Father's Day Flop

As you read this, it is Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all the people who fill a 'father' role in their lives!

We stocked up on male oriented products especially for this big day. We still have at least two thirds of it on the shelves. We sold:

• "Gone Fishing" sign
• 2 wallets
• 3 leather wrist straps with snap buttons
• A metal motor bike
• A pen
• A 'Dad's Garage' sign

That was not today, but over the last three weeks. So I'm thinking that Father's Day is not much of a 'thing' around here OR it's a much bigger thing than we can provide at The Happy Abode. I'm pretty certain that Bunnings, Dan Murphy's, Super Cheap Auto and Lowe's had much better sales than us.

It was another steady Saturday morning where we made higher sales than the number that I predicted on my notepad this morning. I'm practicing the art of manifesting!

It's exciting that my photography is selling well and I feel pretty chuffed knowing that there are houses all over the world with my photos framed on their walls.

Ok, so not ALL OVER THE WORLD, but New Zealand, Hong Kong and England count as PART of the world! I know for certain that they are hanging in four different states of Australia too and I think that's pretty special.

I am a legend in my own lunch box.

Our new Happy Abode signage should arrive next week. I paid for it all today, so I'm thinking delivery should happen around Thursday. Wahoo!

Adoring Husband finished lining the fence with the bamboo sheets today. This photo was taken yesterday of the first section that he did ...

Kiwi Bernie finished as much of the kitchen as he can until the electricians complete their work ...

It's all coming along nicely.

I'm looking forward to having a quiet Sunday. There is 'stuff' to do and while I have some big jobs that I want to get started on - like a massive decluttering of my clothes and shoes - I'm going to play it by ear and see how I feel in the morning.

I haven't been sleeping very soundly lately, but last night I used my 'Sweet Sleep' essential oil and slept like a baby, so I'll try that again tonight.

By taking some big risks with my footy tipping this weekend, I have ruined my chances at winning a prize, but Adoring Husband is doing very well and is currently sitting in second position. Still a few weeks to go and you never know what will happen!

The pressure is on!

I'm off to bed.

Nite all.

Quietly Does It

I actually did some housework this morning before I left for work.

Unheard of!

Adoring Husband beat me to the shop and opened up for me by setting out the flags, signs and chairs, then he collected the mail and bought my morning coffee.

Yes I know.

He's a good man.

It seems to be a common occurrence where people go for a walk empty handed, see our signs so come for a look. Today was one of those days - lots of empty-handed potential customers.

More often than not, they return later that day or the following day, so I expect Saturday morning will be busy for me.

I photographed a few pieces of the lovely new jewellery ...

In between visitors, I did some solo dancing around the shop to my favourite tunes and I don't mind admitting that some singing happened too.

Adoring Husband spent the day working in the yard while Kiwi Bernie continued his work on the 'outdoor' kitchen, which is actually more like an 'indoor' kitchen. It will be Adoring Husband's domain and I'm keen to see how the final product looks.

AH lined the western fence with bamboo sheeting and it's looking great.

It's very exciting watching everything slowly come together.

My evening was spent at the Club where I won a Bakery voucher, so there will be morning tea available at our Tuesday coffee morning.

While I was enjoying a beverage or two at the club, Adoring Husband was busy at home preparing a delicious dinner of roast lamb with baked potato, sweet potato and onion. He prepared some broccoli and when I arrived home, I made gravy with the flavoursome juices that came from the lamb.

It was absolutely delicious and I savoured every last mouthful!

Thank you Darling.

I am feeling incredibly tired tonight, so I'll be in bed before 10pm to get a good night's sleep before work tomorrow.

As you read this, it will be the first day of Spring!

Have a lovely day.

Nite all.  

Officially Huggable

As you know, Adoring Husband has been a member of the SES, in some capacity, for about five years now.

He applied for the position of Local Controller for the Fraser Coast and had an interview a couple of weeks ago. Today, it was confirmed that he won the position.

Wahoo!

Congratulations Darling. Best man for the job.

At The Happy Abode, it was a fairly slow day, but we decided to accept some beautiful jewellery from an interstate artist, to sell in the shop. I wish I'd taken some photos to share here - I'll try to do it tomorrow. They are truly lovely. Vibrant and colourful and obviously made with love by a very nice woman who deserves success.

I sold two photos today!

I need to get mat boards on the photos that I printed last month because stocks are getting low at The Happy Abode.

Most of today's visitors were people waiting for their fish and chips to be cooked and they were not the slightest bit interested in spending money on anything other than food, but they DID enjoy browsing and made lots of nice comments about the shop.

