Acupuncture Angel

I haven’t been up to much lately.  With low energy levels from my detox and an even lower immune system, I haven’t had the energy to do anything.  I had acupuncture twice this week to help my body process the toxins, as my poor over worked organs were taking a hammering and the toxins were manifesting in awful ways, with skin rashes, spots, heat and itchiness.  AWFUL! 

I rang Kylie in a panic, was there anything she could do to make me purrrty again?  It’s great to go to someone that heals people in a way that goes beyond surface symptoms, where they get a thorough background to understand how best to help you.  It’s an experience poles apart from dealing with doctors in western medicine, where they prescribe, prescribe, prescribe.  The holistic approach is definitely my preferred way on the road to healing and wellness.

As Kylie went around my body putting needles in, I felt a dull sensation by some key spots.  They were the points that had a direct correlation to my kidneys, which were over burdened with toxins from my detox.  I went in to see Kylie with a hot swollen mess of a face, which was itchy and sore.  It had been like this for 3 days, with no sign that it was improving.  By the next morning the heat had dissipated and the swelling had gone down.  I felt 1000% better and the improvements continued after my second treatment throughout the rest of the week.

Kylie Box is an acupuncture angel and I’d totally recommend her services to anyone.  She works with stress and fertility issues, but there are many ailments that can be addressed with the magical little healing needles. 

Kylie Box  (Acupuncture Angel)  kylie@acupuncture-uk.com

Precious

I went to the Electric with Koi-lee on Friday night.  I love the Electric.  The foot stools, the seats, the space and the bits in between the seats where you can put your drinks and scooby snacks.

We saw Precious and it was one of the most gut wrenching movies I’ve ever seen. It was shocking in a ‘oh my god I can’t believe some people live like that’ sort of way.  A similar reaction as the one I had when I saw Once Were Warriors.  A totally different movie though.  It’s about Precious, who is a morbidly obese, illiterate girl who is pregnant with her second baby, by her father.  As well as incest she also has to deal with her mother, who is actually jealous of the fact she is having a baby with ‘her man’ and takes every opportunity to belittle and humiliate her.  One particular rant finished with “I wish I’d aborted you.”  She was quite a despicable character and Mo’Nique the actress played her superbly.  She just won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for her role.

The acting wasn’t overplayed and felt totally authentic.  Mariah Carey makes an appearance as a dowdy social worker who tries to help Precious and there is no sense of the musical diva about her at all.  Lenny Kravitz is John the nurse and he is smoking hot.  Ms Rain ,the ABC teacher, who steps in and gives Precious some genuine encouragement and support also gave a brilliant performance.  Actually there wasn’t a duff note in the whole thing, apart from the fact that the sound boom kept entering the picture.  Seriously, that is like film making 101, keep the boom out of shot.

I felt quite disturbed after watching this.  Not just for the people in the movie, but for the fact that there are some girls out there, trapped in similar circumstances with seemingly no way out.  Destined to repeat the cycle.

Sometimes we just don’t know how lucky we are.

Beer then?

We celebrated B’s birthday in the Chamberlayne pub in Kensal Rise on Sunday afternoon.  It was a lovely bunch of people and two of the cutest dogs, Oscar and Freddie. 

Sarah and Oscar, Naz and Freddie

A few people were intrigued about my new regime and were surprised that I’m not drinking for a whole year.  I seriously think I’d have had less of a response from everyone if I told them I’d developed a smack habit. 

The conversation with B and D the night before went something like this…

“So you’re not drinking for a WHOLE YEAR?!”

“Yep, that’s right”

“What about vodka?”

“Nope.”

“Whiskey?”

“Ew, I don’t like whiskey anyway.”

“Gin?”

“Gin makes me mental and I’m actually ok with not drinking.”

Cue a look of disbelief…  “BUT you’ll have to find a drink for S and B’s wedding or you just won’t enjoy it.”

OH MY GOD!

