The old houses’ curse

blocked drain MelbourneI get it. Old houses are aesthetically beautiful, and the history behind them of all the families that came before yours can give it a warm glow, but for goodness sakes, no one tells you just how much harder owning an old house can be! The floors are likely to be falling apart, you’re going to battle against the creaking doors and squeaking floorboards, there’s always a fine layer of dust over everything, and the electrical work is a nightmare. Far and away, though, the worst problems are with the pipes.

Oh my goodness the plumbing. Melbourne has a lot of fantastic plumbers, and so every time we run into a problem, our incredible plumber is always there to help us out, but my gosh, there comes a time when you have to wonder if you wouldn’t be better off just ripping out all the pipes and starting over again from scratch. Things can only get so bad! Having the odd blocked drain in Melbourne is nothing to worry about, but when you have to call your plumber for something different every month, you know there’s a serious problem. You can’t just brush something like that under the rug.

Really, sometimes I wonder if we’ve even done the right thing here. We have two small kids, maybe it would be better if we relocated to a modern house. It’s such an enormous drain running into problems like this left, right, and center. Maybe it would easier, cheaper, and better. Obviously, that would be a huge stress and pressure to put on my family, but sometimes I have to seriously wonder if it would be worth it. At this point, I’m just starting to get really tired of the pure amount of work that goes into maintaining a house like this one.

Property styling brings sales

When we first bought this house it was extremely run down. None of the plumbing worked and a few of the walls had gaping holes in them. It was definitely a fixer-upper, and fix up we did! We decided to do most of the work ourselves to cut down costs. It was fairly extreme DIY but Rob is very handy with a drill and I know my way around the grouting. The process was fairly stressful, we had our fair share of arguments and a couple of cuts and scrapes too, from the building work not from each other. So now, two years later we are preparing to sell the place. This time we are letting the professionals guide us, Rob has hired a property staging company based in Melbourne to come in and make our house look ‘buyable’.

It really is a shame we have to sell the place, if we had been a little more careful with our budget during the renovations we have may been able to afford to stay here. It seemed at the time it was best to go the extra mile and make everything perfect but perhaps if it had been just less than perfect we’d be able to enjoy it. The good thing is we should be making an unbelievable profit on the place, especially if the property stylist can maximise the selling value by the percentage he thinks he can! Although I like our spin on the decor, apparently it doesn’t appeal to the mass market. The stylists are bringing in lots of warm tones and curved surfaces. We do live in a pretty vanilla neighbourhood and our out-there style has never gone do so well. When I cut the hedges out front into celestial shapes most of the neighbours complained that it didn’t fit in the with the ‘street-look’. They liked it even less when I then trimmed the hedges into various human anatomies. Let’s just say I had a lot of parents complaining about their kids asking a lot of questions.

Changing careers in your thirties

makeup short courses MelbourneAs a life coach I have seen it all. From career breakdowns to marriage failures. I have been there in the best of times and the worst of times. I am here today to dispense some wisdom about studying in later life. I get many clients who tell me how stuck they feel and how frightened they are of retraining in a new area by going back to school. My latest trauma came in the form of a woman wanting to get as far away from the corporate life as possible and follow a childhood dream of becoming a makeup artist.

I guided her through signing up to complete a diploma of makeup, Melbourne has some fantastic learning institutions that are renown within the industry. This should allow her the flexibility to continue to working on the days she isn’t studying. It is not always about taking a massive leap but often about slowly pacing yourself towards a goal. My latest client had always wanted to work in the beauty industry. She had even taken makeup shorts courses in Melbourne while at university but was sucked in by the promise of money working in international finance.

Now years into her career she finally feels ready to set that final goal of working as a beauty therapist. The diploma of beauty based in Melbourne is her first big step, handing in her notice to her current job is her second and then her final stop is landing that dream job!

Digestible chunks is the term given to this goal setting strategy within the life coach industry. It can be scary to turn your life around after years of the same monotonous routine but it always pays off when you are doing what you truly love. Whether it be beauty and makeup studies or archaeological digging, there is a pathway of digestible chunks waiting for you to grasp it!

The joys of a fresh garden

tuberous begoniasI’m so excited I can barely breathe. After applying for months and months for any and every job out there on the market, someone has finally decided to give me a go. Well, they haven’t hired me yet exactly, but I’m meeting with a guy, and that’s the most I’ve heard back from anyone in months. And it’s not just any old job either, it’s an amazing job. My dream job, in fact. I would get to work at one of the best nurseries in Melbourne!