The Motivator is, as we speak, boarding her flight to Bali!

Kiwi Bernie was here today and started the build on our outdoor kitchen by the pool area, so the back yard is looking quite the disaster at the moment.

Tweedle Dee (new name yet to be announced) came to the shop for a quick visit and a hug today, which was nice because our coffee morning was cancelled this week and we all missed out on our weekly hugs.

Another long hug was given to a lady who works for an Aged Care facility. One of the men she cares for passed away two days ago and she was so affected, she took the week off work. She came to us last week asking for a donation for their fund raising raffle, so I've only met her once before, but she really looked like she needed a hug so I wrapped my arms around her and she shed a tear.

Adoring Husband received a long hug this morning too.

It's been a bit of a huggie kind of day!

Now I need to go fix my MacBook Pro because it has black lines across the screen and I'm going to try all the suggestions that my Google search suggested!

Happy Friday to you all!

Nite all.    

Out of Time

It's almost 10pm as I write this and once again, I have been sucked into the television screening of "Pretty Woman"

I've lost count of how many times I've watched this movie, but I think it's the connection that it gives me to my mother - she loved it and every time her favourite line is uttered "Cinderf___inrella", I can picture her face telling me about it after she first saw the movie herself. It's the only time she ever said the "F" word out loud.

The movie never gets old for me. Even if I watched it last week, I just can't bring myself to change the channel this week.

This morning I attended meditation class, followed by the most perfect massage ever. My neck has been playing up for the last couple of days, even causing me to feel a bit dizzy at times, so The Gypsy worked hard on that part, but all of my body seemed to be very tense and many of my muscles were tight and needed work.

She told me at the end of the massage that I would feel sore and sorry because she worked so hard on me, but I feel pretty good tonight. She gave me some more exercises for various parts of my body - I feel that I need to set an early morning routine to stretch everything before I start each day because as I get older, all of my muscles (the few that I have left) are feeling kind of seized up.

I needed to rush home to get ready for my movie date with Adoring Husband, but everybody that I know in this town was in my path this morning and by the time I stopped to chat with them all, I had ten minutes to get ready when I finally reached home!

Luckily, we had a smooth run into town and even the roadworks didn't hold us up.

AH got our tickets and I got our chips. Our favourite seats were still vacant when we entered the cinema and the previews had just begun when we took our seats.

The movie was "The Book Club" and it was full of famous names, all over the age of 60, the oldest being Jane Fonda who turns 81 this year! I loved it.

After the movie, we picked up some things for the shop, priced a bar table in Hervey Norman ...

... ordered a photo print, bought the winning tickets for this week's lottos, bought an outdoor fan for our pool pergola and finally headed home.

There was no time to rest because the dog food needed to be made up and having sat in the fridge for a couple of days, couldn't wait another day to be prepared. Then I had to cut up a giant pawpaw that had been sitting on the kitchen bench for a couple of weeks. The Gypsy had given it to me when it was completely green and after two weeks, it was looking a bit dodgy. After I peeled it and cut it up, it was good enough to freeze in packs for smoothies.

THEN I had to batch up my chicken bone broth which had been simmering in the slow cooker for the last 20 hours.

It was after 6pm when I finally got to sit down and by that time, my tummy had started to play up (perhaps it was the chips at the cinema?), so I wasn't in the mood for dinner. AH cooked his on the barbecue.

Gogglebox was our TV show of choice this evening. I recorded, then watched The Bachelor and now it's almost 10.30pm and I'm ready for some sleep. I'll be in the shop by myself for the next couple of weeks so I need to have my game face on!

Nite all.

Spontaneity

While I was having my lazy start to the day, I was surfing the net, looking at outdoor lounge settings.

It seems that we've been doing that for days now and not having much success.

You've seen one outdoor lounge setting, you've seen them all, and the wicker look is all the rage at the moment. The idea of black Burrum dust filling all the cracks of wicker furniture doesn't thrill me much and I wanted something more sleek and a bit different.

The reason that I had this time to spare, is because Adoring Husband realised last night that he had an SES meeting early today, so we had to postpone our movie date.

Anyway, I found this great outdoor lounge and excitedly sent the link via email to AH, then got up, dressed, and was just about to walk out the door to get my morning coffee, when Adoring Husband suddenly appeared. His meeting was much shorter than expected so I suggested that we drive to Bundaberg to view this fabulous furniture.

He changed out of his uniform, we stopped to get my morning coffee and off we drove north to Bundy.

It was a beautiful day and not much traffic on the road, so we made good time. Driving through Childers, we agreed to stop on the return trip so that I could check out the wonderful shoe shop. It's probably been about 2 yrs since I got to visit this lovely shop because we always seem to be in town outside of opening hours.

