Nesting, Part 6

and resting really, but solidly on the mend!  I no longer have to run out of meetings in a coughing fit now, so that's a plus.

Snaps of the home and hood recently.

Secret confession: Whenever there is a special holiday on (which, lets face it, is pretty much all the time here) I go down to Walgreens purely for the purpose of scoping out all the intense looking candy and decorations on offer.  Ghost peeps!

Discovered Conifer - a new favourite store, just off the beaten track in my neighborhood.  I was passing by and saw a sign "art + clothing this way" - how could I resist?  Run by the most beautiful woman who has a personal relationship with all the emerging brands she stocks.  Just beautiful.

I found this magnificent beast panting on the sidewalk on my way home from froyo one day.  How I loved his thick glossy fur!  The little girl in the background stopped to say hello to him too.

It's a little hard to see but this house on my street has an incredible fiddle leaf fig tree in each long window, I look up in admiration (or, like a stalker) every time I walk past it - oh how I want one for my living room!  So sculptural.

Our friend Karl the fog came back for an evening the other day - even though it's not his season at the moment.  I don't mind though, I like him now.

It's nice to be back, SF.

Healing chicken soup

The human body is an amazing beast isn't it?  One minute it's fine with traipsing across 6 different cities and the next minute it's breaking down in full force - complete with 3am feverish sweats and a throat so on fire I thought I was going to die in my sleep (no really, in my delirium I considered calling up C to remind him that the couch is by some Norwegian architects that I like, so could he please keep it in my memory hahaha).

Anyway, I kid - I totally deserve this.  I feel like this is my body's way of shouting at me to stop for a moment, so here I am.  I've been hiding out in a snot cave this weekend and now just taken my first sick day since I can remember.  My beloved Google Shopping Express took care of most things, but as they don't do fresh produce I did trek out to my local store to make a proper chicken soup - bones and all.

I used this recipe as a guideline, but I made the alteration of sautéing the onions and garlic beforehand.

Chopping in progress.  I took a very liberal perspective on 'finely diced'.

Simmering goodness.  The green bits are the fresh Thyme floating to the top.

The get-well food of champions!

Not as good as my mama's but definitely hit the spot!

Go deep

Some words for your Friday - taken from one of my favourite HONYs, I was reminded of this as I was aggressively pushed over by the very physical waves at Byron:

At Wategos

"When a wave comes, go deep.

There’s three things you can do when life sends a wave at you.  You can run from it, but then it’s going to catch up and knock you down.  You can also fall back on your ego and try to stand your ground, but then it’s still going to clobber you. Or you can use it as an opportunity to go deep, and transform yourself to match the circumstances.  And that’s how you get through the wave.”

And a great weekend to you all!

On multitasking

... and its apparent enemy, productivity.

Even my snacks distract me from work.

Ironic that I have visited Facebook twice, youtubed a song I wanted to hear, watched a short film on Vimeo that a friend sent me and checked my phone twice in the space between that first sentence and this one.

I have just started reading Brain Rules, which goes through "12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home and school" by equipping you with a better understanding of how the brain works and what it needs from you to operate well.  It's not one of the principles as such, but one thing that has stuck out to me in particular is the amount of effort it takes for your brain to switch from one task to the other - it's tenths of a second every time you switch any task - to both figure out where it needs to access to get the new data you need, and then extract and synthesise that data for the new task.  The flashing FB message thread I keep revisiting while typing this is a new switch every time, ditto checking my work email, because the information to complete both of those tasks are all sorted in different places in my brain.  The seconds added up, we apparently make ourselves 50% slower by any attempt to multitask.

Am currently thinking of ways to mandatorily reduce the distractions - a creative solution via zenhabits: hire someone to sit next to you as you work and pay them to slap you in the face every time you look at Facebook  :)

(Full disclosure: additional to the activities listed above I took a phone call, checked Facebook, googled something about marshmallows, checked Instagram, checked Facebook again.  Somebody slap me.)

Beautiful home

I felt like I was in a Tourism Australia postcard but better.

I very badly would love to post pictures of the most gorgeous of weddings but I'm not sure that my haphazard Android photos between happy tears would really do the beautiful couple or the celebration justice.  It was a privilege to be a part of it, and it was surrounded by some really wonderful days on the sunny shores of Australia.  Such great friends.  I didn't think I would get so sentimental, but I did.

I will leave you a small snapshot of bathing in an incredible warm Tea Tree lake, next to what we called 'the secret beach' - so magical!  The Tea Tree is what stains the water darker.  One of many warm, lovely sandy afternoons.

p.s. the jet lag trick totally worked!  Definitely recommend.  Prepare to starve in between though - that part is less fun  :)