Coffee and Yoga. Mind, body and spirit.

When I order coffee at a cafe it's usually an espresso. That little cup of black gold, black magic, call it what you will. If I'm feeling particularly enamoured of the idea of darkness, I'll order a double short black.

It's something that's been a treat from time to time as until recently we didn't have a coffee machine at home. We had a French press and I got rather sick of the mug with milk that was our typical morning tea.

A friend gave me a coffee machine, new old stock, 8 years old and never used. I suspect some plastic pipes inside it had perished or died, as I persevered for a few days, cleaned it, followed all the instructions and never got anything better than dark sludge out of it.

So I bit my lip, mentally apologised to the environment, and bought a wee Nespresso machine. Reader, I know I'm bad. Those pods take forever to decompose. You can't recycle them. But the bliss of popping one in, touching the button and watching an espresso materialise before my eyes, for one fifth of the cost of a cafe one! And I can have one EVERY DAY. I wouldn't walk to our local cafe every day and hand over $4.50 - my espresso was a weekend treat only.

Thankfully there are several brands of compatible pods, and the Vittoria espresso is nicely dark and deep and strong. L'Or isn't bad, either.

And my husband now makes his own flat whites for morning tea and is in heaven.

So what a tasty start to the year we've had.

Coffee cheers my spirit, in moderation is good for the body and gives my mind that little jolt to cheer it up when it doesn't feel like doing work at the computer.

Which segueways nicely into yoga. Now yoga is arguably much better for the mind, body and spirit, and I've taken that up recently. Like, last week, officially. I had been teaching myself from magazines and YouTube and websites, but I bit the bullet and joined a fitness centre that teaches yoga, pilates and barre.

I've decided I'll try and do 3 yoga classes a week, 1 pilates and 1 barre, as they are the only ones that fit in with my schedule - i.e., doing it during business hours. I have no desire to head out at 6am or fight peak hour traffic and overfull classes at 6pm when I'm getting hungry. I'm treating yoga as work - work on myself!

So far I'm loving it; I'm doing yin yoga and hatha yoga. While I do a fitness class on Fridays (bodyweight, light weights and cardio) which makes me realise just what muscles I've used, I'm getting complaints from muscles on a daily basis, but only mildly. It's all good.

I'm feeling a bit calmer - I think! The one bad thing about the yoga place is parking. It's in a shopping strip where the main car park is being redeveloped so parking is at a premium. Last Friday I was driving for 20 minutes around and around the other car park areas there desperate for a spot, almost screaming and my blood pressure going through the roof as I didn't want to be late for my class. I had allowed for 15 minutes to find a park. This rather negates all the good yoga does for my mind, body and spirit I suspect!

My neighbour put me onto the yoga centre as she has recently joined it too, so at least she'll be coming to some of the same classes and urging me to go if I'm feeling lazy or depressed and don't want to leave the house.

I've noticed another difference in my mental state - I want or NEED to do some sort of exercise every day now. Either yoga, pilates, barre or a good brisk walk. For this little sloth, that's a very good thing indeed.

And if yoga doesn't perk me up, fresh espresso will!

The happiness sucker; or, why perfectionists are a pain in the arse.

What's your view on perfectionists? Not your average perfectionists who simply want everything they do to be the best, but the kind of perfectionists who tries to suck the happiness out of your own activities by putting you down because you're not bloody perfect?

Today I went Dragon Boat Racing for the first time at a local festival. It was an amateur event for corporate teams, school teams, sports club teams but no professional dragon boat teams were allowed. For half of our team it was the first time we'd tried it. Our only practice was paddling the boat to the starting line.

I got very wet and I had a ball. The first race we went in we came second and we were overjoyed. Last year our team had one second and 2 last places. We were fortunate in having a great 'sweep' at the back of the boat who coached us mercilessly.

In the second race we also came second at a much faster time; as a team we felt much more together. We were all gee'd up for the third heat, and it was neck and neck. A photo finish. We came second but we were exhilarated. We were paddling in unison, we were flying on the water and we were a tightly-knit team of people who'd suddenly grasped a sporting concept. We had qualified for the minor final on the day but many of our team had other commitments and couldn't stay, so we satisfied ourselves with a team best. You'd be hard pressed to meet a happier, more satisfied bunch of people after that third heat.

After the first race my 'friend' Whingy arrived and proceeded to pick on everything and everyone. Wasn't I going to take my bracelet off to paddle? (No.) Was I really paddling wearing THAT? (That being technical merino leggings, top and knickers, chosen because they dry quickly in the sun, and I told her so).

According to Whingy our team was hopeless in the second race. And the third. I in particular was rubbish apparently. G was watching from the shore with Whingy and she kept up a running commentary on how awful all the teams were, putting everyone down and being generally degrading. G couldn't believe how nasty she was being; maybe she was jealous because everyone was having fun and not taking it too seriously.

