As I write this blog post, I'm lying on a mattress that's sprawled out on our living room floor.
Looking around the flat, I'm taking in my surroundings. There are moving boxes stacked in the corner, the corner where the treadmill used to lie and where Oscar used to sleep on. Looking around a little further, I can see the square alcove in the wall - we never did figure out what it was originally used for, but we turned it into a storage space for blankets & occasionally to store the cat toys. The huge l-shaped lounge, with its annoying pillows that always, always get messed up. Our orange kitchen, the one that is so modern that it doesn't need doors on any of the cupboards. The drawers, which we had to move all of our food products out of, because the cat figured out how to stand on his hind legs and open them. The full length windows with beautiful light and their view down Ladbroke Grove, the millions of buses with squeaky brakes, the ambulance, fire and police sirens that blare down our street every night, the tourists that hoard the neighbourhood each weekend for the Portobello Markets, that really pretty church I've always wanted to visit... this is our home. This was our home.
And even before this, our old apartment in the East side of London - with views across the Thames to the o2 stadium and to Canary Wharf. Our old noisy neighbours and our mouldy bathroom with its crusty ventilation fan. The place where we brought Oscar home as a kitten, lost him under the refrigerator that one time, and called home first.
So many memories. I could go on and on.
Somehow, I've reached the end of my London journey. I can't even describe what an experience it has been for me, but I do know that it's one I'll never forget. I'm surprised to admit that it even makes me a little emotional thinking of leaving here for good - who knew I'd grow so attached to a city thousands of miles away from 'home'? But, as people predicted, I learned to call it 'home' here too. And I will miss this place.
Jase and I accomplished a lot during our time spent over here. We moved in together for the first time. We celebrated our sixth, seventh & eighth anniversaries. We survived an apartment move, clear from one side of the city to the other. We adopted Oscar-cat and started our own little family. We worked and lived on a joint budget. We got engaged and we started planning a wedding. We used our long weekends wisely, and added some new European cities to our 'countries visited' list. We've grown up, so much, together.
I'll always remember these things as happening during the time I lived in London.
Tomorrow I set off on my travels - a month discovering Europe with two of my best girlfriends, followed by an amazing pre-wedding-moon with my amazing & hard-working fiancé. I still can't believe how fast time has gone, but here we are. Farewell London: thanks for the memories.
This blog will soon play host to some fabulous guest bloggers that I am lucky to call friends, so please show them some love while they're here. And if you're in need of some wedding-related rambles, I'll be posting at Weddingbee while I'm away - so make sure you add my feed to your readers.
Be safe & well, friends - I can't wait to speak with you again from the other side of the globe in a few weeks time. I hope you'll stick around as we embark on a whole new set of adventures back in Sydney.
This past week, Jase and I got to do something that I never thought we would be lucky enough to experience - twice! We saw not one, but two concerts put on by our favourite band. Now this isn't just any old band that we like: this is the band that brought us together. Speaking of that story, I recapped it for my blog over at Weddingbee the other day, so if you want some of the juicier details, click here to read it. But back to the story at hand...
WE GOT TO SEE LIFEHOUSE TOGETHER!
This was a pretty big deal for us - bands don't tend to make their way down to Australia because it is simply too far for them to travel - so for us to get to see them twice in our last few weeks of living in London, well, it felt like the fates were speaking to us once again. Jase was in charge of booking the tickets, got excited while doing so and ended up purchasing a second batch as well, which ended up being their final show in London.
I can't even begin to tell you what an experience this was for us. The band are amazing live, they had so much energy and so much personality - and they sing better live than they do on albums. Jase has been listening to recaps of the concert on his iPhone pretty much every day since the concert, they are just that good.
We've been undecided on choosing a song for our first dance for all these months, but we always agreed that it's only fitting it be a Lifehouse number. (And, you know, if the guys wanted to schedule a Sydney visit in June in order to make a live cameo appearance, I'm sure we could loan them a few sofa beds to put them up for the night!) But since I'm being realistic and all, we're playing it safe and deciding between audio versions instead.
