Wednes Day Links

Daffodil arrives too early. Awkward.

Despite the fact I saw a daffodil in the garden yesterday, it is still the middle of Winter here in Auckland, New Zealand.

You folks who have extreme seasons will think I'm a complete pansy for thinking what we experience any kind of hardship during our Winter months, especially when compared with places that have snow drifts and frozen water pipes and electricity black outs and snow days and low sunlight exposure etc, but we didn't get our reputation for being whiny cry babies in Auckland for no reason. We're delicate little flowers and we live here because we couldn't survive in harsher conditions. 

While there is probably fewer cases of Seasonal Affective Disorder in this town, it's still quite depressing being stuck in an office during the short days of this season, and today it's particularly cold, so we may still need some help getting through it.

Today's Wednes Day Links are dedicated to helping you beat the Winter Blues if that is what you need. And maybe if it's Summer where you are, you can reverse all the advice?

PRO YOGA TIP: if it's super cold where you are yogaring: light more candles.

The wound of Eve's office chair

Look just calm down, will you?

It's not every day you get to drive home at lunch time - voiding your 'early bird' parking status - to shower and change before coming back to work to clean up the chair you just bled all over, is it? If you just stay calm, no one will even notice you are wearing different clothes when you get back to work after lunch, will they? Have they? No.

No, they didn't so everything's going to be okay. OK?

Yes I know that's gross. And if you're a work colleague don't let me catch you surreptitiously walking past my work station to inspect the standard of my stain removal skills because, let me tell you, that's way weirder than this blog post.

In a lifetime of regular-as-clockwork menstrual cycles (you're going there?), I have entered the world of peri-menopause (yep, here we are). For those of you who don't know what that is, peri-menopause are the twilight years of a woman's reproductive abilities. Though some might argue (Yes, Dr Denis?) that my twilight started half a dozen years ago ("See my hand, Michelle? Five fingers. You know what that represents? The five viable eggs you may have left. If you're lucky.") but I digress.

We "women of a certain age" experience a wonderful bunch of physical changes, pretty much like an anti-adolesence, but without the perky tits. And like an adolescent awaking to the dawn of their sexual maturity, our twilight years see us start growing hair in unusual places like we did way back then. Unfortunately at our age, it's not a soft downy fur that is growing under my arms, but stubby, entrenched whiskers sticking out of my chin. Not to mention the long, unruly eyebrows curling their grey way across my brow either which, by the way, causes me the most consternation of all my time-of-life changes put together.

But look at me, I am the model of serenity. My calm is becalmed in a sea of tranquility. Sitting here sprouting hairs and spoiling chairs with the resignation of age awaiting the lovely onslaught of senility. Some days, it just can't come fast enough.