Recently I went to meet a new group of people who I’d had contact with through the internet but had never met face to face.  Suddenly I was a little fish in a big pond.  The people around me were the big fish and this was their little pond.  I felt like a fish out of water!

It can be quite disconcerting to find yourself in these situations.  You can become very shy and unassuming, when you are normally very confident.

It is important to recognise that all the other people you meet may be feeling the same way as you.  They may not be as confident as they appear.  And you can appear more confident than you are feeling.  Take a deep breath and know that they are just people, just like you.

Enjoy the journey.

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And also for jocular, jocund, jovial – all having a similar meaning.  J is also for joy.  And J is for jelly…I like J words.

Charles Dickens once wrote ‘there might be some credit in being jolly’. ( The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 5).  How right he was.

Having a jolly disposition changes the way we see life.  It changes the way we respond to the things around us, both good and bad.  We have a choice about whether we approach things with a jolly attitude or not.  Choosing to be jolly is good for your soul, and things won’t drag you down so much.  Limitations only live in our mind, we are strong enough to choose our attitude towards everything.  We receive back what we put out.

If we only realised how powerful our thoughts and attitude are we would never be negative, never have a negative thought, we would control those times when we just don’t feel like being jolly.

Keep your feet on the ground, your thoughts at lofty heights, and always be jolly.

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Having had a new baby enter the family a short while ago, one who lives some distance away and has a mother (my niece) who updates her Facebook entries regularly, I find myself searching for the little darling’s latest photo, news of her developments, health, interests and stories about funny little things she does!

Of course all of these happenings are well documented on Facebook and I can go to my niece’s page and see everything long after it has happened…but I want to be the first to comment, to offer encouragement, to coo and ooh and generally be a GREAT Auntie and great-Auntie!

So, I am spending far too much time on Facebook and not enought time focussing.  Sorry if you have noticed my increasingly diminishing number of blog and forum visits.  I will try harder!

Must just go and check if there’s any new news!  (Tautology if I ever saw it!)

Enjoy the journey.

January in the UK is tax payment month.  I visited my accountant and was horrified when she told me how much tax I had to pay – by the end of the month!  I simply did not have enough money put away.  The reason was that my tax liability had just notched me up enough to have to pay next year’s tax in advance!  Effectively this doubled my tax liability this year.

Once I’d calmed down I telephoned the tax office and told them I could not pay.  They agreed to a monthly payment over ten months, but it was still far more than I could afford, however I had no other choice, so agreed to this payment plan deciding very positively that something would happen and I would somehow find the extra money each month (almost £500 extra!).

One week later I got a letter from the accountant.  They had made an error in the numbers and my tax liability was reduced by £1,000.  Phew, I thought, that makes a huge difference, I’ll telephone the tax office and get the payment plan adjusted.

On the same day I contacted my electricity company because I’d had a letter requesting a meter reading as they hadn’t caught me in last time they called.  I gave the lady my reading and she told me there was no recorded reading since April 2009.  I know I have phoned readings through on their automated line, indeed I did one on my return from the USA last September.  Anyway they didn’t have it.  No problem, now they have an up to date reading.  I asked if I would have a deficit on my account recognising they may have underestimated on the past few bills.  She said she’d work it out, then came back telling me she had some good news.  I thought that probably meant a small credit balance, how lovely!

I then nearly fell off my chair when she said my account was £2,652 in credit!  I had been overpaying for two years!  She said she would refund the money immediately.  With the £1,000 mistake it meant I could pay my tax bill in full!  So on the last day of January, the last possible day I could pay, I telephoned the tax office and gave them the good news.  And I saved myself the interest they would have charged too!

So, good luck?  Coincidence?  Divine Providence?  Fate?  Am I destined to be lucky the whole of my life?  I do hope so!  I hope you are lucky too.

Enjoy the journey.

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The reality is that the flight to the USA was very reasonable, and having checked again and again they seem to be pretty much the same, month in, month out.  The actual cost, including insurance and taxes, was way less than £500 – and I have spent that on a package trip to Barcelona before now.

Of course that wasn’t the only cost, and I managed to barter some freebies to make it affordable for me.  I have a friend who does not have a car currently.  I offered her the use of my car for the three weeks I was away if she could take me to and from the airport.  I saved the parking fees and she paid the petrol in return for the car loan.  She was over the moon with the deal!

I bartered accomodation in the USA with an American friend who has just had her return visit here.  Staying with someone severely cuts the costs.  All the stories you hear about everything being very much cheaper in the USA is entirely true – we ate our main meal out most days and paid less than $5 in many of the cases, and never more than $10.  I didn’t take very much spending money, less than £200 for the three weeks.  My spending money came from not drinking lattes out every day before I went!  Every time I didn’t have one I saved the money in a pot.  And I made sandwiches at home for lunches instead of buying one from the deli.  Another large saving.

It’s the same with everything in life.  We can just assume we can’t afford it, or we can work to make it happen, compromising where we can, bartering and sharing.  Remember that in your Internet business too.  Use free information where you can, join a good quality membership site for a small monthly fee and download as much content and tutoring as you need.