Our top choice, and the song that we call 'ours' is Everything. We're not using it for a few reasons, though: it's too long, and I refuse to ruin the song by chopping it into pieces for a few minutes of awkward shuffling, and also because a cousin of mine used it at his own wedding and I don't want to repeat it. Instead, we're torn between a few other alternatives - and luckily, they played a few of them at their concerts. We still haven't made a decision yet, but I think we're a lot closer now.
It's funny how seeing the band live has made me feel like I'm eighteen years old all over again. I'll admit, over the years I started to lose interest in them - but watching them rock out in person brought everything flooding back. I'm always going to be in debt to the band that led me to my best friend, and to my soul mate.
By now you've read about my PCOS journey in a number of different ways: the problems with my cycle, the weight related difficulties and the body hair dilemma. Now we're onto the next, and probably most superficial of all of my symptoms: the acne. Oh, the acne. It's the bane of my existence. My chin seriously hates me right now.
I first noticed that my skin had changed when I moved to London. I don't know exactly what the cause of it was, but I liked to blame the harder water here in the city; but my face did not react well to the move overseas. My face, once prone to oiliness, changed completely. It became very, very dry in some places, but remained oily in others. During the first few years here, I also suffered with problems with my skin after I travelled; it would become extremely red, irritable and scratchy - as if I'd contracted some kind of rash. The pharmacist in the UK recommended I use sorbolene/aquaeous cream for moisturising, but the pharmacist back home in Sydney prescribed me with a mild cortisone cream, which helped quite a lot. But that was just the beginning.
Since starting on the Metformin tablets, I've been experiencing quite bad acne; particularly around the chin and neck. Since I've never really suffered from acne before, it's safe to say that I feel awful - they are red and inflamed, and they often seem to form little cysts - so giant red lumps that don't really ever get any 'head'. {Gross, right?} The worst part is that even if I do my best not to pick or squeeze, they scar. The red cysts eventually disappear but they leave behind a mark. My once-clear skin is now very, very scarred.
I have also been getting little bouts of acne on my back, which again, is the kind that leaves marks. I've been using bio-oil to try and reduce the scarring, but it's not really doing much good - my skin is so fair that even the smallest of bumps leaves a spot behind. It's awful. Here's me trying to get in the best shape and physical health I've been in before, and I'm spotted and marked. What lovely wedding pictures I'm going to take, eh?
Quite a few adults suffer from acne, but I'll be honest: it was not something I bargained for. I never expected to suffer from this, and especially not in my twenties - so much for escaping the hormonal crap once you're out of the teens! If I'm still not happy with my face clearing up in the next few months, that'll be one of the first things on my agenda when I have my follow up visit back in Sydney in December.
Have you ever experienced adult or cystal acne before? What did you use to combat it?
I realised the other day that I forgot to mention how everything was going with Oscar-cat and his transition to moving overseas with us. Let me just start by announcing this: SENDING A PET OVERSEAS IS FREAKING EXPENSIVE. Okay, I feel better already. Well, I don't really - I'm still in a bit of shock as to how much this is costing us, but you do what you've got to do when it's for your family.
Yes, we consider him to be a part of our family. No, he's not just a cat. Yes, we could have left him behind and saved some money. No, we're not those kind of people. Seriously, you should hear some of the things people say when we explain how difficult this process has been for us. They're beyond obnoxious. Do they think we don't know that this is a costly venture that not everyone would choose to pay out for? Do they think we don't know that we could have an entire farm full of kittens for what we're paying for Oscar? He's our pet. When we adopted him over here back in 2008, this was one of the decisions we were prepared for.
Okay, rant over. To summarise what's happened so far, here's a bit of background information for you:
Two years ago, I researched the cost involved in having Oscar imported. You paid a fairly hefty sum in British Pounds for his export certificate, his specially made travel crate and his actual plane ticket. And then, upon arrival back in Sydney, you paid the Australian quarantine agency a per day fee {like a boarding fee} which would cover his mandatory 30-day stay there. Back then, the cost was pretty reasonable: around $15 per day, in Australian dollars. Still a bit hefty, yes, but it's pretty comparable to if you were simply boarding a pet in a kennel.
