before.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I had imaged a massive following of stalkers or anything; it's just that there are people out there that I didn't particularly like having access to my inner most thoughts. I could have made my blog private, but what's the point in that? I'm a firm believer of a blog being public for a reason - because what is blogging without the interaction of fellow bloggers relating and commenting?

And so, for a while I avoided blogging about the personal stuff and things flowed along fine. But one day I stopped and realised that hey! I do want to write about personal things. I want to write about the awesome things that are happening in my life. I want to write about the mundane things too. And the not-so-good things. And I want to stop writing things in a 'stalker-proof' way, to avoid those few people finding me and having access to my rantings. Unfortunately to make sure I remained anonymous throughout the transition, I think I lost a lot of readers along the way... but I'm hoping that they'll find me again at some point - I miss them!

So now, here I am, with my first personal blog since the move.

I've been putting off writing this post until things were a little more concrete and until I was completely removed from my work environment - again, just on the off chance that people are cleverer than I'd anticipated and had found this new blog home. Yes, as of today, I've finished up at work. My days working in an office are over, and I'm feeling a whole lot of relief at the thought of not having to go back to ten hour work days for a little while. I don't have a new job, and I don't have any grand plans. I'm finishing up because I have another focus right now.

When I was back home in Sydney, I'd made it a mission to go and have a medical check-up, as I knew that things weren't right with me and wanted to visit our family doctor. I'd visited a few GP's in the UK and no real testing had been done, so I was adamant that I wanted to be checked out. To sum things up, here's a rough idea of my medical history crammed into a few giant sentences:

Unbearable pain and cramping with periods since they started when I was 12; weeks of heavy bleeding followed by months of nothing; put on birth control pills at 14 to manage odd cycle; pain, oh lots of pain. Went off birth control two years ago; periods MIA for five months at a time; pain, oh lots of pain, negative pregnancy tests taken in fits of panic when my period was missing YET AGAIN; break-outs worse than the teenage years; crazy weight gain that was impossible to get off; hair growth on chin (CHIN!) and subsequent embarrassment... and the list could go on and on.

I'm sure anyone reading those symptoms would have a rough idea that something wasn't right - but all I was told to do was to keep tracking everything and give my body time to adjust to being off the pill again. Ha. I think nearly two years is MORE than enough time. Apparently not. In the short two weeks that I was home, my doctor took blood, looked at the notes I'd made on myself for the last few years and ordered several ultrasounds to check out everything internally, and lo and behold, there was a problem.

I have Poly cystic Ovarian Syndrome. My hormones are completely out of whack and I have dozens of visible cysts on each ovary; dozens! I've been put in Metformin tablets initially to try and manage my insulin resistance and to attempt to restore a more regular cycle - but as for eventually trying to fall pregnant, well, that's another story.

It's a bit of a shock to the system when you find out that you're more than likely going to struggle having children naturally. It's even more difficult to take in when you're not even ready to consider children yet - when we're not financially, emotionally or heck, even in the right country to be prepared for the responsibilities involved in falling pregnant and having a baby. Our general plan was always to get a little more stable with our lives back home, and obviously focus on the wedding first, and then look at where we stood in terms of a baby - but now that 'plan' may not be as smooth as we'd hoped.

I'm sure there are plenty of women out there with PCOS who conceive naturally. And since we haven't started trying yet, and won't be for a little while, I'm trying not to jump to conclusions and declare myself infertile. To be honest, I don't know enough about this whole thing to make judgements. I just know that it's scary and worrying and I'm glad I have an actual diagnosis now, to prove that I know my body and I know when something isn't right.

My doctor informed me that losing weight can also help to kick-start cycles into gear so using the drugs as a boost, I'm taking this time to get healthy and to get fit. It will be more difficult than usual, thanks to the insulin & hormonal problems, but I'm determined. I want to have children. I want to be healthy! And thanks to my hardworking fiance and my own little pocket of savings, now is as good a time as any to take some ME time and get this sorted. Lord knows we'll have a whole stack on our plate when we return home, so it has to be now. And now it is!

So there you have it - I think this qualifies as a ripper of a personal blog.

Do you have any experiences or information about Poly cystic Ovarian Syndrome that you'd like to share? I'd welcome your thoughts!