Coca-cola used to have cocaine in it.

Well, Red Bull still does, apparently. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1900849,00.html

I am doing the wardrobe thing - just yanked everything out of drawers and wardrobe and put it in a pile in the living room. All I can say is HOLY SHIT.

I could bury myself in this pile. No kidding.

Looked up 'capsule wardrobe' items, and one listed velvet pants. Velvet pants are not coming anywhere near me, thank you.

How is it even possible to acquire so many clothes when I never go clothes shopping????

This is a new dreamwidth journal. It's supposed to x-post to lj, so I'm testing it out.

Cheers to Jake!

"The U.K. Independence Party, which seeks withdrawal from the EU, took second place with about 17%. For the first time, the far-right, anti-immigration British National Party picked up two seats in the European Parliament." - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124444700376593655.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I don't tend to think of countries as having borders, but rather humanity shifting and changing like the landscape. Trees do not abruptly turn to desert, and one nationality does not abruptly switch to another. Sure, we are an island, but we are an island with a long history of both invasion and colonism. At some point, somewhere, we were all immigrants.

We seize hold of land and proclaim it to be ours, we refuse hospitality and welcome to those who would come here after us. Any person who would claim entry will be reduced to less than a person, will become a suspect, an enemy, a draining parasite. We forget that we thrive on trade, change, exchange, barter. We forget that every person who comes here brings more than just a mouth to feed - they bring stories, ideas, skills, talents, histories.

When my now-husband was detained at Gatwick, I felt that massive, powerful, anonymous apparatus that sits in our airports and ports and tracks everything that enters. The only positive thing that you can bring is a tourists money, and the promise of making it quick.

When I entered the USA, and had my bags searched, my computer ransacked, when the gifts my friends had given to me were questioned and mocked, when I was 'given a second chance' despite having done no wrong in the first place I felt the immense power that authority has, how irrational and impervious it is to normal human empathy and care.

The hate people have right now is rooted in fear. Maybe the far-right can turn this economy around, by controlling and counting everything, by cutting all support for those at the bottom of the rung, by laying aside the costly emotions like sympathy and love and tolerance. But the price of that is not counted in money, and is a loss of everything that matters.

Fear and ignorance and a need for a them and us. Forget the silences for all those who died in the war against fascism, forget the piles of starved and gassed bodies of a right wing adminsitration that did nothing except carry its ideology to the logical end. Let anyone who is not a strong, whole, white man be used and abused for the furtherance of the strong, whole, white man. Because, in the end, all that ever seems to matter is how much power you can clutch for yourself, and how much higher you seem to rise when you grind everyone else down into the dirt.

I'm watching the elections map, and noting a definite pre-dominance of blue.

Directions:
- Go to Google image search.
- Type in your answer to each question.
- Choose a picture from the first page.
- Use this website to make your collage.
- Save the image for use in this note.

( Here's mine... )

.... change the way we think.

GOALS

1. Have £2600 Emergency Fund saved by December.
2. Complete the Exercise Ladder EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT SEVENTY FIVE YEARS GODDAMN IT SUZIE.


LESSER GOALS

1. Learn how to bake bread and do it every Sunday.
2. Grow a tomato plant in a hanging basket.
3. Get some templates designed and start selling them.
4. Visit a far-away friend every two months.


THE END

I just read the Conservapedia entry on Obama.

There is a wood about 5 miles away from Towcester where we used to go for walks when I was younger. I was trying to figure out a way to get there without a car.

Five miles is not far to walk. But it appears that you need to cross the A43 dual carriageway to get there.

Someone needs to make a Google Maps that is actually useful for walkers.

I wouldn't get along with e-books because:

I treat them really badly. I drop them in the bath, I spill tea on them, I break the spines, I leave them half-finished in dusty, damp places for days on end because I started another book in the meantime. Books are forgiving. Crinkled pages and brown stains do not render them inoperable. Do this to an e-book reader, and you are looking at a substantial chunk of change that you just lost. I also forget aout them and leave them in public places. People tend to ignore a tatty copy of The Stranger. They don't tend to ignore a Kindle.