Whingy you see, is a serious dragon boater. She is with a dragon boating association, practices in a team twice a week, paddles in regattas with other teams who practice regularly and therefore judges our amateur efforts unfavourably against her own (naturally perfect) ones.  Like everything else Whingy turns her hand to she has to be perfect at it - and she has no time for people who aren't perfect at it too. She is unbearably smug.

She was doing her best to suck the happiness out of my day. So what if my team was a bunch of mugs having a go? The main thing is this bunch of mugs had a go and loved it. I suspect that perfection comes at a price and if she judges her performance to be less than perfect she doesn't enjoy it at all. For me it was about being out on the water on a stunningly sunny spring day. And that was perfect.

Trespassers will be composted

After five months of feeling guilty about chucking fruit, veggies, eggshells and other organic matter into the bin, we finally got a compost bin for our new house. It nestles under the edge of a 45 year old camellia, and gets the western sun to warm it. It looks a bit like a Dalek in disguise. I'm surprised it doesn't shout "Exterminate!" every time I open the lid and put more veggie peelings into it.

I visit it daily and turn the contents with a stirrer that looks like a long metal corkscrew. Already the contents - my fruit and veg scraps, together with coffee grounds, tea leaves and the like, plus a healthy proportion of dried leaves - is starting to look like compost. Once I see a few worms in there, I'll be truly happy. The system will be working.

Buoyed up by living a bit greener, we have also bought ourselves a rechargeable lawnmower. Mum used to have a lawnmower man, John, whom I was quite happy to keep on in the role, but he's gone AWOL. He was going backpacking in Asia for six weeks in February, but I haven't heard from him since. I've tried phoning at different times of the day and his phone just rings out. I'm quite concerned about him, actually. I don't know anyone else who uses his services so can't contact them.  I hope he's OK.

But, sans John, with a lawn growing madly after a rainy autumn, we debated what to do. We were doing it ourselves with a whipper snipper and a little push reel mower (i.e.,. I was the motor!), but that was a pain in the teeth. The push reel jammed on every twig.

We considered other lawnmower men, but most of them work on a schedule. They come every couple of weeks whether you need the lawn doing or not, and you are duty bound to pay them, and they all charge more than John.

So I decided we would DIY as it would get us fit. I looked at petrol mowers, and recalled the childhood days when Mum would mow the lawn with our 1960 Scott Bonner and it was a pain in the arse to start.  I looked at electric mowers and rechargeable mowers and most of them wouldn't have the grunt to do justice to our lawn. It's big and sloping. Finally I found one that would: Eco-Mate.

As luck would have it, the Eco-Mate importer was awaiting a new shipment and had a demo model for sale, which had only had about two hours' use. It was nearly $100 off the list price, so G and I grabbed it. It rocks!  It's half as loud as a petrol mower and all you smell is the delicious scent of freshly cut grass. The downside is the battery is humungous so it's quite a heavy unit, but it's well-built and - bliss! - starts every time. I found it easy to mow the main lawn even though it slopes. I did the higher slopes outside our chimney area and that was bloody hard going. This week G did the higher slopes and he found it hard work too, but we both agree it's a great bit of kit.

Eco-Mate can do up to 90 minutes' work on a full charge; you don't even have to remove the battery to charge it if you don't want to, either; just run the charger up to the unit. Even after ploughing through our overlong grass last week it was still half-charged when we'd finished.

I've been doing the edges with hand powered grass shears; I found an manual edger in the garage and it's shite. It just hacks at the grass, but the hand shears work a treat. There's an electric edger in there too and I'm unsure whether that still works. One weekend we'll try it, but I do worry about G and electric lawn tools. Every time he gets the whipper snipper out I wonder whether he'll chop the cord in half! He can be rather slapdash. Hence I haven't suggested we try the electric edger yet.

And not for us the awful noise of the leaf blower. Seriously, I hate those things. I don't mind the ones that actually hoover up the leaves, but all the neighbours have lawnmower and maintenance men who use leaf blowers, and they simply blow the leaves off the neighbours' drives onto the road, where they end up in the gutter and storm water channels. Annoys me no end. They all seem to work here on a Wednesday and I hear leaf blowers in triplicate. We have a big garden broom and decent garden rake and of course the new compost bin will be delighted with our leaves.

To end this post, apropos no reason at all except it's pretty, is a photo of one of my camellia flowers, Paradise Vanessa.

You're so vain... Or, the French Solution

Well, actually, I'm so vain. I feel about 25 and skinny inside but the reality is fifty and overweight (but not yet obese, officially). I don't want to look fifty. I don't want to be tubby. I am also, and I state this unequivocally, the world's laziest bint. I have a gym membership but haven't used it in ages. Just the thought of hot gym-based sweatiness in a Sydney summer makes me want to lie on the sofa with a chilled glass of pinot grigio. Lying on a sofa won't help my thunder thighs though; summer is especially awful for me as wearing skirts or dresses means my big inner thighs rub together and get sweaty and uncomfortable unless I wear panty hose or thigh-length underwear. So I spend summer in trousers or shorts, even on the hottest days.

