Rocking Your World Friday - week 2

It’s that time of the week again – time to reflect on the good stuff.

I’ve got to say, it’s been a little harder this week to pick past the big piles of not-so-good-stuff to get to those little nuggets of positivity – but that’s really what Rockin’ My World Friday is all about, I guess.  It’s EASY to feel positive and grateful when everything is going swimmingly, but we need a bit of help when everything starts heading downhill…

First of all, rewinding back to this time next week, I’m still smiling from the super warm welcome I got from all the other “Rockettes” to my very first RMWF post.  Thanks ladies :)

The next thing to make me grin was an email on Friday evening from the newly formed Swindon Roller Derby team, asking if I would be able to come and photograph their first ever bout for them (I used to do a lot of ice hockey photography and so I have the kit to get past the challenges of shooting fast moving people indoors under artificial light) – the bout takes place this coming Sunday and I am super excited about it as I’ve never seen live Roller Derby before.  

As a warm up, I dusted off my old camera kit (literally!) and took a round of pics at hockey on Saturday night, just to get myself back into the swing of things, and I really enjoyed it (funny, since I stopped taking photos there every week as it had become such a chore, I guess once in a while is fun, every Saturday week in week out, not so much).

In fact last Saturday was a good hockey day all round, I had fun with my camera, we won (beating the team we all love to hate, the Guildford Flames, 6-4), and then when I got home I caught the last period of my NHL team, the Vancouver Canucks, beating their current nemesis, the Boston Bruins, in Boston’s home rink no less.  Fantastic, I was positively jumping up and down with excitement :D  Nothing beats the adrenaline buzz of seeing both my teams win on the same night!

Over the weekend I was still on my New Year cleaning / decluttering kick, I filled another 4 black bags with stuff to take to the tip, and freecycled and ebayed some stuff too. I’ll have nothing left soon :)  The items I freecycled (toys that Connor has outgrown but were too good to chuck away) were all claimed and collected within an hour of me posting the offers online – brilliant!  I get some space back in my hallway, some little kiddies get a new blackboard easel and toy town, and all sorted with the minimum of fuss or effort, win win all round.

Monday was the horrid day, with a pile more redundancies announced at my work, including two of the ladies who work for me, as their role is now being reduced from two heads to one :(  The only positive to come from this is that one of them chose, seemingly quite happily, to take voluntary redundancy, so at least there won’t be any of that nasty competing over one job. Not in my team anyway.  But the atmosphere at work will be tough for a while as all the other role reductions shake out.

Anyway – enough of that negativity – this isn’t the place for it!  Also on Monday, I took my middle son back to Uni in Bristol, and he seemed happy and full of plans, so that’s always good.

Also this week I finished making my new art journal for 2012, and I’m chuffed with how it turned out (this is now the third blog post in a row with a photo of this journal on it – you must all be sick of the sight of it by now lol) – and the tutorial I put together while making the journal was used to kick start the 6 month “Art Journey” art journalling workshop over at UKScrappers.  It seems to have been well received, so that’s good, as I was a bit nervous about it, wasn’t quite sure what was expected of me as I haven’t written a tutorial for them before.

Some other little happy bits and bobs that happened this week:

• I discovered Sherlock on telly. Not seen it before. It's fab!  I have spent the whole week catching up on previous episodes that I had missed.  
• The Hungry Horse pub chain – the kids idea of heaven - have started accepting Tesco Clubcard tokens at 4 x face value, so that means we can have a giant family meal out for a tenners’ worth of vouchers, which I got for free just for doing my shopping anyway.  Bargain.  I do love my Clubcard.
• My middle son is still a member of the National Trust (mine ran out a few months ago), and he got sent his 2012 parking sticker this week.  He doesn’t have a car so he gave it to me.  Result – that’ll save me a fiver a pop whenever I go to Avebury :)  
• I finished another couple of spreads in my sketchbook project book, only 3 left to go now thank god. And despite rushing them, I don't hate them.  Here’s a sneaky of one:

• I bought a couple of items from ebay this week and had really good experiences with both sellers – one insisted on refunding 80p as he had over estimated postage (despite me telling him it really was ok and he didn’t have to), and the other sent me half as much product again as I had ordered as a free gift.  Thank you ebay peeps :) 

Reading that back, even a bad week looks like a fab week :)

See you again next Friday!