Earth Hour 2011

Do not forget people, it's Earth Hour this Saturday 8pm!

Last year, at the B residence, we sat in the bottom flat, in the pitch dark, with bottles of wine and watched as whole sections of the the pinpoint light carpet I love so much blinked out. It was fantastic!
And not just because I consumed way more wine than was necessary...

There's nothing to do with the lights out, except to sit still and appreciate the company you've found to spend that hour with. It's a moment (if you're like me) to just take a breather and let your head quieten. Listen to something or someone else other than the whirling craziness that can take over inside. If you know us personally, you'll be shocked to hear that it all seemed so hushed and calm that the B girls even spoke in whispers and tried to giggle as quietly as possibly. I did mention there was wine right?

This year The Dad has built a deck and I'm thinking that could be the new spot for this year.

There will of course not be ONE light on in our home. No way. Because don't think the scenario in this youtube video hasn't occurred to me before... *shudder*

quiet screaming desperation

With the potential for everything from your colleagues, to the parking your fought hard to get, to the milk in your canteen fridge being under threat of "restructuring" these days, I've been thinking a lot about what we're willing to sacrifice so as not to meet the same fate.
The problem is you can't really predict these things, not even in the media industry where current knowledge is meant to be a click away and often gets typed up by the person sitting next to you. So we end up giving up more and more just to dig our fingers deeper into the crags and hang tight.
We're now at a point where we're given teeny tiny perks such as casual Fridays and flexi-time and we're so very grateful for these things if we have them and horribly jealous of others if we don't.
Yesterday was Human Rights day here in South Africa, and sometimes it's hard to remember through all this chaos and on a deadline that we all have a simple right to go home to our families at 5:00pm. Use it :)

Nigel Marsh says...
"...the reality of the society that we're in, is there are thousands and thousands of people out there, leading lives of quiet screaming desperation, where they work long hard hours, at jobs they hate, to enable them to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like. And it's my contention that going to work on a Friday in jeans and t-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue."


Via swissmiss
How to make work-life balance work: "

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. At TEDxSydney, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity — and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.

Don't panic...

But I'm toying with the idea of redesigning my blog again... "clean and uncluttered" might not be portraying myself very accurately. So if you're visiting and this place looks a mess please have patience for a while.

Food & WIne Pairing

kis·met

[kiz-mit, -met, kis-]

–noun

fate; destiny. Two parts of a whole

Some things in life are just meant to be paired up. Food and wine, bare feet and sand/grass/mud, ice cream and chocolate sauce, ebony and ivory, my hair and a hair iron etc.
Ah you get the drift.
And in case you were wondering about some of those examples I gave that would be the influence and help of my imaginative family sitting nearby and answering what I thought was a pretty normal question.

Another personal example of kismet, to me, has always been at how perfectly Ushi and The Pyromaniac seem to fit and make sense. So when they got engaged the rest of the B's breathed a collective sigh of relief that the madness of our family hadn't scared him away over the years.

Recently they've both started blogging (more successfully and frequently than I ever have come to think of it) and how's this for perfect? Hers is about food and his about wine. See what I mean? A perfect pair!

Go see how it's all starting out before they become famous and give them a little encouragement. These are two blogs I'd love to see stick around!
Meet Season's Eat-ins and Dear Wine Diary and read their descriptions in their own words rather.