Unfortunately, when I got more quotes in the past few months, the prices had skyrocketed. I'm not just talking an increase of a couple of dollars, I'm talking over double the original cost. And here's the problem: it's not like you can shop around and get a better deal. Quarantine is quarantine. You pay, or you don't take your pet home with you.
This threw a few spanners in the works, especially in budgeting terms, but we'd already made our minds up. Let's face it, we knew the day we brought his gorgeous kitten face home with us, that he'd be ours. Always. No getting around it. I mean: LOOK AT HIM. And he's gotten even more handsome as he grows up.
Fast forwarding to now: we have his flight paid for. We have a company organising his carry case. We've done all his shots. We have his final veterinary visit booked for next month, which Jase is in charge of chauffeuring. His place is booked in the quarantine cattery back in Sydney. He's all set to go. We've timed our own travels so time up perfectly with his release from quarantine. We fly home from Honolulu and pick him up that very same afternoon.
I know we're doing the right thing by sending him home - but I still have The Guilt about doing it. He'll be travelling by himself, he'll be looked after by strangers for an entire month, and he'll exit all of that in a very hot Australian December to a brand new place to live. I plan on spending as much quality time with him this week as I can.. because I know how much I'll be missing my little man for the next two months.
This is an ongoing battle for me - catch up on the journey so far by visiting these links:
Operation Healthy: One Month In
Operation Healthy: Two Months In
It's nice to be eating real food again. Since I'm basically the world's fussiest eater, I knew that eating pre-prepared meals for two months straight would be a stretch. In truth, I made it through probably half that time before starting to dread the thought of eating another one ever again. Aside from a few granola packs that I'm finishing off, I'm back to my usual diet now, and loving it! It's so empowering to be able to pick and choose everything that I fancy eating, provided it's within a reasonable portion.
Writing that out above still makes me feel a bit embarrassed. It's the basic mantra we all know about a healthy diet - everything in motivation. Yeah, I'm just catching on to that now. But better late than never, right?
This month, we've had a lot of visitors. I have thoroughly enjoyed running a bed and breakfast type home-stay for everyone who's been passing through, it's been great - but it's also so much hard work. The constant cleaning, organising your day around other people's schedules, planning meals in advance wherever possible and eating out way more than usual, well, it completely threw my routines out the window. But I tried to pick decent meal choices, I kept up my gym visits and I jumped back on the bandwagon as soon as I felt wobbly.
For the first time, I noticed that quite a few of my clothes are fitting differently. I'd noticed it in a pair of jeans last month, but that was just a one-off, so I didn't think anything of it. While trying to pack for Europe, I pulled out some of my clothing from last winter, and it's definitely looser. Unfortunately I'm somewhere between my clothes looking a bit big, but not quite being a smaller size yet. The conundrum of baggy clothing vs muffin-top? I can't win!
As I expected, and similar to last month, the weight loss slowed down again, but it's still a loss, which I'm grateful for. I'm down four pounds this month, which brings my total weight loss to twenty-seven pounds.
I weighed in early, too. We sold our treadmill and our television set in anticipation of the move, and with that gone, so goes my weighing in - I use the Wii fit to track my weight loss. So four pounds in three weeks, well, I'm just fine with that! (Plus, that means my weekend in Paris didn't result in any crazy gains, even after enjoying some beautiful, beautiful food.) Anywho, I didn't quite get to 190lbs or 85kg goals I had set myself, but I'm oh so close. I'm hoping I'll manage to hit those goals while travelling, but who knows how that will turn out.. it'll be a secret.
I won't be weighing in again, or likely even talking about weight loss for a while now. It will be interesting to see how the numbers look, and how I look after the time spent travelling - I guess we'll find out on the other side soon enough!
Oh, Nikon D3100, where have you been all my life?
{On pre-order, of course!)