So back at lunch now and I was recounting this story to Benny who was sitting opposite me.  My food arrived, a lovely roast sirloin, (with no gravy or yorkshire pudding).  I had a few bites and then we did a happy birthday cheers to B, the birthday girl.  Then calamity struck and glasses just started toppling over on our side of the table.  Benny’s beer spilled into my plate and on to my food.  “Oh no, I can’t drink beer either” I exclaimed.  Benny kicked into action and rustled me up some more food and all was well in the world again.  I’m still a happy teetotaller.

Thanks for a lovely afternoon B, many happy returns sweets xx

I think she likes it

Birthday Balloons

Storybook Wolf Scandal

The Storybook Wolf

Well well, there’s been some drama down at the Natural History Museum over the last few days!  The winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year is a fraud!  Jose, you cheeky little devil, you can’t go off and hire Ossie the tame wolf from a local park and set up your own staged photograph.  It’s not WILDlife now is it?  Hardly playing fair with all of the other contestants mmmm?

Whatever next, train your goldfish to jump through hoops and pretend it’s a dolphin?  Poor show José, you should be ashamed of yourself, taking the title from some other deserving photographer who busted their hump to get their shots.  José gets a life ban from the competition and a generous heaping of shame from everyone else.

Hello my name is Little Miss Sunshine and I am a sugar addict

I’ve been clean for 15 days now (bar that little incident with the hash browns) and am feeling great.  It’s not just that I’m not mindlessly grazing on peanut M&M’s anymore or that I’m giving Haribo sweets a wide berth… do you know how much sugar is hidden in packaged foods?  Who would have known that they sneak it in to so many things, seriously – hash browns! 

So my 360 degree switch change on my diet has been weirdly easy.  I’d been expecting to hang around outside Patisserie Valerie with my nose pressed against the window looking longingly at the pretty cakes.  Or reaching for a can of coke at 4pm in the afternoon or settling down to a movie craving a big fat glass of merlot.  But no, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

As well as sugar I’ve discarded alcohol, white junky refined carbs, anything yeasty, anything smoked or fermented and fruit.  Not that fruit isn’t healthy because it is and I love it – but because it doesn’t fit into the sugar free regime. 

I’ll be on this healthy path for a year and keeping it in perspective that I’m only a few weeks into my regime, (and haven’t been to the pub with my friends yet) I’m faring rather well. 

Just in case I get a mad craving to stuff my face full of jaffa cakes I’ll take inspiration from my slightly adapted version of the serenity prayer

 

Universe grant me the self control
not to stuff my face full of cream cakes; 
willpower to stay away from the sweets aisle;
and wisdom to embrace the healthy food difference.

 

Blue Monday

So today is meant to be the most depressing day of the year.  Psychologists have come to this conclusion by considering these factors; weather, debt, time since Christmas, time since failing our New Year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and the feeling of a need to take action.

Well, apart from the low motivational levels I hit all other five factors and I feel on top of the world!  Your life is what you make it and I prefer mine with a double helping of happy please. 

I’m taking action to get myself into some balmy sunshiney weather, with good food and good friends.  The anticipation of an exciting holiday is delicious and I’ve been researching flights and hotels for my San Francisco and Mexico trip in April.  The promise of much needed sun is brightening up my days already.  Arriba Arriba!

Fender Bender

I loved the ‘man logic’ of the guy that ran into the back of a car I was in on Saturday.  He was insisting to his girlfriend that he hadn’t been driving too close to us.  Welllllll, the fact that your front fender is buried into our back wheel suggests otherwise my friend.

He also asked us what we’d done to cause it.  Um, our car was parked on the side of the road.  Like stationary.  Not moving.  You’ve no one to blame but yourself.  I hate it when that happens.

Nine

Isn’t it ironic that the storyline for this movie is about a director who doesn’t have a script and is looking for inspiration.  Well the whole movie felt uninspired!  It’s based on the book written by Arthur Kopit, which is derived fron an Italian play, which was (stay with me people) inspired by Federico Fellini’s autobiographical film called 8 1/2.

