Ahead of the curve... again

Those who know me well, know that I often have great ideas and then do nothing (or very little) about them and then someone else goes on with my idea and makes a great success with it.

Well, this time I am once again ahead of the curve. After announcing my gap year plans, I came across this story about taking time off to travel and experience the world.

How's the planning going I hear you ask?

Well,

Researching flights and reading lots of reviews for the lower cost carriers,  (sorry Qantas) as less money spent in the air is more for the ground, and lets face it, air travel these days is really a bus trip not much glamour left in air travel I'm afraid to say.

Spent a lot of time checking out airbnb and a site recommended by expatica.com called Paris attitude to find an apartment for our 3 months in Paris. I have 2 shortlisted, however I'm not going to book the apartment  until I have done my open day at Le Cordon Bleu

and I'm spending lots of time watching all kinds of cooking/travel shows to get ideas of where to go in Europe. I'm especially loving Shane Delia in Turkey on SBS.


And now since it's Tuesday that would be Tart's day!

You'll have to come back to see what transpires!

That was the week that was.. gap year week 1

Well, I've come to the end of my first full week of my grey gap year so what did I get up to you ask?

Here's all the exciting details...



Got a job,  


 and  then sacked my self!

Yes, really! I applied for a job at a local nursing home and they asked me to do a "buddy shift" where you work with another nurse  (a sort of try before you buy kind of thing), well even though I did the shift and it was not too bad, when the day came to go  back for another, I chickened out at rang them and sacked my self,  It was a kind of  "it's not you, it's me thing"  if you get my drift.  I firmly know now that my nursing interests lie in the more acute care area. So, not a lost cause, just a good learning experience.

and that was only the second day of the gap year!

So here are some highlights of my week....

2 of  my tweets got retweeted and favourited!!     YES!!
1 by by hotels.com and the other by ABC 702 Sydney!   so nearly big time social media player!

If you want to follow me ( and let's face it, there is always room for one more twitter stalker!)  my
 twitter handle is 

@kt2576

Had dinner at one of Sydney's best restaurants, Aria on Saturday night before attending The White Album Concert at the Sydney Opera House.  Had a amazing dinner (we went for the pre-theatre menu and it's amazing value with fantastic food and service) and the show at the Opera House was as equally good;  and I don't imagine there are many Operas where the audience stands up and dances in the seats and aisles, which is what we did at the show!  And now I think I have a bit of a crush  on Tim Rogers too!

In between all this excitement, I've been cooking, drinking some lovely French wine,

and scouring op shops for pre-loved things I can resurrect, like this little bedroom slipper chair I got today for the bargain price of $15!  She's going to scrub all nice and pretty when I get some new fabric on her.

and I've been catching up on essential reading....

So all in all I can say it was a pretty good week, how about you,  did you do something exciting, interesting or like me,  sack yourself from your job this week?

Mind the gap!.. ( year) I'm so tired.....part 1

Thanks for your feedback and comments, to my post about my grey gap year.  I thought I would put it in perspective, lest you all think I'm a so posh lady with so much money she can just give up work and swan around the world.

not that kind of swan

Perish the thought! I'm just tired, worn out and want a rest.

Some of you may not know but I was sent to work as a child, ( not down the mines, but in the pub!)

My sister, brother and I spent most of our Sunday mornings from when I was old enough to count, putting coin change on cigarette packets for the dispensing machines in the pub where we lived and worked!

For the younger readers, (and there are some) in the olden days, before cigarettes were locked up in plain packaging, they were freely available and people bought them from cigarette machines a bit like
this. The big miracle was that on you put in the money and the change miraculously appeared on your cigarette packet nicely sticky taped to the front of the pack.

Now I don't want to boast but I must have been child genius, as my parents wrote each brand we had in the machine, and what change to put on each pack and I supervised the production line, and as far as I know we got very few complaints from people being short changed.

We also did a sideline in lemonade concentrate, (this was in the days before post mix, like I said the olden days)

anyway my working career started young and never stopped. Here is a list of all the jobs I have done

cigarette change superisor

lemonade concentrate supervisor

hotel receptionist

Telex operator; if you don't know what that is, google it!

Sylvester switchboard operator  

and this is all before I am 13, so stay tuned for the next chapter of

"My Brilliant Career"