Having perused several books by French women or Brits and Aussies writing about French women (Almost French by Sarah Turnbull, Parisian Chic by Ines de la Fressange, All You Need To Be Impossibly French by Helena Frith Powell and - like millions of others - French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano, among others), I have decided to pursue a French solution. French women don't go to the gym. They simply move a lot. They walk. They take the stairs rather than a lift (although an office block of 30 floors would defeat me). Having spent five days in Paris walking my arse off last year there's something about Paris which compels you to walk everywhere, because there is so much to see and the city envelopes you in Parisian-ness. Um, western Sydney doesn't have the same charm but I'm doing my best. Even downtown Sydney doesn't have the same pull walking-wise but curiously central Melbourne does.

(Why French? you may ask. Because I've always thought French women to be chic, and while I was born without a chic gene, it doesn't stop me trying.)

Another part of the French solution is eating like the French. Not being guilty about having a glass of wine with dinner (but of course, one is not supposed to drink the entire bottle as some of my girlfriends do!). Not eating huge meals. Eating seasonal produce. Eating whole foods. Eating freshly prepared meals rather than package ones (something I have always done anyway). I've also cut down on the carbs, especially after 5pm. Except for the wine. I view wine as 'good carbs'. Heh heh, I've rattled on about diets etc on this blog before, but basically I eat protein and veggies at every meal, and don't have carbs every day. I have also cut down dramatically on sugar, particularly processed sugar. The Christmas season, with its jolly Christmas cake and irresistible Christmas pudding and home-made brandy custard and catching up with friends to - frankly - FEAST has taken its toll however and my weight is creeping up again.

So I have pledged to walk or cycle to the shops unless it's stinking hot in which case the airconditioned car gets a run, I gallop up the stairs in my house several times a day, the diet is back on track, but wait, there's more.

Those canny French women spend a bleedin' fortune on their skin, not just anti-ageing but anti-fat as well. I've been doing some research as I don't have the kind of budget which allows me to spend $200 on a face cream or anti-cellulite/slimming cream. Nor do I have a budget for regular facials, or regular anti-cellulite massages.

One thing and another led me to the No Lipo Lipo program by Carole Maggio, who has a day spa in California. One thing I had been researching was dry body brushing, something you can do in the privacy of your own home at the frugal cost of a sisal mitt. Lo! Carole's program includes dry brushing and also deep knuckle massage. Because I can't go to California for a six week program, I bought Carole's knuckle massage DVD which shows you how to do it all at home.

I put the DVD on yesterday, made notes to take into the bathroom and gave it all a go. Jesus!  My arms will certainly get toned as giving yourself a massage with your knuckles is hard work! You're supposed to do the massage three to four times a week but I'm going to try and do it every weekday while G is at work.

Carole also sells her Facercise book, which for a modest sum looks like it can supplement the skincare cream I use anyway and keep the wrinkles and double chin at bay. The book arrived in the post a few days ago and G flicked through it. "God!" he said. "I hope you won't be doing these exercises in front of me!" The exercises are well illustrated with photos, and some of the facial expressions you have to pull as part of the exercise program are a hoot!

So I'm also doing the exercises while G is at work. They make your face ache :-), which is probably proof they are doing their thing. I'll be intrigued to see if there is a difference. I've noticed the corners of my mouth turning down over the last year or so, and I hate that. I look like a grumpy old cow. (Probably because I AM a grumpy old cow 9-5 Mon-Fri!) Facercise has an exercise to stop your mouth turning down at the corners.

So here's the goal. By Easter, when it's time to hoe into all those cheap chocolate eggs, I'll be a clothing size smaller with a mouth that doesn't turn down. I'll be bien dans ma peau.  C'est tres bien, non?

Autumnal bliss

OK, the trees haven't started to really change colour yet, but a magical seasonal thing happened over the Easter break.

It got cooler. Just like that.

The heat and humidity that has plagued us since December vanished, leaving sunshine that was warm but not hot, and nights that suddenly we can sleep through - even occasionally needing another blanket. The winter duvet isn't far away. We haven't had to have the aircon on to cool us down. We suddenly need light sweaters in the evenings.

All this delightful coolth means we are waking refreshed and bright-eyed and eager to get out of bed and walk or cycle before breakfast. This week it's been walking for the most part with our dog, who needs the exercise too. The heavy dew on the grass creeps into our trainers, soaking our socks with chilly water. Rosie the spaniel is soaked to the skin halfway up her sides after only ten minutes; she loves to nose through longer grass in the parks, and chases her ball with the delight and dedication of a retriever.