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a complete green thumb. I’ve spent hours boring my friends to death talking about different plant species and whenever I see a plant I like, it just consumes me. I have a little experience doing something kind of similar, I worked on the grounds of my old school for about six months after I finished, but this is an absolute dream come true.

To make myself the best candidate I can possibly be, I’ve been reading up like crazy. I realised that there’s a huge gap in my knowledge about summer flowering bulbs, and to be honest, flowers in general. Working on school grounds I mostly just dealt with mowing the grass, but private study I’ve mostly focused on trees and ferns. So naturally I’ve been reading up like a madman, trying to learn as much as I possibly can about every type of angiosperm under the sun. Having said that, I decided to start with bergonias. I just figured they’d be a good entry point. Besides, the tuberous begonias is absolutely fascinating.

Still, though, I feel vastly under qualified for this role. I realise they’re probably going to be looking at people who have degrees in horticulture, which I certainly do not have, but I hope my enthusiasm about the subject will be enough to make them at least consider me.

The wonders of software courses

software development MelbourneWhat an age in which we live. Such a time, full of technology and scholarly progress, where technology is swiftly taking the place of man! Well, maybe not the ‘place’…but I do love my self-serve checkouts. There always needs to be that human nanny hovering over them and scanning their little cards when someone/thing stuffs up, but they’re a great boon to supermarkets. Human interaction is truly a minefield.

That’s why this new app is just me all over, and I’ve had the privilege of being a beta tester! It’s the result of three years of effort on the part of a few geniuses, coming together from software development courses, web design, app design and a few more disciplines. It looks amazing, it’s totally discreet and it works. It really works. Basically, you just put your phone on the table during a date, having activated the app beforehand. You ask a few leading questions- they don’t even have to be direct- and the app analyses all of their answers and gives you an accurate view of that person’s true personality. Because no one is their true self during a date, right? It’s all a bit superficial, trying to be the funniest and most charming version of yourself regardless of whether that’s actually you.

And then the date ends. Before you can go back to wherever you live and get total sucked into how wonderful and magical this person is, you can review what the app has said about them. The one time I’ve tried it, the app told me that he was a political leftist, he has residual maternal issues, is likely overprotective of his game consoles and believes that cats have souls. Yick! Lucky escape!

The app is having trouble getting off the ground due to accusations of inaccuracy, or something…maybe privacy as well. All I can say is that it makes ME want to take up a course in web design somewhere in Melbourne. Apps that judge people? I’ve got to be a part of this.

I just need to talk about ice skating

ice skating instructorIt runs in my blood, I tell you. Like, there’s ice in my blood, but not in any of the bad ways. Like, I’m a pretty nice person, but ice skating is in my blood and I have to talk about it, sometimes even when other people are talking. Isn’t that odd? That’s rather odd, yeah, but we all have our passions.
Now, it’s my dream to one day be an ice skating instructor, because I can’t think of much else that would be better than passing on my knowledge. I suppose the only problem there is that I’m a terrible teacher overall. I just keep talking about myself, and how I managed to accomplish this or that…and I genuinely think that I’m doing some good. Like, if this student gets what I did, first hand from the source, it’ll all click! Except that’s not so much how people work. Everyone learns differently, and see how I totally get that outside of lessons? I can say that, but the few times I’ve taught have ended in light disaster. There was that one girl who flew over from Russia to be taught by the Yugoslavian fellow. He was off ill with some kind of yellow flu, or blue flu, or some other coloured flu. Anyway, i was the next most senior ice-skating expert, so they told me to show her some of the moves. I performed all of them flawlessly, then asked her to try. Now, she was a prodigy in the making, but not quite there yet…and she was only six. Perhaps a quadruple aerial spin followed by a skating no-hands cartwheel and finishing with performing the splits and jumping up into a flourish was a bit too advanced. She tried and failed, so I thought I’d regale her with some of my tales of how I strove to learn this move. Forty-five minutes later, I’d just finished the tale of how I got caught in a snowdrift trying to rescue an arctic fox in the middle of a meditation session on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro when she said she had to go home. Boom, ice skating lessons were over for the day and she hadn’t learned a thing. I can be terrible. But at least I KNOW I can be terrible, so…I can be better.

