… As you can probably tell from my previous posts. So, dammit, I’m taking one!

I’ve completely stunned myself by booking a holiday to Ubud in Bali in mid-July for ten days. I’ve never seriously pondered Bali as a destination I’d travel to before - it’s really not very ‘me’! However, I’ve been convinced by a few people (including the lovely meringue) that it’s a really great place to go and relax, especially if you avoid the notoriously iffy bits of the island and go at a good time of year (which is pretty much right now).

And a relaxing holiday - as opposed to a ‘travelling’ holiday - is what I desperately need. In fact I don’t think I’ve had one of those for over ten years!

Ubud is in the mountains and I gather it should be quieter and cooler than many places along the coast. It’s also known as being the main centre for fine and performing arts in Bali.

I’ve booked myself into a great looking hotel with gorgeous grounds, a perfect swimming pool (see above!), air conditioned rooms and excellent reviews - the Bali Spirit Hotel.

So now there’s just … a lot to organise!

Today I’ve finally managed to purchase a perfect daypack for getting around with and taking on the plane. This proved to be a surprisingly difficult and long-winded task when shopping online. It was hard enough to find exactly the right type of bag, only to discover that most US retailers completely refuse to ship internationally (I guess my money isn’t good enough for them or something!), while most Australian retailers either have an extremely limited range or utterly over the top pricing ($350 for a daypack? I don’t think so!) and UK retailers have a great range but when you convert things from Pounds Sterling into dollars … ouch. Of course I would love to have purchased one from an indie designer, but I had no luck finding one who makes what I need - although Timbuk2 was indie once upon a time.

Now I need to find some decent walking shoes, organise vaccinations and travel insurance, get my head around the ever-changing visa situation and baggage restrictions, get a letter from my doctor explaining that, yes, I really do need to take all of those medications with me, sort out some bathers/swimmers, get my plants minded … and much more. Nothing like wearing myself out even more before I take my desperately needed rest, huh?!

As for my shops on Etsy, Mintd and Bouf … I’ve decided to keep all of them open but will try to make it as clear as possible that there will be a delay in terms of shipping, which I will get to asap upon my return to Australia after my ten day trip. If you’re considering purchasing something for a gift or an event, you might like to bear this in mind.

Yes, it’s true! I have been continuing my journey into what so far seems to be a year of generally being bogged down. However, I have managed to get on top of a few things today and seem to finally be catching up a bit. Fingers crossed that I can stay caught up for eternity! … Or something.

Before I get around to writing a proper blog post, I’ll leave you with a link to an interview I did for a great blog called Indie Pretty Perfect, which is created by Helen, the creator of the wonderful handmade stationery at pepperinapress.etsy.com.

Dear blonde man who was driving a little bluey-turquoise coloured car north along Macquarie Street in Sydney in February 2003 and who decided that in order to arrive at his destination 0.3 seconds earlier he needed to swerve around the rear end of a bus travelling in the opposite direction which was turning right into Hunter Street, thereby ending up entirely on the wrong side of the road and having a head on collision with a taxi immediately behind the bus in which I was a passenger,

I hate you. Seriously, I do. Four years later I still spend time almost every day in some degree of head and neck pain, from minor to major, and requiring painkillers, from a few to many.

For a period last year I had one single headache for TWO MONTHS STRAIGHT - all because of you! When things aren’t settled I feel like my life is going in slow motion. The hassle and disruption it causes me is immense, even putting aside the pain.

Last year I was assessed to be 11% permanently incapacitated as a result of your utter stupidity. Yep, the damage to my spine looks to be permanent. Thanks for that!

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I really do hate you. And that I still think of you on an almost daily basis - even though I don’t even know your name (just your registration number). It’s almost romantic, don’t you think? Except it’s not.

That is all.

Simone

It seems I’ve been tagged by Rebecca and now must undertake one of these new-fangled meme things! See what happens when you’re not paying attention?

This one is six things about me not mentioned previously in Make Me.

Okay, so here goes …

one

After I left school I worked in the music industry for about seven years. Firstly for a recording studio (which was more advertising than music, really) and then for a big record company for several years. And after that for a music magazine doing odd jobs while I was working out what to do with my life.

Being obsessive about music, it had been my dream to work in the music industry. It turned out to suck, which was a bit of a shame.

It was incredibly poorly paid (the theory being that everyone wants to work in the music industry and you should consider yourself lucky that we’re not *charging* you to do it); it turned music into a ‘product’ for me and instead of enjoying it I’d think about marketing it; the industry was (and probably still is) so incredibly male dominated that as a female you’d either be stuck in dead end jobs forever while doing most of your boss’s work for him or would need to behave incredibly aggressively to get anywhere; etc.