We got to visit quite a few furniture places in Bundaberg, but the original lounge that the trip was for, was our final choice and we purchased it while we were there ...

The service was fantastic. It was fast and efficient and friendly. We left the store feeling happy and satisfied.

As agreed, we stopped at Childers and while AH ordered a couple of takeaway coffees, I rushed across the road to visit shoe heaven.

Wouldn't you know it, the universe conspired against me today! On Tuesdays, the shop closes at 2pm. It was 3pm so once again, I missed out.

Ugh!

By the time we arrived home, it was nearing 4pm and neither of us had eaten all day. I was famished! While I prepared the vegetables, AH cooked the steak on the barbecue and we ate our dinner before 5pm.

Here we are at 9.30pm and I am definitely ready for bed. While I have tomorrow off work too, I want to attend meditation early in the morning and then I have a 9am massage booked. After that, AH and I are going to the movies and among other things will be printing some photos that a customer has ordered. So it will be another big day.

Have a lovely Wednesday.

Nite all.

Happiness

Today has been one of those days when I felt amazing from the second that I opened my eyes.

You know, the kind of amazing when you sing along to every song and dance to every tune and raise your arms and punch the air just because you feel so good and you don't even care who's watching you?

I didn't have to be at work until midday, so I slept until about 7am. Adoring Husband brought my warm lemon water to me, followed by my bone broth while I selected upbeat, happy music to put onto a playlist for the shop (yes another playlist).

This time I selected the 60s decade for some fabulous tunes, added the sound track to "The Greatest Show On Earth" and then a few others just for good measure. My playlist is almost six hours long! The perfect length for a day at The Happy Abode!

I have spent the afternoon singing along and dancing through the shop and continuing that feeling of fabulousness.

The Motivator and I swam in some money.

She sold her old car, so we lay the money on the floor in the training room and both rolled around in it and pretended to swim through it and giggled ourselves silly like a pair of teenagers.

THAT was fun!

As you read this, it is the 28th August, which means that The Happy Abode is ONE YEAR OLD!!!

Happy birthday to us!

We will have birthday celebrations a month late because The Motivator will be out of the country for a while and I have a photography workshop coming up, so after that, we will party and celebrate.

I have a couple of days off again now and I have so many ideas about how to fill my time, but I can't do it all, so I need to be selective and I guess there is some housework and stuff to fit in there too *insert sad face here*

So it's the end of this beautiful Winter's day that had me feeling super happy and now it's time for bed.

Before I go, we had a storm on Sunday afternoon and this is the result ...

Nite all.

Thank You Mother Nature

Thanks to Mother Nature, I was not required to do the dirty work today.

Adoring Husband's foot has much improved - thanks to my essential oil cure of Frankincense mixed with fractionated coconut oil.

Yesterday, he was limping badly and unable to put any weight on his left foot. He wondered if he may have broken a bone. There is a hard lump underneath his foot, well below where the crow bar hit the top of his foot.

I rubbed the essential oil on his injury twice yesterday - the last time, just before he went to bed.

Frankincense is supposed to cure everything except death!

When he woke this morning, although he was still limping, he was walking much easier than last night. I've added the oil twice again today and as the day wore on, his walking got better and better. The hard lump is still there and some bruising has started to appear around the injury, but he seems much better.

Let's see what tomorrow brings!

It was a rainy, stormy Sunday, so no dirty outside work was done and I got to spend my day in bed.

I listened to the last three chapters of the book "You are the Placebo" and wrote lots of notes, then downloaded three meditations from the author.

While doing that, I discovered, much to my disappointment, that the author is running a five hour workshop in Melbourne two days BEFORE I arrive!

Then I discovered that he was running a five day retreat on the Sunshine Coast in October!! I got so excited and thought THAT would be perfect!

Unfortunately, the retreat is sold out and the 300 long waiting list was filled and now closed.

How disappointing.

I guess it just wasn't meant to be. Maybe next time.

I created a playlist via Apple Music, full of happy, upbeat songs that I can play in the shop - even some Country music!! I don't know what's wrong me!! Just feeling the love.

Twice I got out of bed.

Once to make lunch - chicken and vegetables in creamy garlic and white wine sauce.

Secondly, at 6pm to make a salad to go with Adoring Husband's steak and to make a fruity, chocolate ice-cream for dessert.

I stayed up the second time and now it's almost 11pm so it's time to return to my favourite place.

I don't have to be at work until 11am tomorrow, so I can sleep in and take my time welcoming the day.

Nite all.