I've had a DLSR on my wish-list for the best part of this year and I've been researching them for just as long. Let's face it, I'm no photography expert. What did I want? An easy to use camera, one that I could learn with as I went along, and one that wouldn't cost me my first-born child cat. I tested out my brother's Canon 550D while he was visiting and fell in love - but I was won over by everyone telling me how great the Nikon models were. Add the fact that the D3100 was a newer, lighter, revamped model of the D3000 classic AND shoots video, well, I was sold.
I pre-ordered the camera at the end of August. I knew it was a bit of a gamble, since no official release date was announced, but there were so many pre-order deals going that I bit the bullet and went for it.
Things were all going fine, until I noticed that the estimated delivery time on all the websites stayed as an estimate. I was worried. What happened if the camera release was delayed? What happened if the delivery was late? What was the point in ordering a fancy pants camera that didn't even arrive in time for me to take it with me to Europe? Imagine, if you will, me in a mild state of panic.
I emailed the store I'd pre-ordered through. I emailed other stores, to see if they'd heard anything. I even emailed Nikon Europe to see if they could tell me when it was due in - but I still didn't get an answer. I got a call last week though, to tell me that it was in stock! The store I bought it through were really fabulous, and shipping it next day for me - complete with a free memory card, storage backpack & photo editor. I've been playing with it constantly since, trying to get my head around all the bells and whistles.
Unfortunately it's been gloomy and rainy outside for the past week, so I've spent my time capturing two subjects: Jason and Oscar. One is being more co-operative than the other in regards to having his picture taken, so here are some of my favourite snapshots so far, straight out of the camera. I hope you like them as much as I do!
The PCOS saga continues: this time focusing on the fairly hairy (oh ha!) subject of body hair. One would think that having a whacked-out cycle and a tendency to put on weight like nobody's business would be as awful as it gets, but no. It's not. Another common symptom of PCOS that I have found myself suffering from is excess hair growth.
I began noticing that my leg hairs grew back seemingly thicker and darker after shaving, and at a faster rate than before. I started paying more attention to the fuzzy blonde hairs that were on my cheeks {I like to call them my mini-sideburns.} I saw hairs that had started growing on my belly. I began playing with the hairs that had sprouted out of my chin and neck, without even realising I was doing it. I remember Jase calling me out on it for the first time, and feeling absolutely mortified. How long had I been doing that for? Was I drawing people's attention to my lady-beard? Was it noticeable? I began constantly examining my face in the mirror & wondering what to do next.
The hair growth started off fairly mild. But as I'd began plucking them out, they grew in quite coarse and again, seemed darker. I've never waxed any part of my body before {let's not talk about my one ill-fated home waxing strip experiment, remember that one?} and I was petrified of taking any step that would result in me having to constantly remove the hair for the rest of my life. I'm a low maintenance kind of girl.
It took me a while to figure out what to do, but I eventually went with a hair removal cream, which worked out quite well. I use it sparingly on my chin, and it helps get rid of the nastier dark hairs - I only do it every couple of weeks, and it makes my self confidence soar afterwards! There's not much I can do about the hairs, to be honest - much like acne, it's hormonal and will probably settle back down again if I were to go back on birth control.
But, thanks to the never ending random cycle of annoyance that is PCOS, I'm trying to avoid being back on those for the moment, to monitor my natural cycle and to eventually figure out the best way to conceive.
Boo to the hairyness!
And it doesn't even stop there. Unfortunately, as I've found out for myself, women with PCOS are prone to ingrown hairs, due to the coarser hair that grows on our bodies. That explains why I've suffered from more of those in the last few months than I can ever remember. They're painful and they're gross and I hate them.
Now, I should add here that I also suffer from a different dermatological problem that I've had for as long as I can remember; I'm fairly sure it's hereditary, as my dad has always had it too. It's called keratosis pelaris and it's basically a skin condition that presents itself as lots of dry, lumpy spots all over the back of my arms and my upper thighs. It's one of the reasons why I have issues with my arms, because those bumps often lead to pimples which lead to redness and scarring. Add in the pre-disposition to suffer from ingrown hairs, and it's not a pretty sight.