Me (purple scarf in hair), some ex-colleagues from the music industry and some relatively famous people at the time (ie. a long time ago!) who were actually fun and coped with the fact that one of my more eccentric colleagues decided to dress up and take the piss out of them! I also particularly like the ‘toilet upstairs’ sign in this shot.

Oh and I worked something like 60 hours a week for my pittance of a salary - this would include going to see every band on the label who came to town, which sounds like fun until you find yourself doing things like watching Dire Straits perform tedious 15 minute versions of all of their songs to such dull perfection you mostly want to axe murder them … and this while you’re coming down with a serious bout of tonsillitis … but have been told your job is on the line if you’re not there and looking like you’re enjoying yourself.

One day I just walked in and resigned. And the rest is history.

two

My degrees of separation with all sorts of famous people are excellent - two from me to the Queen, for instance. This is because I met Elton John and he’s met *everybody*! So that was one upside of the music industry I guess! Sort of.

three

Other than my contemporary jewellery-making friends and people I’ve met through Etsy and the like, my friends are almost entirely males. And despite going to a girls’ high school it’s been that way for most of my life. In fact, my only remaining friend from my high school days is a male - he was the friend of a female school friend’s boyfriend!

My best friend throughout kindergarten and primary school was a boy (he’s a man now, of course!). People thought we were weird - sometimes we’d lie and say we were brother and sister to avoid being hassled.

Here are a couple of my closest friends:

four

I lived in London for about two and a half years. And I would never ever have come back to Australia if it wasn’t for my deeply irritating Australian passport and the lack of foresight of my parents with regard to not to have been born in Europe.

Two of my very favourite photographs of London - taken by me about ten years apart.

I had kind of recovered from this horror, but I went back for a visit early last year and realised I’d still much prefer to be there than in Sydney. Although these days it would only be if I could afford to live there reasonably comfortably.

five

I have no pets. I did used to have a really lovely and intelligent dalmation called Kitty (the name was not my fault!). However, I left her behind with my soon-to-be ex-partner when I went to London and she very sadly passed away a couple of years ago at the ripe old age (for a pedigree dalmation!) of 14. Whenever I was in Adelaide I’d always pay her (and my ex) a visit.

Sometimes I think about getting a cat, but I’m not sure I’m ready for the responsibility. I like that I can pack up and disappear overseas whenever I want - even if I don’t do it often at all.

six

I am left-handed. My best friend is left-handed. I was once sitting at a table in a hostel in Nice, France with about eleven people from all over the world … every single one of them was left-handed.

* * *

Phew … it’s done! But it was fun and I even went to the trouble of scanning in some ancient photographs to make it vaguely more interesting - if you move your mouse over them you get a bit more information.

And I now tag Shae of The Butterfly Collector (to whom I also offer congratulations for her recent news!).

During the hell of working 100-120 hours per week for much of last year, I must confess that my system of keeping myself organised and on top of things fell into an abyss, along with many other important things in my life! And I’ve found it difficult to pull it back out again.

So in recent days I’ve been reading through Getting Things Done all over again to remind me how it’s all supposed to work and that it does in fact work - it’s the only system I’ve ever attempted to use to manage my time and committments that actually does the job.

It’s also been very useful to remind myself that I have slipped into committing many GTD cardinal sins, such as keeping lists of things I need to attend to in my head, or of writing them out and then never looking at them again - and even of hiding piles of ’stuff’ in drawers, based on the rather flawed premise that if I can’t see it, it therefore does not exist.

Once I got my head around all of that once more, I set to work on collecting everything into lists and piles and have now gone through every single item and processed it. This shot of my in tray(s) as of a few weeks ago in comparison to one taken this evening will give you some idea of the difference to my state of mind:

It’s not that I’ve done everything, it’s just that I’ve organised what needs to be done in a way that means I won’t need to keep fretting about all the things I haven’t done or might have forgotten or might forget if I don’t keep reminding myself over and over numerous times a day. And it also means I can put my finger on exactly what I need to complete things whenever I decide to do them. Yay me!

The centrepiece of my new organisation is a very nifty piece of software I’ve discovered called Journler. It has many, many possible uses, but after lots of thought I have come up with a way to make it do exactly what I want in terms of organising myself.

So far it works a treat! And it’s going to be far more efficient than the old little application I have been using to date, which was one reason I let things slip into a hole. If you’re a Mac user I very highly recommend you get a copy and have a good play with it. If you’re not … well, it sucks to be you, huh? ;P

So far Journler has 131 entries in it in terms of next actions … and that’s after I knocked quite a few on the head this afternoon. And it’s not including the large number I still need to move across from my old software (in fact, that in itself is one of my next actions!). So, yes, there’s still too much to do. But at least I’m in control of it - and we jewellery makers do like to be in control!

