lalalondon.net

I got a bill from my hosting company last night.

For £100. £100!

Some of that is for future hosting & domain registration but some of it is for going over my data allowance for the month. I can’t afford that to host a blog, it’s not a commercial website and I don’t make any money out of it at all.

So I’m going back to Blogger and I hope that you’ll follow me.

http://live-love-me.blogspot.com/

Guess what, Carly? I’m writing this whilst I’m listening to your chat with Carol Duncan. You did AWESOME, babe!

Anyway, apart from that personal shout out right there, I have an important post to make. Important because it’s not all about me for once, but about something really important. I heart my body 2010. (Ok, I lied. It is all about me, but in a really good way.)

Carly, the wonderful creator and owner of WeHeartLife.com shared a post with us last week, it was about her experience shooting an article for an Australian girls magazine and how it had affected her self confidence and her view of her own body. Now because Carly is cool and such a beautiful person (seriously, go check her out, she’s beautiful inside and out!) she has asked us to help her support body love all across the internet.

So here’s what I love about my body.

My long legs. Seriously, don’t know where they came from, because I’m from a family of short-arses, but I seem to have developed some serious Giselle Bundchen style pins. I will never complain about them and in fact, I’m usually shoving them in people’s faces anyway, because I can’t help but to show them off.

My booby-doos. They might be small but they’re mighty. Remember what Shakira said, people. People definitely wouldn’t confuse mine with mountains, but damn, I love them.

My tummy. When I moved out at 18, I put on a lot of weight and lost said weight about a year later. My tummy has a few stretch marks, but they’re just reminders of why I don’t eat KFC every day now.

I wanted to share a semi-nude photo with you all, but I chickened out in the end, but you do get this nice one which seems to show off all three points above!

Happy “I love my body” day!

My house does not feel like my home. We have been renting a three bedroom house in South East London for almost three years now and I feel like I’m yet to make a stamp on it that makes it my own.

Maybe because the room that we use as a study had previously been used as a nursery and has been decorated with a frieze of teddy bear wallpaper – lovely, yes but for me, it’s just a reminder of things I’m yet to achieve. It doesn’t help that the study is being used as an office come holding place for our overflow of clothes and you can’t see the floor 99% of the time. Our bedroom needs a coat of paint desperately and don’t get me started on the bathrooms. Two words, mold central. The kitchen is not so bad, but there is hardly any workspace.

A year ago, I suggested to G that we try to redecorate as much as we could without spending a fortune. We asked the Estate Agent if we could re-paint some of the rooms in return for a reduction on our monthly rent. At the time, our landlord was in the process of transferring the ownership of his houses to his son and told us that his son would get back to us. A year later, we got a letter saying that any painting or decorating could be done at our own cost but also had to be returned back to its original state when we moved out. We nixed the idea straight away and left it at that.

Now I’m a blogger and I read some wonderfully amazingly creative blogs where people post pictures of their house and I wonder how easy it could be just to change a few things, put up a few pictures and voila, house becomes a home. I wrote out a list of ideas and I’ll be slowly crossing them off over the next few months as money allows – we are currently saving £800 a month towards a deposit for a house in a new development in Sydney – and of course I will share them on the blog.

• Order A3 prints of wedding photos, one of me, one of G, one of us together and one of the entire bridal party.
• Organize frames for wedding photos and hang personal ones in bedroom and group ones in lounge room.
• Buy a few prints off Etsy and hang on walls in spare rooms – well the office/study/junk room until our housemate moves out.
• Re-organize bedroom, sort out bed linen and buy new duvet and pillows.
• Work out how the heck to get rid of all of the mold in the bathrooms and then look at storage options for en-suite.
• Clean out bookshelves and re-arrange living/dining room.
• Clean out kitchen and re-assess what we really need in regards to crockery, cutlery and other assorted kitchen junk. Buy a new set of dishes, plates and more glasses (why the heck do I manage to break so many of those darn things!)

A big list and a pricy one too, with all of the purchases I’d like to make. I think it’s time to start thinking about asking for gift vouchers for Christmas for John Lewis and Marks & Spencer!

Are you renting a house and hate the way it looks or feels? I’d love some advise from those who have re-decorated rental properties on the cheap without painting or serious decorating being done.

All images from ApartmentTherapy.com.

When I go to bed at night, it usually takes a few minutes for me to relax and settle down and I usually have what seems like a thousand thoughts all running through my brain, trying to keep me from sleeping. Lately, they’ve mostly been about work but occasionally they might be about something I’d like to write about in this blog. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to think to myself, “well I’ll just write that up in Word tomorrow at lunchtime” and then by the time morning comes, the thought and the prompt to post has just disappeared into the ether.

Sometimes, when I’m at work, I’ll be on a cigarette break and I’ll think of something and I’ll try to write a note in my phone to prompt me for when I get home. Usually I forget about the note and then weeks later, I’ll find a bunch of notes that seem cryptically impossible to understand.

So – the point of this? I have a bad memory and I’m a bad, bad blogger!

Anyway, I did actually have a really good thought this morning and I remembered to write it down. In fact, I even had five minutes spare to think about what I wanted to say and draft a post – it’s all about Privacy and the blogging world.

When I started blogging, many years ago on Livejournal, I used to write about my life, warts and all. I used to update every two or three days and I had a wonderful little community of friends there – many of them who still blog either at LJ or on their own site to this day. Because Livejournal has some wonderful security features, I felt like I could share a lot more than what I do here at LLN.net, for instance, I used to call G by his full name and I even gave out my mobile number to my friends there – it was all so easy when I had full control over who could and couldn’t see my entries.

But now I’m in the public domain.

I’ve already broken my original rules of blogging in public: no identifying photos of either my husband or I and no mentioning my full name.

I know a lot of bloggers out there are now turning back the clock on revealing their personal details – one blogger who originally had a public Facebook profile is now setting hers to private and setting up a Facebook profile for her website, another is getting rid of her domain all together and re-doing it – basically creating a new online identity, but can these people undo everything they’ve made public in the past? I’ve contemplated changing everything around here to remove my name and my personal photos, but it all seems like a bit of hard work if I pledge not to blog so personally anymore.

Is any personal information sacred anymore? Are you worried about the wrong hands getting a hold of your personal information that you put out there on the internet? If you’re a parent, do you worry about posting photos of your kids online for anyone to see? If you’re not a parent, what do you think about photos that clearly identify you?

Dear Blog,

I have really been neglecting you, haven’t I? The combination of long hours at a new job and not really wanting to log on to the computer is pretty much stopping me from even wanting to log in and check my site stats.

I promise to try harder, but you know I’m a bit of fair weather friend at times.

Love Jade

So apart from neglecting this place, I’ve been shopping.

I bought an Apple TV box for G. He wanted one and wouldn’t have bought it himself, so I just paid for it whilst he stood there with a look of shock on his face. I hooked it up and now I can blog or play my games on the laptop whilst he is watching his stupid Science Fiction shows instead of having the laptop hooked up directly to the TV and me sitting around with a filthy look on my face because I’ve got nothing to do. (I did try to convince him to let me buy my MacBook Pro – still haven’t got it, don’t think I will. At least I did try to buy a new battery for this one because it’s as dead as a doornail, but they didn’t have any in stock. Damn old computers!)

Tonight we are going to a friend’s house for dinner and tomorrow we will lie in and laze about the house.

What are you doing this weekend?