I have scarring on my arms, on my upper thighs and on the inside of my knees. I exfoliate all the time, especially since I shave my legs - but it doesn't seem to help. I've read somewhere that tea tree oil can help with ingrown hairs, so I may try this next. I've never been a skin baring kind of girl, but it's still hard not to feel embarrassed by all the marks and wobbles and other quirks that I've discovered as I've gotten older - and I haven't even gone through the pregnancy stage yet! But it's the only body I've got, so I'm learning to love it anyway.
Looking back, these posts do appear to be all about me complaining and whinging about the problems I'm facing - but let's face it, this syndrome sucks. I'm hoping there will be more positive outcomes as the months progress, depending on how things go with diet changes in particular. But for the meantime, this series is documenting how I'm feeling right now, which I think is important. Thanks for following along with me, I appreciate you letting me vent it out.
I haven't mentioned much about wedding planning lately, because the travels have completely overtaken my brain. If people ask, I tell them what we're up to so far, and then gladly use the 'we'll be doing more when we're back in Sydney!' excuse. I've been plodding along trying not to get too far ahead of myself, and my inspiration folder is growing every day. I'll admit it, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for not turning into this whole other person, a wedding planning mutated version of my former self.
Until I looked at the date and realised how fast the next few months will go by.. and then I freaked out. There will be no excuse when I get home: I'll be throwing myself face first into the planning and the DIY-ing and the vendor-finding and all that jazz. And when people ask me what's happening and what needs doing, I'll actually need to give them real answers.. jeepers. That's scary. Maybe I'm not as organised as I thought I was.
While Jason's parents were here, we tackled a rough guest list - because one of the first things I want to do when we get back is sort that out. It's a mock one at this stage, but good to know what we're looking at in terms of numbers. It kind of terrifies me that all those people will be coming to watch us get married. I'm not a huge attention loving kind of girl, but poor Jase can't stand it - so this ought to be fun to combat. Is it too late to elope?
So here's the deal: I'm a pretty laid back fiancé. If the boy wants to go out, he goes out - as long as each of us knows roughly where the other is headed {to avoid the worries, you know} we're fine. We trust one another, and we work well with freedom. It suits us. Which brings us nicely into the subject of: the grooms pre-wedding festivities.
When we talked about wedding related activities, he was quick to announce that he wasn't going to have a stag-do/bucks night. His argument was that two out of his three groomsmen lived abroad, so wouldn't necessarily be in the country in the lead-up to the wedding, so it wasn't an option. I thought that he should at least do something to celebrate pre-wedding, but we thought we'd leave it until a little later to talk about it.
Until recently, when one of his UK groomsmen decided to organise something for Jase before he leaves the UK! I'm so thrilled that he's going to get a chance to hang out with the boys here, and I think he is secretly pretty chuffed as well. No date is set yet, but I have a feeling it's going to be after I've already left for Europe - so it'll be a proper boys night out.. no strings attached! Who knows what will happen, but that's something I'm *gasp* giving the groomsmen free reign over. Hopefully they keep it classy!
As for me - well, I'm sure I'll have something fabulous with my girls once I'm home. In the meantime though, I'll be going away with two out of my three bridesmaids and exploring Europe with them, I couldn't ask for anything better than that!
(Except maybe if Jase could come along to that too.. but I'll catch him shortly after for our Pre-Wedding-Moon!)
Because everybody {well, most everybody} loves starting their week looking at cat photography. Or at least I do.
Even when you wake me up at 5am. And then 6am. And when you scratch on our carpet. And try and eat our food.
You're lucky you're cute, buddy.
As for the the other image, why yes, that's a neon crucifix light bulb. What else would it be? I take no claim to owning that one, but I'm kind of tempted to plug it in, just to see what it looks like. I hurriedly put that one back where I found it, I don't want to be messing with anyone's religious light-bulb collection, that's for sure.
Have you ever discovered random stuff lying around your home?
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