I use Keith Alston’s Resale Rights for You as I find his content very good value and there is so much choice.  He is always very willing to help you out and will add content requested if there is something in particular you require.  Pop over and have a look, and remember, work to make your dreams happen – you can do it!

Enjoy the journey.

We have a small pond already, and each year the fish increase in numbers and the babies grow ever bigger.  It definitely was time for a larger pond as we lost two of the biggest fish last year in the humid weather.  We were very sad about it and know that if we had increased the size of the pond earlier it may not have happened.

So we decided to set to a couple of weeks ago and went to the reclaimation yard to buy a dozen garden sleepers.  They arrived the same day, which was incredible service.

Our garden is a bit up and down and mostly field grass so the ground needed to be levelled first so we could get the base down for the sleepers to sit on.  We have built a ‘box’ 3 sleepers high, and the pond sits in the middle.  The whole structure is 8 feet square and we have a shaped moulded pond inside it.  Once it is full of soil we will plant alpines around the edge between the pond and the sleepers.

At the moment, after much hard work, we are at the stage where the box is built and level (always a hard part I find) and the pond is inset into the ground inside the box.  We now need to fill the box with half sand then soil and compost for the plants.  After that we need to dig out the electric wire that leads to the old pond and re-route it to the new pond position for the pump to be set up.  Transfering the fish will be quite a long job as the water needs to be right before we do that.

But then our fish will have a new, bigger home!

Enjoy the journey.

One other thing I have been doing for quite some time now is selling oil lamp glassware on ebay.  I sell boxes of 4 oil lamp chimneys for Duplex burners.  The majority of other sellers are offering single chimneys and they are charging almost £10 for each single chimney plus around £5 extra for postage and packing.

The boxes of 4 I sell are £20 with £2.99 postage and packing so I have offered a really good deal.  Occassionally I get someone asking for just the one chimney but I only sell them in packs of 4.  The reason for this is because the crates of chimneys I get come packed in 4′s in double wall cartons, so all I do is pop some ‘fragile’ tape around them, write the address on the front and go to the post office.  The postage second class costs just £2.70 and the other 29p pays for the tape and pens and shoe leather!

This week I received the latest delivery of 2,000 chimneys.  The company that make them have been bought out by someone else and the new owners have changed the packaging!  Clearly in order to save money they now pack the 4′s in single wall cartons.  This is a tragedy for me as I can no longer put them straight back into the post.  Single wall cartons simply are not strong enough for our postal service, especially when the contents are glassware.  Quel dommage!

So now I have to review my whole system as no-one makes boxes the size I need for 4 chimneys.  Custom made cartons are way too expensive.  And the whole thing is now much more complicated in terms of time as I have to repack every box of chimneys I send out.  A big alteration I had not banked on.  I’m sure it will be fine, I have found a box I can get them into safely but I will now have to buy extra packing too.

Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you hoped!

Enjoy the journey.

‘Two friends were walking through the desert.  During some point of the journey they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other in the face.

The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything wrote in the sand:

“Today my best friend slapped me in the face”.

They kept on walking until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath.  The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but the friend saved him.

After he recovered from the near drowning he wrote on a stone:

“Today my best friend saved my life”.

The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him “after I hurt you, you wrote in the sand, and now you write on a stone.  Why?”

The friend replied “when someone hurts us we should write it down in sand where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away.  But when someone does something good for us we must engrave it in stone where no wind can erase it”.

Learn to write your hurts in the sand and to carve your benefits in stone.

They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.

Do not value the things you have in your life, but value who you have in your life.’

One of my great friends, John McNally, has written about how he maintains connections with those important people in his life.  You can read his blog post about it here.

Enjoy the journey.

So you are probably already wondering what this post is about.  I will start with the viagra tale.  Akismet stopped the longest spam comment I’ve had to date yesterday.  I had to scroll down three times just to get to the delete button.  Every single line of the comment was an advert for viagra.  Having had to close an email account in the past because of the enormous amount of spam emails I got advertising this stuff I was not happy to see the spam comment on my blog!  So, to all you viagra spammers, I do not need viagra!

So back to the topic of the blog.  Interesting how the title kind of fits in with the alternative topic!  It doesn’t mean what you might be thinking though!

I put on my best bib and tucker last night for the service at the church I attend.  The reason I did that is because the night before I was at a karaoke party with some of my fellow church attenders and yes, you guessed, I sang ‘I’m a Barbie Girl’!  (The song was picked by someone else, I hasten to add!)

They threatened to tease me mercilously about it at church and I decided I would go in looking my best to throw them off track.  I also decided that it would help to ensure everyone else did not see me as a ‘Barbie Girl’ type!  If you want to read more about dressing to impress take a peek at Susan Young’s blog here, and in particular her posts on how to dress to impress for women and men.

As it happened my friends did not turn up at church so I had the glory of announcing to everyone that I had sung ‘I’m a Barbie Girl’ so that if they do mention it, everyone knows they heard it from me first!

Two points I wish to finish with.  Firstly, if you ever want to leave a positive impression after a party DON’T sing ‘I’m a Barbie Girl’, and secondly, if you do make an idiot of yourself somewhere and are worried about others finding out, avoid the fireworks and tell everyone first!

Enjoy the journey.