I can get paperbacks from a charity shop for around 50p - £2, and return them when I'm done. In this way, I support various charities, and get a cheap read.

I always wanted a library - a cozy room dedicated entirely to books and reading. The smell, texture, and the physical act of walking between the shelves matters to me. E-books reduce clutter, but - considering I am mainly an anti-clutter minimalist - I don't think of books as clutter. Rather, I think of them as a physical representation of many places I have been - if only in my head.

Digital media is rife with copyright protection, proprietary formats, and inevitably becomes obsolete. Books will last for my entire lifetime, and possibly several more lifetimes. I do not have to worry about Sony going out of business, or reformatting .kindle files to .microsoft files.

Hard-drive failure means the loss of all e-books, more or less instantly. Bye bye 'thousands of books in my pocket'. Meanwhile, physical books will survive anything except fire or flood. I've experienced two hard-drive failures in the 9 years I've owned a computer. I've never experienced a fire or flood.

Having said all that, I can see the place for e-books for some people. I think they would be wonderful for non-linear texts that need to be frequently revised and updated (e.g. non-fiction) - being able to carry around wikipedia with me would rock. However, with wireless internet becoming more common, and most electronic devices able to access the internet, we pretty much already can carry around wikipedia with us.

For around the past 3 months I have been educating myself on money.

It started slowly, with a couple of Finance blogs here and there, mainly US based, and a return to Cha-Ching, my money accounting tool to track where all my money goes.

These past few weeks, however, it's been something I've lived and breathed. Personal finance, mainly, by a wide variety of authors and viewpoints.

Personal finance is simple, really. Spend less than you earn. Track where your money goes. Have a budget. Have savings goals. Have an emergency fund. Know what you want from your financial situation in the short, medium, and long term.

Like healthy eating, doing your homework on time, or not playing WoW for 12 hours a day is simple.

Understanding the abstract concept is not the same as being internally motivated. Buying stuff is way too easy, and what can it hurt to buy this or that or grab lunch from a coffee shop or move into an apartment that's only a few pounds above what we can comfortably afford?

I don't regret any of the monetary decisions I've made; not the overly expensive flat, nor the plane tickets and visa fees. Without them, I wouldn't have learned some important financial lessons that you cannot learn from a book.

Namely, that the line of credit can run out.

If Nationwide had allowed me to increase my overdraft limit, I would have done it, because there was a point where I had no money, an upcoming rent bill, and no source of income equal to my outgoings. Luckily, I got a job and for about a month I worked 7 days a week at both my old and new job, whilst simultaneously working on my business. I was able to recoup some ground and some breathing room.

In order to take control of my finances, I have had to take control of my life. It is not possible to run out of food mid-week and have to make an impulse trip to the supermarket, or worse, the chinese. It is not possible to 'forget' to pack a lunch, and instead buy a sandwich for £3 from the van. It is not possible to rent movies from blockbuster when the question of how to spend the evening arises.

So; meal-plans and home cooking. Prep-work. Packed lunches. Free hobbies, like walking by the river, or working-out to a free internet video. Re-reading old books. Sex. Home baking. Repairing torn clothes.

And now, I do have a clearer idea of what money is, for me, of what it means. Of how much time is really worth, and of how little value the Stuff around us is.

Uuuuh, yeah. This is what I do for fun.

I coloured it by the way - don't actually know who did the line-art, but I like it.

Umm, lurid purple backgrounds for the win.

Matterhorn Languages are a service provider for German and English language tuition, translation services and also cultural training.

The owner is fantastic, I really like her.

I didn't do the layout, I just transferred her old layout into Wordpress and jigged it up a bit.

I Saturday, my play-day. So I'm going to go have a long bath and eat some toast, then pack up my camer and go for a walk.

See ya later, aligator.