PS. Hi steppy!!!

As of around midday today I have been the proud owner of a sparkly new Macbook Pro and an equally sparkly new iPod nano (bright pink of course … are there other colours?).

I was very dedicated and didn’t even unpack it for at least an hour or so before I had a few other tasks out of the way. This is mostly because I was fully anticipating spending much of the next few days migrating things, reinstalling things, digging out ancient registration numbers and encountering moments of intense panic as things went wrong.

But I forgot one simple little thing … this is a Mac. Such things are just not part of my reality anymore. Moments into the process of first starting up the new machine I clicked on a button to say I wanted to migrate from my old Mac … I then hooked the two machines up with a cable … and it was all sorted out for me. Yes, it did take an hour or so to move everything across, but then there was about 50gb worth of data.

And then I finished the set up on the new Mac … and everything is here in perfect working order exactly as on my old machine without me needing to lift a finger to do anything further.

Lovely.

And now it’s all set up and functioning dreamily … and I just need to figure out what to do with the old one. It’s incredibly faster and therefore happier than my old Powerbook - which was the only major problem with it. It’s also quite a bit less worn out looking, but other than that it looks almost identical.

Now I’m trying to get my head around my iPod and how to organise it. But that shouldn’t take too long. And then life will be complete … or something.

PS. Are you paying attention, Meshell? I wonder if this means I’m officially stalking you now!

Yes, it’s that time of the year. I’m completely exhausted, completely behind with everything and getting closer to being completely over it!

I’m finding myself needing to meditate in public to try to prevent myself from lashing out at people who irritate me … and needing to take more frequent breaks to stop myself from making too many silly mistakes with my work … and last week I very badly hurt my neck just doing a stretch when I woke up!

I honestly cannot recall the last time I had a day off completely. And it’s been several weeks since I had even a few hours off, other than those few hours of the day when I sleep.

So, yes, this is less an informative blog post and more of a whine! Just because I need to get it out of my system and - you guessed it - get back to work.

However, I’m dreaming of 19 December when I fly off to be with my family for Christmas and can no longer do a great deal of work. Then there will be all of lovely January to pull myself together, try to get my health back into some sort of order and generally sort my life out. Oh, except I’ll probably have a lot of jewellery needing replenishing around the place!

Anyway … there’s my whine. And now I must work.

I seem to be having a bit of an off day today, so I will blog about a few pretty things I have gathered over the last day or so which might well cheer all of us up (if you need it, of course!).

Yesterday I was walking along not far from home, minding my own business and heading for a much-needed coffee when a delivery man with a box of flowers stopped me and asked, “Do you know where this street is?”. He showed me the card on the flowers and they were … for me!!! I giggled and showed him my driver’s licence to prove that I wasn’t just making it up and he thought it was pretty funny too! They are from St James Ethics Centre to thank me for my efforts in getting their interim new website up and running.

So I’ve taken a few photos of them as they’re gorgeous and are providing a bit of inspiration for some new pieces I hope to get made this weekend. To see more of the flower photos head over to the set of them on Flickr.

And today I went into the city to get some supplies as I realised last night that I didn’t have enough silver to get me through the rather mammouth amount of making I want to do before the middle of next week.

I also decided to drop into my favourite gemstone beads supplier as in the middle of the night a while back I had a vision of a new flower piece with a very particular type of bead in the centre - a light, powdery blue disc.

I’ve not been to the gemstone place in forever - mostly because I always spend far too much money there on things I know I’ll never use! However, they had exactly what I had in mind. The beads are turquoise, so they weren’t cheap, but it was a long strand and should see me through a lot of work. I also couldn’t help but pick up some matte dyed yellow jade (a lot less expensive!).

And I was also really excited to see that at the moment they have a really interesting collection of vintage glass beads - something they’d never normally carry as they specialise in precious and semi-precious stones. Apparently they bought a lot of them from a woman in the US who was retiring and who had originally bought these beads from a bead making company which closed down in the early ’70s.

So I grabbed several short strands of the ones I most liked - in blues, reds, yellows and greens. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can come up with in terms of how to use them in my work - I have several lurking ideas. As you can see my stash of beads now looks very multi-coloured! And I like seeing the pearls and garnets and lapis lazuli all mixed in with the glass too.

Anyway, I suspect I have a very long few days of making ahead of me now that I’m surrounded by beads, a lot of silver and a whole lot of designs. I hope to have some new work to share with you soon!