Listening to my inner 'Yes' voice...and spending some money!

Every since I left school/went into full time work I've never actually had a full months wage to myself. There has always been things to save and pay for, mainly to do with moving out, weddings or ex's breaking my cars (honest to god my poor Punto never went wrong when I was driving it but as soon as I let a boyfriend drive it they broke it!)
Now that I've moved back with my parents and cleared the final bills from my house I've found I've had some money left over! For the first time in my life I've actually had a bit of 'Money Freedom' and I've taken it as a chance to treat myself.
My first big spend wasn't so much a 'I've got the money to do this' sorta thing but more of a 'I need a break and I can afford to do this' spur of the moment decision. I've booked flights to go to Canada to visit my family at the end of June.
I find it very hard to hear my inner yes voice, as one of my Twitter friends aptly put it, and always feel a pang of guilt over spending money on something that isn't really an essential. I'm so glad I didn't think to hard about booking the flights because if I'd have slept on it I probably would have talked myself out of it and not booked them at all and I really feel like I could do with the break just to relax.
My next purchases are a classic case of me indulging my geeky side. I've said for ages that I'd like to get myself a nice camera, I don't know enough about photography to splash out on a SLR so I went for, in my opinion, the next best thing... a Canon PowerShot SX20 IS

 

I also bought a Flip Video camera, justified by the fact that both of these would be useful for me to take on 'Tour' and the fact that I'm a sucker for anything gadgety.

I'm still getting to grips with working out how to use the camera properly but I'll be posting some photos soon!

Multi-tasking Vs. Uni-tasking

I like being busy and trying to multi-task.
I like having things to do and projects to work on.

I don't like feeling unorganized and I really don't like it when I can't concentrate because there is too much going on in my head. A few weeks ago I started a 'Tuesday To Do List' the idea being that if I wrote down a list on my blog I was more likely to get it done (because you lot would tell me off if not!) and that did work well, but I still felt like I had too much going on in my head.
I work best when there are routines or a schedule to follow-I like the feeling in control.
After a quick convo on Twitter with @vwallop and @mummylimited, where I was

1. Reassured I'm not a freak for considering making myself a schedule to plan out my evenings and
2. told that multi-tasking is a really inefficient way to work and pointed towards this article and I decided that I'd give Uni-tasking a go.

I came up with...

'a cunning plan'

It involves devising a schedule for some evenings during the week to help plan my time better and by trying Uni-tasking it means that I can just focus on one task at a time with no other distractions (so no music on while I'm trying to write, no Twitter (I know..its scary!) when I'm trying to sort paper work etc - it makes sense; I'm easily distracted, if I minimise distractions I should be able to work quicker and more efficiently) 

I'm not going to go overboard and try to micro manage every last minute of my evening I'm just going to try setting aside a few hours that I can break down into chunks to work on certain areas; for example - setting aside time to blog, answer emails, catch up on my Google Reader, tidy-up.

I know this probably sounds amazingly boring, tedious and overly controlling to most of you but if you could experience just how busy and crazy my head feels some days then you'd understand why I'm so excited at the prospect of this working to help turn down the noise!

Party over here, Party over there!!

What are you doing over here??

Didn't you know there's a party going on over at the MissSearles on Tour blog!

Wait...you don't know what MissSearles on Tour is?

You better get over there quick and have wander around, find out whats going on, its going to be an awesome project that I'd love you all to get involved in.

 Come over and say Hi and help yourself to a *virtual* drink or two

Can't wait to see you!

A lovely birthday

Its the perfect end to a lovely birthday, sitting with a cup of tea watching Glee (yes I'm a Gleek!), reading through peoples blog posts, working on a spreadsheet, organising photos on iPhoto, catching up on Twitter and pondering what could be one of my greatest ideas ever, all will be revealed soon!

  Birthday Tulips-taken on iPhone

Thank you too all who sent birthday wishes on Twitter

@jfb57 @eljay1980 @1stUniqueGifts @lauralatch91 @RosieScribble @susankmann 

@integralist @barracat @somevaguetweet 

@smiley_b_ @SocratesN @chellekip @LauraAWNTYM @stuartbyford @totinhas