The joy of colour in the garden

gladioliWith springtime just around the corner, a great and long held tradition is sneaking up on me. Every year without fail since I was a little girl, my mum and I have gone to our favourite garden shop to find the plants of the season. I know most people just buy all the plants for their house when they move in, and then only do a little maintenance when required, but where’s the fun in that? Mum gave me a love of gardening, and she’s not the kind of person who’s happy to look at the same thing day in, day out her whole life. She wants something different, and I can’t say I blame her.

This year, it’s all about the gladioli. Mum’s a huge fan of having an explosive pop of colour or two, just to liven the place up, but despite that she’s never gone down the hyacinth road. It’s actually quite strange that she hasn’t. I mean, over the years, mum’s grown almost every type of flower imaginable in that garden of hers, from alstromeria to zephyranthes, but never has she had a hyacinth. Not that she’s got anything against them, just that it’s never seemed to happen. Either they’d run out of stock or she’d found something online beforehand and decided that she just had to have it. Even when that is the case, and mum knows exactly what she wants before we even go to the nursery, it’s still an experience to go there. I just love wandering through the aisles, looking at all the different types of Summer flowering bulbs and seedlings that will one day grow into a big and strong plant all in their own right. It doesn’t even matter that I don’t live at home anymore, it’s really just a fun mother-daughter activity we do once a year.

App Storm In A Teacup

app design coursesMe and my GF are going to take the technology world by storm. Yeah, so, anyway…technology. Specifically gaming, because the gaming industry is the largest and most financially lucrative industry in the world. They just started offering entire app design courses here in Melbourne (or have they been doing that for a while?) where people can genuinely, for real learn all about apps. And gams! There are game design courses!

Alright, I’m stating the obvious, but what I really should be stating is our plan. July (that’s ‘July’, like the month) and I met on a dating app, and we bonded over our love of mobile gaming. There’s a big market for this stuff, hence why so many people are studying it. But do you know what instantly makes everything better? More labels! It’s culturally proven that the more genres a movie has, the better it is, until the whole thing is just an undefined genre soup. We want to take everything we learned in our respective game design and app design courses to create…the perfect app. It would be a sort of dating app on the surface, but also one that allows casual friendships, like Visage-Tome. You’d interact while playing games, which would reveal a lot about someone if they were a stranger…but also, at the same time, people have to progress through the levels by sharing photos, details about themselves and their aspirations.

Oh, it gets better. See, certain challenges require you to perform rigorous physical activity to progress in your friendship, while others need you to do some quick research on the stock market, or the divisions of Poland. It’s trivia, current events, history, dating, gaming, exercise and friendship, all in one app! No one with a course in app development has attempted such a feat. We’ll soon be tech tycoons, July and I.

Skating the issue of a corporate function

corporate venuesYep, they must be running out of ideas by now. Just too many…things. All the same.

Hmm? I’ve been really absent-minded lately. I know I’ve been getting to sleep at a good and decent time, I’ve been eating very well and I’ve been very productive at work. That last one is the most important, obviously. But still, whenever I’m not at work I just feel listless. The shows I used to watch aren’t too exciting any more, and as for my family, I just don’t find myself rushing home to see them. Funny, that used to be so important. I guess working for Lawrence Corp is really the only thing left.

And we really do have a good time at work. We’re worked hard, but of course, it’s okay when you’re working for the good of the company. Then we get to let off steam at one of the company functions, held at Melbourne’s most prestigious party venues, complete with such entertainment options as ice skating rinks. I don’t…think we used the ice skating last time. We just hung around in the one function room and had a very good time that was very good indeed. No, really…such a good time. Fun, conversation, good things, lots of punch and good things, as well as conversation. I mean, I can’t remember what we talked about…we just had some good conversations, I remember that much.

It’s odd, because I used to have such a good memory, even for little details. In fact…it’s what makes me good at my job. Maybe this function room was so good I just sort of lost myself a bit, which I suppose is a great sign. That’s what the events are for, after all! We need loosen up a little bit, or we’ll go mad.

Yeah, bit fuzzy though. I do remember the punch tasting a bit metallic, but it wasn’t like I had any trouble driving myself home. I just really wanted to get back to work, you know? Melbourne and its corporate function venues are good, and nice, really good, but I know I should be working. We’ve got some very important work to do.