The result of all of this plot ‘inspiration’ is a distinctly average movie, which is surprising given the stellar cast line up.  Not to say that there weren’t good performances, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson and Penelope Cruz were all excellent.  In particular, Kate Hudson and Penelope Cruz gave scorching performances in their sexy musical numbers.  

The rest of the story is less satisfying, with deep soul searching of a man facing a mid life crisis.  I was rolling my eyes in the theatre and couldn’t wait for the over dramatised emotion to reach it’s final conclusion. 

With the director from Chicago at the helm I expected something as sharp and sassy, but instead I got a giant heaping of schmaltz.

The Ugly Side of Christmas

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
In beauty green will always grow
Through summer sun and winter snow.
Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas tree,
You are the tree most loved!
How often you give us delight
In brightly shining Christmas light!
Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas tree,
You are the tree most loved!

Until January and then you’re out on your arse and I never want to see you again.  You big, ‘take up the whole living room’ messy tree that sheds pine needles all over my carpet. Take that!  I’m kicking you to the kerb you good for nothing Christmas tree.

Christmas Tree Graveyard

Domestic Goddess Unleashed

For the last couple of years I’ve been a heat and eat kind of girl.  An open packet and mix with another packet kind of cook.  Well aside from dinner parties, when I unleash the inner domestic goddess.  There was no dinner party this weekend, but the domestic goddess made an appearance in aid of my new healthy eating regime. 

I’m on a strict anti allergy diet which has restricted a few of my favourite foods.  Alcohol is also on the naughty list, but after my 2 day violent hangover on New Years Day I still don’t miss it.  Actually the list of foods I can’t eat is longer than what I can, so I’ll just cut to what I cooked up this weekend.

I made some roast almond butter, cashew nut butter (both delicious spread on celery and oat cakes), chicken stock, chicken soup, buckwheat pancakes and lemon curd.  Lemon curd is SOOO easy to make, mouth puckeringly sour without sugar (that’s on the restricted substance list) but delicious none the less.  I layered it on my buckwheat pancakes, added a generous spread of greek yoghurt and sprinkled coconut on the top. 

So I’m one week in to my new regime and I don’t feel deprived at all – with food like this how can I?

Buckwheat Pancake Stack w/ Lemon Curd, Yoghurt and Coconut

London Snow

Well the burbs might be snowed in, but we’d need a fair amount of snow in London Town for that to happen.  It hasn’t stopped some people cleaning out supermarket shelves, JUST in case there is a blizzard.  I have to confess at first I was confused when news reports came in that kitty litter was running low everywhere.  I found it odd that people would stock up on kitty litter for their kitty litter trays in case they were snowed in.  Duh!

Scare mongering in the media is so crazy.  Every single day is dominated by the snow and how gas supplies are low, grit supplies are low, food supplies won’t be able to truck on through and we’ll all die a slow, cold, miserable death.  Enough already!

The snow makes my park look really pretty.  We need more though as there are too many footprints in it and some of it’s a little bit dirty.  Don’t buy into the media hype, go sledging! 

It’s not quite as impressive as the snow dump from last year which you can see below.  Now that’s snow.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

After seeing such extraordinary shots in last year’s show I couldn’t wait to go back and see this one.  Again, the standard was excellent and I still can’t get over how much patience and skill the photographers have to get the perfect shot.  Some of the entrants are children as young as ten. 

Going to the exhibition made me appreciate my little snappy snap Canon Ixus 200IS even more.  I was a little bit naughty and put it to good use in the gallery.  I’ve only just noticed that I didn’t have to be all secret agent, quickly taking my photos without the attendants catching me, as there is an online gallery on the Natural History Museum site.  I did quite enjoy my covert spy activity though and think I’d make a sterling secret agent.

~ Overall Winner ~ The Storybook Wolf by José Luis Rodriguez

Ice Fox by Henrik Lund

Flight of the Locust by Chris van Rooyen

White Water Fishing by Eric Lefranc

Respect by Igor Shpilenok

These two monkey ones are my favourites.  I’ve always been a big fan of monkeys and love the human expressions on their faces.