We've had the bikes out, too - I think I'll go for a ride later today, even if T'Other Half isn't up to it. He makes rather a big deal out of any kind of exercise, even if he's doing it regularly. The Birman Boycat and I exchange knowing glances when T'Other Half starts rabbiting on about his calf muscles or thigh muscles or how he should only jog instead of walk every second day. The jogging, by the way, consists of a 200 metre trot down a mild hill, and another 200 metres on the flat in the middle of our brisk walk. You'd think it was a ten mile gallop the way he bangs on about it. The animals and I hear a lot about the muscles after a jog :-). Not that I can talk, my jogs are about the same; my damaged knees scream in protest if I jog for long on the footpath, so I keep any running to the soft turf in the park. Thankfully cycling is much kinder to my knees.

So while now might be the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, it's also the season of cycling - we are planning rides for the next few weekends: Richmond, Olympic Park, along the Parramatta Riverbanks. Weekdays we'll be alternating walking and cycling before breakfast. It doesn't get any more perfect that this.

Obesity crisis gains weight

Blimey I'm posting a lot today. But I read something in yesterday's newspaper which appalled me. Taxpayers could be forced to fund lapband surgery for obese teenagers. Now the appalling bit isn't the bit about the taxpayers (although that's bad enough), it's that there are so many young people out there seriously and dangerously overweight. Apparently one in four children here in Oz are obese or overweight.

It wasn't that long ago that Australia was considered a bit of a paradise, filled with lean, healthy people, outdoorsy types who spread the legend of the Bronzed Aussie throughout the world.

Fighting middle-aged spread is not uncommon throughout the western world on western diets - our metabolism and hormones change the way we store and use fat. But my goodness there are a lot of sadly big children around. It can't all be "just big bones" or "genes". When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s we were all pretty lean. I was slightly chubby compared to my friends but looking at pics of me in my youth I wouldn't have been considered overweight. We used to run around outside all the time, we rode bikes, we flopped into bed tired after busy, active days. We didn't have fast food several times a week as to be honest there wasn't any back then. There were a few pizza shops but KFC and McDonald's didn't appear in Australia until the late 60s/early 70s and even then they were considered a twice a year event in our family. Now there is a scary wealth of fast food options for busy parents to fall back on, or for teens to stop at on the way home from school.

Pre-teen kids these days have a different life. At school, many of them aren't allowed run at lunchtime unless the school has a grassy oval. In my childhood we belted around the concrete playground heedless of skinned knees and other injuries. Nowadays schools are mindful of insurance premiums and parents taking out lawsuits if Little Johnny breaks an arm at school. So kids can't run unless it's during supervised sports.

The careless play my friends and I indulged in after school isn't always an option for today's child either. All the kids in my street would congregate in the bamboo grove at the back of my next door neighbour's. It was a cave, a house, a castle, whatever you wanted to make of it. We'd perhaps go for a bike ride together, or play chasing or some kind of ball game. Our mothers would get a little concerned near dinner time and call us in, or take turns to check periodically we were all still there and in one piece. Today's child often stays in 'after care' until his or her parents get home from work. If Mum doesn't work and picks up the child from school, it's usually in a car, and the child has to stay at home rather than play in the street with friends as parents are justifiably concerned about paedophiles. My mum used to worry about me getting kidnapped, but compared to a lot of today's kids I had amazing freedoms. So today's kid stays at home in front of the telly or computer after school. Many modern suburbs encourage big houses on small blocks so the classic backyard, the home of cricket, footy and everything else, is diminished.

Teenagers don't 'play' like younger kids. There's even more temptation for them to spend their money on junk food after school, and unless they are passionate about their sport, they aren't the most active beings if any of my friends' teens are an example. If both parents work, your average teen will go home from school and either hit the computer or the tv or chat to friends on the phone. There's no-one to tell them to get up and move around. Where I live I see a few teens and younger children being active after school either on bikes or walking, but nowhere near the number I used to see when I was younger. The lure of technology encourages sedentary behaviour. It's all very well to buy a Nintendo Wii and play tennis on it but don't kid yourself you're getting fit - you'd be much better off playing tennis for real.

Our government is currently engaged in a 'measure up' campaign for adults, encouraging them to measure their waistline and do something about bringing their weight down if they are overweight. They are also seriously considering banning fast food / junk food advertisements during children's tv time. Major supermarkets are engaged in advertising to make fruit and vegetables exciting choices for kids to eat (but still have long, full aisles of sugary soft drinks and fatty or sugary snacks). There's a real push to get people out there in the fresh air, exercising - there is a spring family bike ride next week, 45km across Sydney; Ride To Work day next month etc. But is it too little too late for families who take the easy option with pizza and chips and use the car to travel 500 metres?

Is Australia now Paradise Lost?