Borneo Baby by Brian Matthews

Water Fight by Andrew Forsyth

The exhibition is on until the 11th of April 2010, get your tickets here.

Glimpses of London

I was wandering around in the FR-EEEEZING cold on Sunday after I’d been to the Tate Modern and snapped off these shots of London.  I’m so lucky to live in such a fabulous city and even with my fingers nearly falling off from the cold I took a moment to appreciate the beautiful city scape, the cultural diversity and the fact that you could never be bored in London.  Cold yes, bored no.

The Millenium Bridge

St Pauls Cathedral bathed in sunlight

London Eye at Twilight

London Sunset

I got to appreciate London even more on the tube journey home when we had a tube driver who was a real London character.  He sounded slightly frustrated with how his day was turning out.

Sorry folks for the unscheduled stop at this station.  The train isn’t meant to be stopping here but the system that updates all the platforms was second hand in 1976 and it has a big reset button on it that no one seems to know how to use.  The last person that knew died in 1994 so we’ll hold up here until someone can figure it out.

Happy New Year!

Come on down Twenty Ten!

Thank god Christmas and New Year are over.  I always find the expectation that you have to have a good time over the holiday season slightly irritating.  Not to say that I didn’t have a wonderful time, but I’m happy it’s back to business as usual.  No more tinsel, no more carols and no more forced merriment. 

I housesat for Mr and Mrs J for ten days and was quite happy to see the back of their TV too.  DVD boxsets are the way forward, who would even pay their broadcasting fees and Sky bills with the absolute crap that you get shown.  Hundreds of channels and nothing to watch.  

Next year I’m going to be somewhere hot for Christmas and New Years and next year I’m not going to drink so much.  I’ve been laid up for two days with a hangover.  Yesterday I thought I was going to die.  Today it just feels like a hangover and I’m happy with the progress I’ve made since this morning, when even watching people drinking on TV made me feel nauseous.

2010 (Me and Koi-lee are  saying Twenty Ten as it sounds more futuristic) feels full of promise and I have big plans for the coming year.  I’m not going to call them resolutions as no one ever really sticks to those and these plans had been in the pipeline since before New Years anyway.  I couldn’t have thought of them yesterday or today as my brain capacity has equalled that of an amoeba.

Little Miss Sunshine’s Plans for 2010

1. Improve my diet and health (from Monday)

2. Pay off all my debt (which I’ve had since I was old enough to get credit).

3. Start saving (which I’ve never done and it will make me feel quite grown up).

4. Move into my own flat (although I did miss Dolce and was happy to have her arrive home again today.  Not only because I could whinge to someone about how terrible I felt either, but her sympthy was gratefully received).

5. Work super hard and double my take home pay (these two will go hand in hand and also tie in quite nicely with the debt being paid off and my savings starting – woo hoo!)

6. Go to San Francisco, Mexico, India and wherever N and F plan to have their wedding.

7. Practise yoga twice a week and do at least 2 lots of cardio (aiming low on the cardio, I really mean 3 but am saying 2 as that’s what I’m more likely to stick to).

8. Write.  Every single day.  At least 3 pages.  (except for today as I am still feeling rather ill and have had to be semi  sedated with the whole series of 30 Rock and Outrageous Fortune).

9) Find love, luck, laughter and prosperity wherever I turn.

2010 is going to be the year that Little Miss Sunshine has it all.  Hope it’s true for you too.  Cheers (with a very non alcoholic drink) to a fabulous new year, filled with promise and hope! xx

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

The smell of candy floss and hot caramel almonds permeates the air, along with the sounds of shrieking kids on fast, stomach churning rides.   Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park has all the fun of a fun fair with an added bonus of mulled wine and cider.  

Not only mulled wine, but also fabulous German food like bratwurst and mini pancakes.  I missed the hog roast unfortunately as I was stuffed by then.  As well as the rides there’s also ice skating and fabulous people watching. Snapping away with my new camera I captured some of the highlights.